CHAPTER 12
Elias
◆
The frost had come in overnight and held on the north slopes, silver in the shade of the pines, gone where the sun crossed the rock.
From the east terrace it had looked like a warning.
From the doorway of the main room it looked like time.
He had four hours of usable light and the wind on the ridge would be steady by three.
He stood in the doorway with his coat folded once over his forearm and waited for her step in the hall.
The oak floor carried her before she came into the room.
She moved even now, less than a week off the ankle, the limp small enough that a stranger would call it deliberate.
She was not deliberate. She was just careful.
She had come off the last flight of stairs on her own since Sunday and she did the exterior perimeter with Havlin every morning at eleven and she stopped counting her own paces sometime in the last two days.
He knew because he had stopped watching for her to count.
She came out of the west wing with a wool shirt on and her braid pulled forward over one shoulder. Her weight was even. The ankle held.
“Walk with me,” he said. “Three miles. Bring the coat.”
She looked at the coat first, then at him. Her eyes did the thing they did before she asked a question she already had the answer to.
“Now?”
“Now, while the light holds.”
She went back for the shell. Her boots crossed the oak and returned; sleeves whispered as she pulled the coat over the wool shirt. When she stepped out of the west wing she was already zipping.
“The wind above the frost line will find you before the cold does,” he said.
“I’ve had colder afternoons than this one.”
“Take the shell anyway.”
He handed the coat across. She took it and slung it under her arm and looked at him the way she looked at a map — appraising the ground, deciding what she was walking into. Then she nodded once.
He turned for the trail.
The compound settled behind them in three sounds. The kitchen exhaust dropping to idle. Reyn’s voice on the terrace low against the wind. The east gate lock cycling as Havlin went in behind them. Then the pines closed on the noise and they were alone with the ground.
He had taken this trail once a week for six years. He had taken it in every kind of light and every kind of weather it offered and once in the dark on a bet with Reyn that he had won by four minutes. He had never taken it with a woman before. He noted that and set it aside.
Past the equipment shed the trail ran east-northeast for a mile through second-growth ponderosa, then broke onto the shoulder and climbed.
Frost held where the shadow held. Where the sun came through it was pine duff and dust and the sound of their boots on packed dirt.
He kept his eyes on the ground ahead of her the way he kept them on ground he did not own.
The needles were dry underfoot; the trail read clean.
He walked his own pace for the first eighth of a mile before he understood what he was doing. His stride was nineteen minutes to the overlook. Hers, with the ankle, would be twenty-eight. He shortened his step by four inches without deciding to.
He caught himself doing it and did not stop.
She said nothing about the pace. She said nothing about anything.
She read the trail the way she read a strong-motion trace — one foot then the other, weight forward, eyes down for the roots and up for the light.
Her braid rode her shoulder. Her breath went with her step. She was not counting; he could tell.
At the third switchback the trail lifted onto the shoulder and the wind found them for the first time.
It came off the ridge in a steady low sound, no gusts yet, the kind of wind that would hold clean through dusk and only turn at full dark.
She lifted her chin into it and did not slow. He kept walking without a word.
Two hundred yards on he spoke.
“Watch the roots along the next stretch,” he said. “The frost lifts them a quarter inch and drops them again by noon.”
“That’s why the line of them looks wrong.”
He gave her that.
“You would do this trail in nineteen minutes on your own,” she said.
“On a warm day, before frost.”
“You shortened your stride at the shed.”
“I did.”
She let it stand. He liked her better for not making a compliment of it. That was the second thing today. The first had been the way she came off the last stair without checking the wall.
They cleared the shoulder and the trail steepened. The pines thinned to a run of white fir and then to a scrub oak break where the ground opened. He measured the light against the ridgeline to the west. Forty minutes to full dusk. Enough.
He turned his shoulder to the wind and let her come abreast of him for a stride and then he moved back to the point again.
She did not comment on the change. There was no comment to make.
He was aware of her at his three o’clock and slightly behind, aware of the way her weight came off the good ankle and rolled forward off the ball of the bad one.
Aware in the way he was aware of any load he was moving through country.
The way he had been aware of five sets of boots behind him for six years and eight before that.
Except she was not a load.
He said nothing to that either.
The last quarter mile was granite. Wind-scoured, hand-holds few, the face rising in three long steps to the platform above. He knew the sequence. His hand knew the sequence. She looked at the face from the base and read it the same way she had read the trail. Then she started up.
She did not ask for a hand. He did not offer one. He went up two body lengths ahead of her and stopped on the middle step and turned his back to the face so she would not think he was looking.
He looked anyway.
She held the rock the way she must have held rock at twenty-two, before the scar on her palm went white.
Her fingers set flat first, then found the edge with the pads, then loaded.
She did not grab. She let the rock take the weight.
Her braid went across her collar and she pushed it back with her wrist. The left ankle worked. She used it. It held.
She came up the last twenty feet without pausing. When she cleared the middle step he was already turning for the platform, and by the time she came off the top he had put six feet of granite between them and given her the overlook to herself for a breath.
That, at least, was something he had learned to do.
The Notch opened north over the valley and the wind on the overlook was steady.
Charcoal-grey rock at his shoulder. Sight-line north, on a clear evening, twenty miles to the black line of the White Mountains.
To the west the ridgeline still had color; to the east the pass was already the blue that came before dark.
The valley below was in shadow already. The light was dying, not gone.
