Elias reached out, his hand hovering in the air before gently taking her shoulder. He wanted to pull her close, but he felt unworthy to touch her grief. He was a part of the machine that had done this to her. "You are not empty," he said, his voice thick. "You are alive.
That is enough. I did not buy a broodmare, Naya. I bought—I bought a partner." She looked at him, searching for the pity she hated, but she found only a shared sorrow. "Come," he said gently.
"Let us go home." That night, the silence in the cabin was different. It was the silence of a tomb. Naya went to her room early, closing the door. Elias lay on his cot, staring at the ceiling, the shadows of the rafters looking like the bars of a cage.
He fell into a fitful sleep, and the nightmares came. They were always the same, the smoke, the screaming horses, the sound of the bugle. He was riding through a burning camp, his pistol heavy in his hand. He saw a woman running, a bundle in her arms. He shouted at her to stop, to get down, but a soldier beside him fired.
The woman fell. The bundle rolled into the snow. "No!" Elias shouted in his sleep. "Stop it.
Call them off." He thrashed on the cot, tangling in the sheets. "God, please, not the children." He woke with a gasp, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He sat up, drenched in cold sweat, his breath coming in jagged heaps.
The cabin was dark, but the door to Naya's room was slightly ajar. He saw her standing there, a silhouette in the gloom. She was watching him. She had heard Elias wiped his face with his trembling hands. "Go back to sleep, Naya," he croaked.
"Just a bad dream." She stood there for a moment longer, saying nothing, then silently closed her door. But he knew she was awake. He knew she was putting the pieces together, the scout, the army, the timeline. Two nights later, the storm broke.
It came out of the north, a violent thrashing thing of thunder and wind that shook the cabin to its foundations. Rain lashed against the walls in sheets. It was the kind of storm that drowned cattle and washed away roads. Elias sat by the stove, feeding wood into the fire. The temperature had plummeted.
The wind howled like a banshee, finding every gap in the chinking. Suddenly, a steady drip, drip, drip sound echoed in the room. Elias looked up. The roof, neglected for so long, was failing. Water was pooling on the floor near the table.
He stood up to find a bucket, but then he heard a noise from the back room, a shifting, scraping sound. He walked to the curtain and pulled it back. Naya was on her knees in the dark. The leak in her room was worse. Water was streaming down the wall, soaking her bedding on the floor.