She ran out on it, and that makes her a thief of her own con- You hand her over and we ride off peaceful." "Paper or not," Eli said."She bargained for shelter here, and I gave it.
She's not yours to take." One of the riders behind Greer shifted his horse.
The other one was moving to Eli's left, slow, like he was just settling the animal."You got a daughter in there," Greer said.
The words landed in the cold and sat there. The door opened behind Eli. He turned, ready to send Sona back inside, and stopped. She had walked out onto the porch herself.
She was standing at his shoulder in her buckskin, hands at her sides, eyes on Greer with the same steadiness she'd had at the door 2 weeks before."You know this mountain," Eli said to her, low enough that only she heard."Tell me what you need." "I need 15 minutes," she said.
He didn't understand yet, but he had learned in 2 weeks that she didn't say things without reason."Greer," Eli called out."Let's talk this over properly.
Come down off your horses." He kept his voice level, kept Greer's attention. At the edge of his vision, Sona slipped off the porch into the dark. She moved through the snow along the back of the house and into the timber, and she knew exactly where she was going. She had been watching the ridge behind the ranch for 3 days, mapping the drainage in the couloirs, noting where the snow loaded heaviest above the south-facing cliff.
She climbed in the dark with no lamp, fast. Her moccasins quiet in the The ridge above the tree line held a cornice. She had looked at it every morning. The east-facing side was loaded six, maybe 8 ft deep on a crust that had refrozen after a warm afternoon 4 days ago.
She found the shelf she'd marked in her mind. She used her knife blade to test the crust at the break point, and what she found told her it would go with pressure. She stepped on it once, hard, at the weakest point. The sound was not a crack.
It was more like a low exhale from the mountain, something held a long time finally letting go. The slide that came off the east face of the ridge was not massive, not a full mountain event, but it was more than enough. It swept down the draw on the far side of the south pasture with a sound like low thunder and cut the route Greer's men would have needed to flank the ranch on that side. Greer's horses smelled it and lost their minds.
The two flanking riders lost all interest in Eli. Greer himself spent 40 seconds fighting a terrified horse and trying to work out what had happened. And in those 40 seconds, Eli had covered the ground between the porch and the nearest rider and unhorsed him in a way that ended the discussion. By the time Sona came back down off the ridge, Greer and his remaining rider had gone.
The third man was sitting in Eli's barn with his hands tied, considerably less convinced of his employer's legal rights than he had been an hour. She came back through the kitchen door, snow in her hair, breathing hard from the climb. Eli was at the stove.
Sarah was sitting at the table with her eyes very wide."Are you hurt?" Eli asked."No.