"You know what it'll cost you," he said.
"I know what it'll cost me."
"He'll go free, likely. Or near it. There's no law I know of against letting a dead man wear your coat. They might try him for the stove, but there's no proving what he meant by it, and it's two years gone. He didn't take the horse. He'll walk out of that jail, and he'll be your husband."
"He's been my husband the whole time," Sabra said. "I only let myself forget it." She paused. "I don't know what I'll do about that. I'll find out. But I'll find out in daylight."
Tallis lay back down. After a while she heard him say, very quietly, toward the roof, "Thank you," and she went back down the ladder and banked the stove and lay down, and slept for the first time in three nights, all the way through, until the light came gold instead of blue through the four panes of the south window and she knew that the storm had broken.
They went down on the fifth day, when the wind had packed the drifts hard enough to bear a horse. She rode Deacon, because Deacon was the surer of the two mules on a grade, and led the other, a patient gray jenny named Orpha, with the pack. Tallis rode his bay. Nimrod ran ahead of them breaking trail and came back to see why they were so slow and ran ahead again. The cold was enormous, a clear, still, ringing cold that made the snow squeak under the hooves and froze the breath on the scarves into white plates, and the sky above the Divide was a blue so deep it was almost violet. She had ridden this trail a hundred times. She had never seen it look like this.
At the creek crossing, where the ice was thick enough now to bear them, Tallis stopped and looked back up the way they had come.
"That's where I fell," he said. "The first time."
"I'd have liked to see it."