Cursnbick’s apparatus in the back clank-clanking under its canvas cover and the horse’s hooves crunch-crunching in the snow on the road, rutted from the business flowing up from Crease. Pit and Ro lay in the back under a blanket, faces pressed up against each other, peaceful now in sleep. Shy watched them rocking gently as the axles shifted.
‘I guess we did it,’ she said.
‘Aye,’ said Lamb, but looking a long stretch short of a celebration. ‘Guess so.’
They rounded another long bend, road switching back one last time as it dropped down steep off the hills, the stream beside half-frozen, white ice creeping out jagged from each bank to almost meet in the middle.
Shy didn’t want to say anything. But once a thought was in her head she’d never been much good at keeping it there, and this thought had been pricking at her ever since they left Beacon. ‘They’re going to be cutting into him, ain’t they? Asking questions.’
‘Savian?’
‘Who else?’
The scarred side of Lamb’s face twitched a little. ‘That’s a fact.’
‘Ain’t a pretty one.’
‘Facts don’t tend to be.’
‘He saved me.’
‘Aye.’
‘He saved you.’
‘True.’
‘We really going to fucking leave him, then?’
Lamb’s face twitched again, jaw-muscles working as he frowned out hard across the country ahead. The trees were thinning as they dropped out of the mountains, the moon fat and full in a clear sky star-dusted, spilling light over the high plateau. A great flat expanse of dry dirt and thorny scrub looked like it could never have held life, all half carpeted now with sparkling snow. Through the midst, straight as a sword-cut, the white strip of the old Imperial Road, a scar through the country angling off towards Crease, wedged somewhere in the black rumour of hills on the horizon.
Lamb’s horse slowed to a walk, then stopped.
‘Shall we halt?’ asked Majud.
‘You told me you’d be my friend for life,’ said Lamb.
The merchant blinked. ‘And I meant it.’
‘Then keep on.’ Lamb turned in his saddle to look back. Behind them, somewhere high up in the folded, forested ridges there was a glow. The great bonfire the mercenaries had stacked high in the middle of Beacon to light their celebrations. ‘Got a good road here and a good moon to steer by. Keep on all night, quick and steady, you might make Crease by dark tomorrow.’
‘Why the rush?’
Lamb took a long breath, looked to the starry sky and breathed out smoke in a grumbling sigh. ‘There’s going to be trouble.’
‘We going back?’ asked Shy.
‘You’re not.’ The shadow of his hat fell across his face as he looked at her so his eyes were just two gleams. ‘I am.’
‘What?’
‘You’re taking the children. I’m going back.’
‘You always were, weren’t you?’
He nodded.
‘Just wanted to get us far away.’
‘I’ve only had a few friends, Shy. I’ve done right by even fewer. Could count ’em on one hand.’ He turned his left hand over and looked at the stump of his missing finger. ‘Even this one. This is how it has to be.’
‘Ain’t nothing has to be. I ain’t letting you go alone.’
‘Yes y’are.’ He eased his horse closer, looking her in the eye. ‘Do you know what I felt, when we came over that hill and saw the farm all burned out? The first thing I felt, before the sorrow and the fear and the anger caught up?’
She swallowed, her mouth all sticky-dry, not wanting to answer, not wanting to know the answer.
‘Joy,’ whispered Lamb. ‘Joy and relief. ’Cause I knew right off what I’d have to do. What I’d have to be. Knew right off I could put an end on ten years of lying. A man’s got to be what he is, Shy.’ He looked back at his hand and made a three-fingered fist of it. ‘I don’t…
‘You ain’t evil,’ she whispered. ‘You’re just…’
‘If it hadn’t been for Savian I’d have killed you in them caves. You and Ro.’
Shy swallowed. She knew it well enough. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, we’d never have got the children back.’
Lamb looked at the pair of ’em, Ro with her arm over Pit. Stubble of hair showing dark now, almost grown over the scratch down her scalp. Both so changed. ‘Did we get ’em back?’ he asked, and his voice was rough. ‘Sometimes I think we just lost us, too.’
‘I’m who I was.’
Lamb nodded, and it seemed he had the glimmer of tears in his eyes. ‘You are, maybe. But I don’t reckon there’s any going back for me.’ He leaned from his saddle then and hugged her tight. ‘I love you. And them. But my love ain’t a weight anyone should have to carry. Best of luck, Shy. The very best.’ And he let her go, and turned his horse, and he rode away, following their tracks back towards the trees, and the hills, and the reckoning beyond.
‘What the hell happened to being realistic?’ she called after him.
He stopped just a moment, a lonely figure in all that moonlit white. ‘Always sounded like a good idea but, being honest? It never worked for me.’
Slow, and numb, Shy turned her back on him. Turned her back and rode on across the plateau, after the wagon and Majud’s hired men, after Sweet and Crying Rock, staring at the white road ahead but seeing nothing, tongue working at the gap between her teeth and the night air cold, cold in her chest with each breath. Cold and empty. Thinking about what Lamb had said to her. What she’d said to Savian. Thinking about all the long miles she’d covered the last few months and the dangers she’d faced to get this far, and not knowing what she could do. This was how it had to be.
Except when folk told Shy how things had to be, she started thinking on how to make ’em otherwise.
The wagon hit a lump and with a clatter Pit got jolted awake. He sat up, and he stared blinking about him, and said, ‘Where’s Lamb?’ And Shy’s hands went slack on the reins, and she let her horse slow, then stop, and she sat there solemn.
Majud looked over his shoulder. ‘Lamb said keep on!’
‘You got to do what he tells you? He ain’t your father, is he?’
‘I suppose not,’ said the merchant, pulling up the horses.
‘He’s mine,’ muttered Shy. And there it was. Maybe he wasn’t the father she’d want. But he was still the only one she’d got. The only one all three of ’em had got. She’d enough regrets to live with.
‘I’ve got to go back,’ she said.
‘Madness!’ snapped Sweet, sitting his horse not far off. ‘Bloody madness!’
‘No doubt. And you’re coming with me.’
A silence. ‘You know there’s more’n a hundred mercenaries up there, don’t you? Killers, every man?’
‘The Dab Sweet I heard stories of wouldn’t take fright at a few mercenaries.’
‘Don’t know if you noticed, but the Dab Sweet you heard stories of ain’t much like the one wearing my coat.’
‘I hear you used to be.’ She rode up to him and reined in close. ‘I hear you used to be quite a man.’
Crying Rock slowly nodded. ‘That is true.’
Sweet frowned at the old Ghost woman, and frowned at Shy, and finally frowned at the ground, scratching at his beard and bit by bit slumping down in his saddle. ‘Used to be. You’re young and got dreams ahead of you still.
