walked into the teeth of the storm with tall, dark evergreens whipping and moaning overhead. The surrounding forest shielded them from the worst of the wind, but not from the ice-tipped rain that gradually turned to sleet.
They climbed with the violence of the storm all around them, sound and light hammering down until Willow screamed in fear but the storm drowned even that, leaving her feeling as though she were suspended in a cauldron of sound so overwhelming it became a punishing kind of silence. The air thinned until she was breathless just sitting on Ishmael and doing nothing more than hanging on with hands numbed by wet and cold.
And still the trail climbed. Sleet slowly was transformed into fat white flakes of snow swirling on the wind like petticoats of icy lace. Thunder came less frequently, at a greater and greater distance, finally becoming a muttering of the air, as much sensed as heard. Snow fell until it was ankle deep. The stream took on a dark, oily sheen.
Caleb checked his compass, turned Trey to the left, and began a long, ascending diagonal across the mountainside. In the fresh snow, the ancient, abandoned trail gleamed in a different shade of white than the snow falling on ground that had never been disturbed by the passage of man. Caleb looked at the ghostly thread snaking away to the overhanging clouds and wondered if any of the horses had the strength to take it.
The aspen vanished first, then the fir, then the spruce, until the forest was nothing more than a black-and- white fringe licking down sheltered ravines that lay a thousand feet down the mountain. Caleb and Willow were suspended between a mercury sky and a white ground. Veils of snow lifted and rippled, sporadically concealing and revealing the sweeping landscape. Far below, the creek was a black ribbon coiling through a steep, narrow, snow-choked ravine.
Gusts of wind tore aside the falling snow, unveiling a lid of clouds across rugged mountains whose very tops were still hidden in mist. For the first time Caleb saw an end to the climb…but not soon. There was at least another mile to go, another thousand feet to climb on a ghost trail slanting across broken rock, clawing up and up until finally the last ice-shattered ridge was climbed and melted snow flowed west, not east.
Caleb reined in and dismounted. Ishmael and Deuce were within two hundred feet of him. The mares were more spread out as they struggled upward. The last two mares were lost in the veil of snow that the others had climbed free of. Caleb waited, but no more Arabians appeared. Then the wind wailed and pushed aside more curtains of snow, revealing two mares a mile below, laboring slowly up the trail.
Ishmael walked the last few yards to Trey, then stood head down, blowing hard, fighting for each breath in the thin air. Caleb helped Willow down, supporting her with one arm while he loosened the saddle cinch. When the wind was still, steam peeled away from the horses in great plumes and the rasp of their labored breathing was loud.
«I’ll — walk,» Willow said.
«Not yet.»
Caleb swung Willow up onto Trey, tied Ishmael on a long rope, and fastened it to Trey’s saddle. Caleb took the reins and began walking up the trail, leading the big horse. Willow looked over her shoulder, saw Ishmael following and Deuce limping not far behind, and prayed that the mares would be able to keep going.
The route became steeper, the snow deeper, until Caleb was sinking in to his knees at each step. The horses were no better off. Every few hundred feet Caleb stopped and let the horses blow. Even Trey was feeling it now. He was breathing like a horse that had been run hard and long. Willow couldn’t bear to listen. She knew her weight was making it worse. Despite the stabbing pain in her head and the nausea that stirred in her stomach, she started to dismount.
«Stay put,» Caleb said curtly. «Trey is a lot — stronger than you are.»
Caleb’s words were spaced for the quick, deep breaths that still couldn’t satisfy his body’s hunger for oxygen. He was accustomed to altitude, but not to being more than eleven thousand feet high. The thin air and days of hard riding had worn him down as surely as it had the horses.
By the time they reached the base of the last, steep pitch, Caleb was stopping to catch his breath every thirty feet and the horses were strung out for miles down the trail. The clouds hadunravelled into separate patches nestling between ridges. In the distance, rich gold light glistened where the late afternoon sun poured into valleys between cloud-capped peaks.
Trey stood with his head down, his breath groaning harshly, his sides heaving. He might be able to walk farther, but not carrying even so light a weight as Willow. Caleb loosened the cinch and pulled Willow from the saddle. He put the heavy saddlebags and bedroll over his left shoulder, supported Willow with his right arm, and began to walk up the trail. He paused only once, sending a shrill whistle over his shoulder. Trey lifted his head and reluctantly began walking once more.
Wind had blown away the snow to reveal the rocky bones of the mountain itself. The rocks were dark, almost black, shattered by the weight of time and ice. The ghostly trail vanished, but there was no doubt of their destination. Caleb fixed his eyes on the barren ridge rising in front of him, blocking out half the sky. He barely noticed the receding clouds and the thick golden light washing over the land.
Willow tried to walk alone. She managed it for twenty breaths, then sixty, then a hundred. She thought she was still walking when she felt Caleb’s arm tighten around her waist, all but lifting her. Vaguely she realized that she would have fallen without his support. She tried to apologize.
«Don’t talk,» he gasped. «Walk.»
After several racking breaths, Willow managed to take a few more steps. Caleb stayed beside her, breathing hard, supporting her, urging her on. Together they struggled up the steep, stony ridge, hearing nothing but their own pounding heartbeats and the rasp of their overworked lungs. Every few minutes, Caleb would pause long enough to send another shrill whistle back down the trail, calling to Trey and Deuce, who had outpaced all the mares.
Caleb shifted the saddlebags and bedroll to his other shoulder, caught Willow up again, and resumed walking. He stopped for breath every thirty steps, then every twenty, but even that wasn’t enough for Willow. The long days of riding, the uncertainty, the fight with theComancheros, the altitude, everything had combined to rob her of strength.
Grimly, Willow struggled onward, trying not to lean on Caleb. It was impossible. Without his strength she wouldn’t have been able to stand.
«Almost — there,» Caleb said.
Willow didn’t answer. She couldn’t. Her steps were only inches apart, more stumbling than true walking.
Caleb looked up at the route ahead and remembered with unnatural clarity the words his father had written in his journal to describe BlackPass: Steep, rough, and colder than a witch’s tit. But the pass is there all right, for any man with spine to take her. Up and over the Continental Divide, climbing until you’re looking in God’s eye, high enough to hear angels sing, if you can hear anything but your heart pounding and your breath sawing.
Without warning, Caleb and Willow were there, standing on the brink of heaven, heart pounding and breath sawing and angels singing all around. Caleb’s arm loosened around Willow, allowing her to slip to the ground. He dropped the saddlebags and bedroll next to her, sank down, and pulled her against his chest.
She slumped gratefully against him. For a long time she fought desperately for breath. Finally her breathing slowed. She realized that Caleb was cradling her, gently stroking her hair and cheeks, telling her again and again that the worst was over…they had finally reached the highest point in the pass. She gave a long, shuddering sigh and opened her eyes.
Caleb saw the color returning to Willow’s skin and felt a relief so great it was almost pain. He gathered her even closer, shifting around until she was looking toward the setting sun. The clouds were all but gone, reduced to incandescent golden banners flying from the highest peaks. The snow that had fallen was already melting, threading back down the mountain peak in silent black tears.
«Look,» Caleb said, pointing.
Willow looked at a hand-sized patch of snow that blazed nearby in the dying sun, weeping tears of gold. She watched a drop form and slowly separate from the still-frozen snow, falling away in the first instant of its long journey back to the sea.
The water was flowing west, toward the setting sun.
