The five weeks Mercy had promised ran almost out. With the fair a bare eight days off and the first drovers already stirring on the Colt Hallow road, Gabriel Thorne did not go up to the great house to wait out the small hours. He took a lantern from the tack-room hook and went down the row instead, the short way, along the wall that backed the yard, the way he had not walked in three years. He stood at the bolt of the killing-box with his hand on the cold iron.
"All right," he said to it, low, the way a man speaks to steady his own hand. "All right."
And he drew it.
The colt came off the wall, sheeted and wild, screaming into the light, re-dosed on Vaux's word, exactly on the clock she had named. And Gabriel, who had ordered this himself out of a wet afternoon's grief, did the thing he had refused for three years to do. He looked at it. He did not flinch, and did what she had shown him at another box a lifetime ago. He waited out a lull, set two fingers under the near jaw, and felt the heart going too fast and too long under them, a thing no honest temper could keep up.
It was in his own hand now, the truth of it. Not her word carried up a stair, but his own two fingers on a hot vein at midnight. The madness ran on a clock, and a clock is wound by a hand. He had felt it and could not un-feel it, and shame came up not as a wound to live inside but as a debt to pay.
He set the trap at dawn, before he went to her, because a man ought to bring more than an apology. He found Vaux in the yard and spoke of small things, the fair, the greys, and then let fall, easy, the false coin he had minted in the dark.
"Word's come the true grey's found," he said, light. "Fetched to a neighbour's barn against the fair. All quiet."
He watched the man's hands as he said it. Vaux had a headcollar over his arm, his fingers working a buckle, and at the word found the fingers went still. Not his face — his face stayed loyal, grave and glad for the news. His hands stopped. A half-second, no more; then the buckle moved again and the easy words came. But Gabriel had learned, these weeks past, from a coper's daughter, to read the hands a lying face forgets to govern. His and Vaux's did not agree.
He went to her then. She was at the rail in the grey light with the flour-stained book under her arm, and he came the short way, past the box, and she marked it.
"I have spent three years," he said, "being the worst thing anyone ever said of me, because it was simpler than being wrong about it. It cost nothing to believe I killed him by inattention. It costs everything to believe I let his killer pour me my wine." The blunt voice did not spare itself, nor grovel; it laid the account down plain, as she laid hers. "I doubted you because a man told me a true thing to sell me a false one, and I've no gift for telling those apart. You have. I should have stood behind your gift, and did not. Say what you need of me. I'll do it."
She did not make him wait for it. "I need you beside me on fair morning. Nothing more."
"You'll have more." He drew a paper from inside his coat, the settlement his lawyer had drawn and witnessed when first she came, and he had never spoken of: the Colt Hallow cottage and its income vested in trustees to her sole and separate use, hers whether she bode here or lived apart from him, and want for nothing. He held it up so she could read her own name. "I had this made the week you came, meaning it a kindness, that if this marriage was a cage you'd have a key. But a key in my keeping is still my gift, and a thing given can be held over a head." He put it into her own hands. "So I have set it past my own reach. It is signed and delivered, the trustees hold it and not I, and there is no freedom left for me to grant or withhold. It is yours already, in law, whatever you choose. If you stand in that yard tomorrow, it is because you chose to, not because you were owned into it and paid off out of it. I'll not own another living thing into an early grave. Not you. Not any."
She looked at the paper in her own hands, and at him, and did not thank him, for he had learned by now that she never thanked a true thing; she only met it.
"Then here is the play," she said, and told it him at the rail while the first fair-carts groaned on the road.
Let the sale go forward. Pell's own ledger had named the tenant's barn where the true grey stood at stud, not twelve miles off; Thady, whom no man on the road would question with a horse on a lead, would fetch her home before light with a constable of the magistrate's choosing at his side, so the taking of her was lawful and witnessed. The true grey brought up to the far paddock at first light and held there. Nan's book, dated, in her apron; and one of Vaux's own buckets sealed under wax before two lads who would swear the hour, so the poison could never be cried a thing she salted herself. Dob primed to speak, but after, when the horse had spoken first. Thady to say the craft of it where the county could hear. The magistrate and the veterinary surgeon invited as custom, so they would simply be there, unwarned, unbought; and Pell's coping-book taken up the moment the man showed his face at the gate and put straight into the magistrate's keeping, that no hand could burn it before the assizes. The colt fed clean from this hour, so that by fair morning the clock would have run down at last and stopped.
"He set the stage himself," she said, watching the carts come. "We've only to let the horses talk."
"And if they will not?" he asked, not doubting her now, only counting the cost as a man does before a leap.
"They can't help it. That's why I trust them over men. A horse can't be paid to forget what was done to it." She shifted the greasy book under her arm. "Neither, it turns out, can a churn-woman. Nor a boy. He taught the whole yard silence, and never once thought the silent things were keeping count."