He measured the platform in cover and lines of sight the way he had measured it the first month he had bought the ground.
Two approaches; one visible, one cut. One face on the north side; drop of two hundred and eighty feet to the scree.
The wind angle put the sound to the east, which meant anyone coming up would arrive on his ear before his eye.
He did not need to check. He checked anyway. The perimeter was clean.
She came up over the lip and stood a pace back from the edge and looked north for a long time before she spoke.
“The valley opens for twenty miles from here.”
“Farther on a clean night with no dust in the air.”
“You come up often.”
“Once a week. More when I need to think.”
She took two steps to her right and let the wind put her braid across her shoulder and then she looked at him. She was three feet from the rock, four from the edge. He put his shoulder to the charcoal-grey face and waited.
“What is it you actually do, Ward?”
He had turned the answer over on the shoulder and again on the granite. He had turned it over the night before, in the dark, when he had understood he was going to bring her up here. He said it plain.
“I extract people,” he said. “On ground I trust. No federal favors. I run the building I sleep in.”
She held that. She did not answer for a moment. The wind kept its low steady sound off the ridge behind him. He watched her mouth, and then her eyes, and then the small line between her eyebrows where the concentration went when she was pulling one sentence apart into its ground.
“That’s the shortest job description I’ve heard from a private contractor.”
“It’s the whole thing.”
“You didn’t sell it.”
“There’s no one here to sell it to.”
She let that stand. He liked that about her too.
She turned her face into the wind. The braid moved and settled. She was not looking at the valley now. She was looking past it, the way she looked past the maps sometimes when the fault was under her thumb and she had left the room without moving.
“Someone I loved died,” she said, “because someone else buried a warning.”
He did not fill the silence. He held her eye. The dusk came down another notch. The wind kept its low steady sound off the ridge, and somewhere down the pass a single crow started up and stopped. Nothing else moved.
She did not say the name. He did not ask for it.
There had been a name somewhere from the first afternoon she checked the Seiko on her wrist and turned it a quarter turn on the strap, and he had not asked then either.
He had learned not to ask about a watch a woman kept on her wrist at all hours.
A watch on a wrist that was not the wrist a watch belonged on was not a watch. It was a person.
He took a breath and let it out slow.
“Then let’s find every buried warning and take them apart,” he said.
She looked at him. Whatever she had been holding on her face went still.
Her mouth worked once around a thing she did not say.
Then she nodded. It was not a small nod.
It was not a big one. It was the nod she had given him at the marriage table on story day three, when they had signed the paper and the ink had dried and Wren’s voice on the speaker had said congratulations without meaning it. That kind of nod.
He had said something to her a moment ago and he understood, standing there, that he had said the thing.
He did not name it to himself. He kept the word out of his mouth for her sake too.
But he understood what he had said and he understood that she had understood it.
Whatever came off this ridge with them was not the same shape it had gone up.
The wind shifted. It came harder off the north face for a second, an honest gust with weight in it, and she was a quarter-step nearer the edge than she meant to be. Her boot skidded a half inch on grit. Her weight went the wrong way.
His palm was at the small of her back before he thought about it. Flat, wide, no grip. Steady.
She caught her balance. She did not step away.
He did not take his hand off.
The dusk was almost the whole thing now. Her face, half-turned to him, was the last clear thing on the ridge. Color still held in her mouth. There was wind and his own steady breath and nothing else. Her hand at her side was open. She was not counting.
He kissed her.
Hard, once, no pretense. He had decided on the trail and he had decided again on the granite and he was done deciding.
Her mouth was cold from the wind and warm underneath.
She made a sound that was not a word. Her hand came up and took the front of his coat, and the take was not delicate.
She had a fistful of the coat and she was not letting go.
He stepped a full pace back.
“Tell me to stop and I stop,” he said, one pace back, his voice level.
She did not tell him to stop.
He came in again. Slower this time and no less sure. Her hand was still in the coat. Her mouth opened to him and he did not push it; he took what she gave. His palm found the small of her back again and stayed. The rock was at his shoulder. The valley was gone.
She spoke against his mouth.
“Not here,” she said, against his mouth.
“Not here,” he said, and did not move his hand.
They came off the platform in the last of the dusk.
He went ahead down the first step of granite and turned and put his hand up to her without a word.
She did not take it. She came down on her own — palm-flat set of the fingers, loaded pads, ankle working.
He watched the last two steps and then walked ahead of her again.
At the base of the face he waited. She came off the last edge and turned and his palm found her spine again without asking. She did not shift away. She walked into it and let it stay.
The trail took them down the shoulder in fifteen minutes.
Frost was beginning to come back where the sun had gone.
The pines were black against a violet sky and the wind had dropped in the timber.
Their boots on the packed dirt sounded twice as loud as the boots that had gone up.
His hand did not move from the base of her spine.
He did not speak. She did not speak. He measured the ground ahead of her step by step and shortened his stride again without deciding to.
Somewhere behind them the crow started up once more and stopped.
To the west the last color went out of the ridge and the pass took the dark down onto the trail one bend at a time.
The compound would come into sight around the last switchback with its east-terrace lights already on and Reyn on the terrace pretending not to look and Havlin at the gate pretending harder.
He would give them both a look on the way in that would end the pretending.
The compound was still a mile off.
His palm stayed at the small of her back the whole way down the trail. No word passed between them to the tree line.