"What's in it? " he asked. "My things," she said. "Your things. " "Yes. " He held her gaze for a moment. She didn't look away, and she didn't elaborate, and something in the particular quality of her stillness told him that this was not a topic she was going to open up just because he'd frowned at her. He turned back to the porter.
Get me whoever you can. It took four men, a great deal of effort, and two near misses before the trunk was loaded onto his wagon. The horses shifted under the weight of it, and he did the arithmetic in his head, and didn't like the result. Whatever was inside that thing was not dresses and household linens. He helped Viven up onto the wagon bench, a formality she accepted without comment, and they started out of Harlo Creek in silence, the wagon tracking deep into the frozen ruts of the main road.
She didn't try to fill the silence, which he'd half expected her to do, and was surprised she didn't. Most people treated silence like a problem to be solved. She sat beside him on the bench with her leather bag in her lap and watched the country open up around them as the town fell behind the lodge pole pines pressing in on either side of the road. The mountains white above the timberline, the sky low and colorless and immense. He watched her watching it, and he couldn't read what she thought of it.
Her face gave him very little. "How far is the ranch? " she asked after they had gone perhaps 2 mi. "About an hour in this road. Less in summer," she nodded. She looked at the mountains again.
You're not from anywhere west of the Alaganis, he said. It wasn't a question. No. She paused. Philadelphia.
The agency said that. Then you already knew the answer. He hadn't meant it as a question. He'd meant it as a statement of the obvious problem, but she had answered it neutally rather than taking it as a criticism. And he found that marginally annoying in a way he couldn't entirely justify.
The winters here are hard, he said. I've been told. Not the way I mean. People tell you they're cold and long and difficult. They don't tell you what it actually does to you.
Being inside for days at a time because you can't see your hand in front of your face in the snow. Livestock dying. Wood running low. A 5-year-old who doesn't understand why she can't go outside. He kept his eyes on the road.