Then they were gone, the mare's shape and the woman walking at her shoulder, into the grass and the dark, and in a few minutes there was nothing at all but the crickets and the far-off barking of somebody's dog toward Cottonwood, and Nils Ordway stood in his yard without a horse, on the fourth night of a war, and wondered what he had just done.
In the morning he woke Ketti and told her the truth, because he had decided when her mother died that he would always tell her the truth even when it would have been easier not to.
She sat on the edge of the box bed in her nightdress, swinging her bare feet, and listened to all of it without interrupting. She had her mother's coloring, that whitish Trondheim blond that went almost green in certain light, and her mother's way of taking in news as though she were weighing it on a scale.
"Was it Ipnaxa with the eyebrow?" she said when he had finished.
He stared at her. "You know her?"
"She came to the spring with the others. When Mama was digging. She showed me how to peel the kouse with my thumbnail so it doesn't break." Ketti considered. "She had a little girl. Tipyelehne. It means a star. She was a baby then."
"She is not a baby now."
"Is Solvei coming back?"