Three riders found him there instead of you.”
Sylvie’s fingers tightened around the blanket.
The three riders who had tied her to the cottonwood returned instantly to her mind.
One holding the reins.
One tying the knot.
One driving the nail.
“Were they—”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I reached my brother before morning.
He was still alive long enough to say only that you had not come.”
The man swallowed once.
“For a year, I thought that meant you had sent him there and stayed away.”
Sylvie closed her eyes.
That explained the sentence he had whispered while carrying her through the snow.
My brother died because of you.
“I didn’t know,” she said.
“I know that now.”
She opened her eyes.
“How?”
He turned the board again.
On one side, Joseph Carrick’s insult.
On the other, a dead man’s invitation.
“My brother carried this away from our camp,” he said.
“You never received it.
Yet your father had it.”
The room seemed suddenly smaller.
Sylvie looked at the deep fresh carving her father had ordered displayed above her dying body.
Indian lover.
Joseph had used the same board.
Whether through arrogance or cruelty, he had taken a message meant to bring two people together and turned it into the sign intended to mark his daughter’s death.
“He knew,” Sylvie whispered.
The man said nothing.
“He knew where your brother was going.”
Still nothing.
Sylvie remembered her father locking the pantry door.
The riders downstairs.
The scrape of boots on the porch after midnight.
Mud drying along the bottom of one man’s coat.
Joseph telling her never to speak the dead man’s name again.
She had mistaken control for certainty because she had been raised inside it.
Now the pieces began fitting together with terrifying ease.
The older woman placed a hand over Sylvie’s wrist.
“You need strength before vengeance,” she said.
Sylvie looked at her.
“I don’t want vengeance.”
The man with the black braid studied her carefully.
“What do you want?”
Sylvie turned the board so the old message faced upward.
“I want him to explain how this came into his hands.”
For three days she was barely able to stand.
The cold had damaged her fingers and feet, though feeling slowly returned.
The rope burns around her wrists darkened before they began to close.
Her shoulder had been torn badly enough that the older woman kept it wrapped and refused to let Sylvie lift anything heavier than a bowl.
The bear cub stayed close.
It slept near the entrance at night and followed whenever Sylvie crossed the lodge.
Once, when she stumbled, it lurched toward her as if six months old and barely knee-high were enough to catch a grown woman.
