The conductor passed them, older, dark blue nearly black in the overcast, brass buttons dulled by years of the same route. "Last chance Eastbound!" he called, more habit than urgency, and the train answered with a hiss that meant it was already deciding to leave.
She watched the cars as if they might reverse themselves for her. "Someone paid my entire fare."
Thomas's gaze snapped from the letter to the seal and stayed there. Color left the edges of his mouth. "Where did you get this seal?"
"Why?"
He snatched the suitcase—not from her hand, but the one still open at her feet—and hauled it shut with a click that sounded too loud on the empty boards. "Because the man who uses it tried to kill me."
The train was already moving. Couplings groaned. Steam blanketed the near end of the platform and then tore free. The Eastbound became a dwindling noise and then only snow and the smell of coal.
Two riders appeared on the far approach, dark-clad against the white, galloping hard toward the station as if the timetable had been written for them alone.
Thomas took her elbow—not roughly, but without asking permission that would cost them seconds. "Can you run in that?"
"I can try."
"Trying's the only currency left. Leave the suitcase if you have to. Keep the letter."
She kept both. Pride was a kind of luggage too. They went off the platform on the town side, down the packed path that became ice and then powder between pines. Behind them, hoofbeats reached the platform boards and became shouts. A man's voice called Reed's name the way a ledger calls a debt.
They did not answer.
The pines took them in. Snow muffled everything except breath and the soft complaint of her skirt against branches. Thomas led without looking back often; when he did, it was to measure whether she was still upright. She was. The red boots were not made for this, but they held. The feathers on her hat caught on a low limb and she freed them with a yank that cost her a pin and left a blonde strand against her cheek.
"Who are they?" she asked when the slope leveled enough for speech.