Chapter 5 #3
"They won't be there," Liam said. "That's the whole point. They'll be gone. They leave at midday. We go out on the evening tide, six hours behind them, in the dark, and we sail north all night with them somewhere ahead of us, and at first light I put the glass on the water and I find them."
"And if you don't find them?"
"Then we go north anyway," Liam said, "and we're no worse off than we would have been."
Nell Rook rubbed her scarred face with both hands.
"You want me to hand over everything my people have to the men who took my boy," she said. "Smile while I do it. And let them row away."
"Yes."
"And you want me to let them go."
"For nine hours," Liam said. "Nell, look at me. I am not asking you to forgive them. I'm asking you to be patient with them. There is a difference, and the difference is three hundred miles long, and at the end of it there's a boy and a door."
Nell Rook stared at him.
And then, slowly, she began to laugh again, that same cracked exhausted laugh, and she shook her head.
"Minnesota," she said.
"Minnesota."
"All right, Minnesota." She stuck out her hand for the second time that night. "We'll do it your way."
They did not sleep.
The blockhouse worked all night, quietly, in the dark, and Liam had never seen anything like it.
Nell gave the orders in a low voice and people simply moved.
Packs were filled and hidden under floor rags.
Water skins were topped from the barrels and buried in the crates.
Every single thing worth taking was made ready to be carried, and everything they were about to hand over to the Sawtooth was left out where it would be found.
Petyr went around the room with charcoal, marking the boats: a two on this pack, a four on that one.
Isaiah worked on the rigging plan, sketching on the concrete, muttering about the leaky crabber and whether he could get her tight with pitch and rag in the two hours they would have.
And Liam sat beside Chloe with the rifle across his knees and took the first watch, and listened to her talk to her dead father, and did not open the door.
It went on for hours.
She begged, near the end. Nell had warned him about that and it was still worse than he had prepared for.
She begged him with her own voice and her own words and her own eyes, and she promised him things, and she told him that she loved him, and Liam sat there with his back to the fire and said nothing at all and let it wash over him like the cold.
At some point, in the smallest hour, it stopped.
She slept.
He put his hand on her forehead and the heat had come down, not much, but a little, and something in his chest let go so violently that he had to press his fist against his mouth.
Isaiah crouched beside him.
"Go and lie down," he said. "I've got her."
"I'm fine."
"Liam. You've been awake for two days and you're going to be shooting a rifle tomorrow." Isaiah pushed him, gently. "Go and lie down. I've got her. I've had her since the marina and I'm not putting her down now."
Liam went and lay down on the concrete near the fire.
He did not think he would sleep.
He slept.
He woke to gray light coming in a knife-thin line through the firing slit, and to the sound of a bell.
Three strokes. A pause.
Somebody was ringing it slowly, patiently, down at the bottom of the hill.
The whole blockhouse was awake and on its feet and completely silent.
Nell Rook stood at the door with her hand on the top bar. She looked back at Liam, once, and she nodded, and her face was as calm and blank as a stone.
"Get in the back," she said to him. "You and the fat lad and the girl. Behind the crates. They don't know you exist and I want it to stay that way, and if they see that rifle we're all dead."
Liam took the Winchester and went.
He got behind the crates with Isaiah and Chloe and the babies and the woman who guarded them, and he lay flat in the dark with the rifle beside him and one eye at a gap between the boards.
The bars came up.
The steel door groaned open on rusted hinges, and the flat gray daylight fell into the blockhouse, and Nell Rook walked out into it with her hands empty and hanging at her sides.
"Ten of them," she called back, over her shoulder, in the voice of a woman remarking on the weather.
And then she stopped.
She stopped dead, halfway through the doorway, and everything in her went rigid.
"Nell?" Petyr said.
Nell Rook did not answer.
"Nell, what is it?"
"It's not ten," Nell said.
Her voice had gone thin and strange.
"Petyr," she said. "Go back inside."
"Nell—"
"Go back inside, boy."
Liam pressed his eye to the gap and could see nothing but the bright rectangle of the doorway and Nell's dark shape standing in it, and he heard, from outside, from down the hill, a man's voice calling up cheerfully through the fog.
"Morning, Nell!" the voice said. "Sorry to come early. We've had a change of plans."
And then, much closer, from just outside the door, somebody laughed.
It was a young laugh. A boy's laugh.
And in the dark behind the crates, Liam heard Nell Rook say, in a voice that had nothing at all left in it:
"Cully?"