Fire Along the Sky
Page 104

And still he said nothing at all, which was at first as Lily wanted it and then, slowly, not what she wanted at all. She was aware of the cots behind her, the shadows that the fire threw against the wall, and Simon's hands. She watched the turn of his wrist as he cut meat and lifted his cup and rubbed the beard stubble on his cheek and with every bite she swallowed down things she might have said.
Finally he cleared his throat and met her eye directly.
“You haven't asked, but I'll tell you anyway,” he said in an easy, reasonable tone. “We stopped early today because the next cabin like this, one that we can use safely, is a good day's journey away.”
Then he got up from the table and went to the cot farthest from the fire, where he lay down and, just that simply, went to sleep.
For three days it went just like that: a long day in the sleigh, a few hours in a strange cabin, and then they went to their separate beds. When they did speak—of food or firewood or other matters that could not be ignored—the tone was pleasant and unremarkable. On the second night Simon examined the pistol that Luke had given Lily. It was only twelve inches long, and it fit her hand neatly.
“An officer's pistol,” she said. “From all the engraving and scrollwork.”
“Your brother thinks a great deal of your marksmanship,” Simon said. “For you'll have to aim true to do any damage with this. But I'll keep it primed and loaded, nonetheless.”
“It's true I'm not as good a shot as my father or brother, but I had good teachers,” Lily said. She heard the defensive note in her own voice, and wished it away.
“It was the pistol I was doubting,” said Simon. “Not you, lass.” He leaned over and kissed her, a quick stamp of the mouth that was over before she could register surprise.
Lily could not call herself dissatisfied or unhappy, not exactly. Simon was everything he should be—everything her brother would want him to be—thoughtful and helpful and polite above all. It was precisely because they had run out of things to argue about, Lily reasoned to herself, that she was sleeping so much.
She slept on strange cots, deeply and without dreams; she slept the days away in the sleigh. She could not think how to start a conversation, and so she slept. Sometimes the reasonable part of herself wondered why she was acting as she was, what exactly she meant to prove by holding back this way, but she was too sleepy to pursue such complicated questions and so she didn't; she pulled the furs over her head and let herself drift away again.
For Simon's part, he seemed vaguely amused by everything, not in an ill humor or any humor at all.
Then on the third day, as she made yet another strange cabin comfortable for the night, it came to Lily that Simon Ballentyne was a great deal like her father, in at least one way. He had the gift of patience, a word far too simple to really convey the quality. It was the thing that made the difference between a man who learned to hunt and one born to hunt. Her father had it and her grandfather and brothers and her uncle Runs-from-Bears and his sons. Men who could wait with utter calm because they understood their prey as it did not understand itself, knew what it was thinking and feeling and what it needed, most of all.
Simon Ballentyne was like her father in this one, crucial way, and Nicholas Wilde was not, and never could be.
It was that thought that woke Lily out of her long sleep, once and for all, on the night that the blizzard started. On the heels of that thought came another one: her courses were late. Just two days late, but late nonetheless when she could never remember, even once, when her bleeding had failed to start with the full moon.
They were sitting at supper when this realization came to her. Lily looked at Simon, who had already started the evening ritual of looking after his weapons. Today he had shot a turkey and they had eaten fresh meat for the first time since Montreal.
Lily looked at him and saw that a perfect line of three pin feathers had settled along one straight black brow and it struck Lily fast and hard: it was the funniest thing she had ever seen.
At first it was just a hiccup of laughter, coming up from her belly, but soon she could hardly contain herself; she leaned forward to put her forehead on the table and her shoulders shook and shook with the force of it. She laughed until the tears came and laughed more, raised her head to try to explain and saw the feathers buckle and dance as he drew his brows together, fixed as surely as quills sewn to leather. She pointed, weak with laughter.
Simon touched a finger to his brow, pulled away the pin feathers and looked at them with a blank expression while Lily laughed on and on and tears ran down her face to plop onto the table, great fat drops like rain. Then Simon was up and pulling her up too, holding her against his chest while she laughed and cried and tried to talk, all at once. He held her very close, his arms around her so that she could let herself go limp and not be afraid of falling, and Lily remembered suddenly and without warning her mother bent over Gabriel when he was just a few days old, Gabriel bawling like a calf, red faced and furious, his toothless mouth open to tell the world that he did not like the order of things, not one bit. And Lily's mother talking to him, calmly, reasonably, while she folded a blanket up and across and across again and then flipped him neatly, binding him toe to head, so firmly that he couldn't kick or wave his arms or fight, and just that simply he stopped, closed his mouth with an audible click and looked up at her, his mother, their mother, and all was right with his world because he was caught, well and truly in the web she had made for him, and the comfort of that was absolute.