She rose and God, she rose the way a building rises. The way the land itself had to make room for her and walked to the wagon on her own two feet. Blood trailing thin behind her heels in the dust. Voss raised the Colt. Whit pulled the Winchester off his back and put one round straight into the sky.
The crack crack split square wide open. Horses reared. Someone screamed. The crowd scattered sideways like water thrown on a hot skillet. And in that half second of chaos, Whit swung up onto the wagon seat, snapped the reins, and they were moving dust and rock kicking up behind the wheels.
Voss's voice chasing them past the last building. "You just started a war, Calder. You hear me? A war." Whit didn't look back. Looking back never once fixed a single thing in his whole life.
No reason to start today. The road home ran two hours through open country and for most of it neither one of them said a word. She sat rigid beside him. Blood drying dark on her feet. Throat ringed purple.
Breath steadying by degrees. Mile by mile. He glanced over twice. Both times her eyes were already fixed on the horizon like she expected to come at her, too. He wanted to say something.
Every line he thought of sounded foolish before it even reached his mouth. Sorry about your neck. Glad you're not dead. Fine day for almost dying, wasn't it? So, he said nothing, which was, he figured, the smarter choice regardless, because silence, at least, couldn't be held against him later.
Somewhere past the halfway mark, his mind did what it always did on long empty roads, wandered backward to Adeline, to the two years since, to the particular kind of quiet that had settled into his life and never quite left. He hadn't planned on bringing anyone back to that cabin, hadn't planned on much of anything past keeping the fences up and the cat cat the cattle fed and getting through one more winter without losing his mind out here alone. Funny how plans worked, or didn't. The cabin rose up out of the land the way it always did, small, weathered, stubborn, a single dark shape holding its ground against all that empty sky. No smoke from the chimney.
He'd let the fire go cold before his trip in. The place looked abandoned. It looked, he thought, a little like him some mornings. He helped her down from the wagon. She shrugged off his hand before her feet even touched the dirt.