The forest dark save for when she moved across glades, the sky like ragged spiderwebs through the branches, the silk glistening with stars, and so quiet when they stopped, she could hear the pulse of the albino’s tired heart.
She shifted in the saddle, the leather creaking.
The odor of the horse smelled strong in the cold.
She listened, heard nothing but the occasional clicking of her teeth, like Morse code in the night. She touched her heels to the horse and rode down through the spruce.
An hour later, she passed through a blowdown, the firs all bent over and tangled up in themselves like spilt matches and dusted with fresh snow, the horse threading its way through the felled trees like it had come this way before.
In the forest below, an elk bugled.
. . .
The moon low in the sky behind a mountain, the stars teeming, the horse wavering, Lana shivering under her white cape, trying to stave off a sleep that taunted her with the rhythm of the hooves breaking powder.
The horse would have crushed her, but it neighed two seconds before toppling, and Lana woke, just managing to drag herself away from where its hindquarters crashed into the snow.
She scrambled to her feet and wiped the powder out of her face, found herself standing among aspen, the snow to her chest and the stars obscured, yielding to dawn.
The horse lay on its side, blowing deep, snorting exhalations that weakened as she listened. She wanted to speak to the albino, give the animal some measure of comfort, but she could only squat by its head and stroke its great jowls until its heart quit beating and its big eyes traded their pained intensity for the empty glaze of death.
EIGHTY-THREE
L
ana struggled on through the aspen, the numbness extending up from her feet into her ankles, her shins. Even her knees were beginning to burn. She was passing through a glade and noting the first rumor of warmth in the sky when she heard the snort of a horse.
As she looked back, a branch snapped somewhere in the grove.
The cold was momentarily displaced by fear.
She bounded into the woods, ripped a spruce branch from a sapling, and doubled back into the glade, proceeding on, using the branch to sweep her new tracks smooth, reentering the trees after thirty yards, thinking if she could find a ramada, or throw together a brush shelter of some kind, maybe he’d pass her by.
The voice stopped her.
“Help!”
She turned and peered between straight white aspen trunks back out into the glade.
Where her tracks branched stood a gray-cloaked girl with long black hair, face as white as china in the dawn light, big black eyes shining. She recognized this child, having seen her in Abandon.
“Please, ma’am!” the child called out. “Help me!”
Lana hesitated, something urging self-preservation, telling her to just keep heading down through the aspen.
It’s a child, for Godsakes, she told herself.
A tuft of cloud went pink above her as Lana waded back into the glade.
The child turned and watched her approach, trembling with cold. Lana stopped several feet away.
She gestured toward the woods, trying to ask where her horse was, but the girl didn’t catch her meaning.
“You wasn’t supposed to leave.”
Lana mouthed, “What?”
Parting the manga, reaching into her cloak, the girl said, “God put you and all the other wickeds in it. Papa told me all about it. And he says I gotta send you back.”
Staring down the bore of a large revolver, the child thumbing the hammer, Lana lunged, seizing the slender wrist with half-frozen fingers, the gun shoved up at the sky, the concussive shock of the report rattling her eardrums.
The gun disappeared in the snow and Lana pushed the child down, thinking, He’s coming, and as if the thought itself held the power of incantation, he appeared, wrapped in a lambskin lap robe and moving at a single-foot rack out of the woods on a starred blood bay, the full-stamped saddle groaning in the cold.
He checked the horse by the strap and dismounted, limping toward her and grasping his leg where she’d stabbed him, his face wrenched up in some brand of agony.
The child sat up, crying, “She pushed me, Papa. She pushed me.”
Lana knelt down in the snow, hands digging through powder, searching for the revolver.
Her mittened fingers grazed something hard. She grasped it.
The preacher five feet away.
She pulled on nothing but a root as his weight came down on her, the snow and the subzero cold biting every square inch of exposed skin. He turned her over, his eyes slitted mad, gums the color of blued steel, and he worked to pry her hands away from her face, his fingers wrapping around her neck, Lana staring up at the preacher and the purple sky and the child’s inquisitive face.
“Go over by the horse, Harriet,” he said. “I wanna watch.”
“Now.”
As the child moved away, he began to squeeze.
What kind of turn?
Her husband smiles, his fingers pattering on the last two keys, right foot tapping the damper pedal.
You remember Mr. Sakey?
Yes.
I hear y’all swapped words two days ago.
Lana brushes a wisp of blond hair behind her right ear.
He bumped into me at the market.
And you called him a fucking capper, took him to task for—
He isn’t your friend. He dragged you into all this, John. Crying now. It’s ’cause of him. You aren’t the same man you were before you made his—
You own a razor tongue, Lana. Ought to know better than to set it loose on a man like Sakey.
I have a truthful tongue. You lost our house.
I’ll get it back.
He reaches into his jacket, pulls out a razor, sets it on the piano.
How? With what money? Think they’re just gonna let you back in the game on credit? They’re probably all laughing at you as we—
I told you. I still got one chip left, and it’s better than any hard chink or banknote.
He shuts his eyes, and she thinks he’s on the verge of losing consciousness, hoping he is, his arm reaching for the top of the Steinway, between candles, fingers closing on a fist-size geode, halved and inlaid with amethyst, a prehistoric egg with purple crystals that flash in the candlelight as he swings it at her head.
The world graying, purple and black spots blooming like supernovas, blotting out the sky, the preacher’s face, Lana thinking, I’m dying in this glade, her hands tearing open his duster, his frock coat.
“It’ll be over in a minute.”
Her left hand caught in an inner pocket, fingers grasping a piece of metal.
John squeezing her throat, the world graying, purple and black spots blooming like supernovas, blotting out the ceiling, her husband’s face, Lana thinking, I’m dying, clawing at his eyes.
I’m sorry, Lana. I have to get back in the game.
The murder of color, gray fading toward black, the preacher apologizing, his tears speckling her face, salting her eyes, and on the edge of perception, a distant woomph, trailed by mounting thunder.
I love you, Lana.
Oxygen-deprived panic.
Unconsciousness.
Dreaming, John, you need help.
. . .
The pressure on her throat subsided.
Stephen Cole stood up, color returning to the sky, to the man.