Fire Along the Sky
Page 192

It was Callie and Martha who brought her word that she could come out. Callie put a piece of paper in Lily's hands—steady now, or steadier, at least—and waited for her to read it.
“This is a bill of sale,” Lily said. “You've bought the orchard and the farm . . . for forty dollars?”
Callie nodded. She was flushed with pleasure and trying not to show it. Thinking still of what had happened at the cabin, and what might have happened.
Martha said, “Curiosity lent her the money. She said Callie can pay it off after the harvest and first pressing.”
“I'm pleased for you, Callie.”
Callie sat down with all the thoughtless grace of a young girl. “Manny is going to run the farm. He says he didn't really want to teach school anyway. Your mama didn't seem to mind too much.”
Lily kept her thoughts to herself, but the girls were too excited to notice.
“Do you think maybe Levi will come back to work the orchards? Manny can't do it all on his own, and Curiosity says we have to keep going to school.” Callie said this with such seriousness that Lily found herself smiling for the first time in a long afternoon.
“I would guess he'd be pleased to come back to Paradise,” she said. “He and Manny together will make sure the orchards flourish.” As your father would have wished. This last she kept to herself, and neither did Callie raise the subject of Nicholas Wilde. Out of superstition or resignation, Lily wasn't sure. They had had no word from or of Nicholas since the day he handed over everything he owned to Stiles.
They were quiet for a moment, and then Martha seemed to remember something. She said, “They left an hour ago. Mr. Stiles and Justus. Curiosity says you should come now, before Simon decides to ride after them.”
“Simon knows?” Lily asked, alarmed.
“No!” Callie said, almost too quickly.
Martha gave her friend a stern look. “But they all suspect something must have happened.”
Callie nodded. “That's why Curiosity wants you to come now, so that your menfolk can see that you're all right and stop them from doing anything foolish.”
“Curiosity thinks I can stop Simon, does she?” Lily said with another, smaller smile. “I hope she's right.”
“I don't,” Callie said, turning her face away. “I hope Simon rides after them and hangs Justus Rising from the first tree he sees.”
Lily put an arm around the girl and hugged her tight. There was little to say that wouldn't have sounded false, and so she summoned up an old song out of her childhood memories, a song whose words she couldn't recall, but with a melody so sweet that it could not be forgotten. It was all the best she had to give.
Chapter 39
“Was he a good husband to you?”
Liam Kirby's voice came hushed and raw in the gathering darkness and touched Hannah's face like a hand.
All around them the men, wounded and whole, lay awake and listening. There was no such thing as privacy in this stockade; in that way it put Hannah in mind of a Kahnyen'kehàka longhouse.
She said, “Yes. He was a good husband.”
“You bore him children.”
“A son,” Hannah said, and before the question could be asked: “He is dead.”
“Ah.” There was a long pause filled by Liam's hitching breaths. In and in and out. A faint rattling sound from his lungs, or maybe she was just imagining that.
“It is not my past that is important just now.”
A flicker of a smile moved across his face, rough with beard, his lips fever-blistered. He said, “You want to sing my death song, Walks-Ahead?”
Blue-Jay moved fitfully on his cot just behind Hannah, and she put out a hand to quiet him.
“For that you would have to tell me the rest of your story.”
Liam grimaced and managed a small shake of the head. He was in considerable pain, but he would expend what little energy he had hiding it.
Hannah said, “You would have liked Strikes-the-Sky, and he would have liked you.”
“That doesn't sound like a compliment, the way you say it.”
She drew a breath and held it for a moment. “It is, and it is not.”
“Will you marry again?”
Hannah made a sound in her throat. “I cannot imagine it.”
He turned his head away. “You will marry again.”
She said nothing, and after a while Liam seemed to understand that she would not be drawn into this particular conversation.
“Your father. He is well?”
“Yes, all my family are well.” She looked into the dark where Daniel lay listening, but could make out nothing.
Hannah said, “You gave up bounty-hunting.”
“You know that I did. You shamed me out of it.”
She made a sound deep in her throat, one that said she doubted such a simple explanation but would not challenge him.
“We used to have such good arguments,” Liam said. “Why do you hold back?”
“I have no energy for such things,” Hannah said. “And neither should you waste yours.”
“Will you tell me how to die as you told me how to live?”
She drew up in surprise, and shock, and shame. When she could make herself speak she said, “Ask what you like.”
“Tell me about my daughter.”
In the next cot a sailor with a fever in his lungs coughed explosively. Hannah went to give him water, and when she came back she settled down again and tried to order her thoughts.