Silus Ror didn't knock. He never knocked. He kicked the door open so hard the frame split, and Mara Vance watched from the corner of her own kitchen as two of his men dragged her husband's wooden deed box off the shelf and dropped it at Ror's feet like it was garbage. Her son Toby pressed against her legs, shaking. Sign it, Ror said, holding out a pen.
Not a question, not a request. Mara looked down at the paper. Blank lines where her life was supposed to go. She didn't sign. 3 days later, her husband was dead in a mine collapse that nobody could explain.
And Ror's men were back at her door with a different paper one that already had her name on it. The cold came early that year. Not the kind of cold that settles gradually, giving people time to chop wood and bank their fires and pull quilts from cedar chests. This cold arrived like a judgment, sudden, indifferent, dropping temperatures overnight until the mud outside froze solid with bootprints still pressed into it, preserving the shape of every step taken the day before. By morning those prints looked like fossils, like evidence of people who no longer existed.
Mara Vance had been walking for 4 days. She didn't count miles because she didn't know miles not out here, not in this part of the territory where the land refused to follow any pattern a person could memorize. She counted hours instead. Hours of daylight, hours of dark. Hours when Toby was quiet because he was sleeping against her shoulder, and hours when he was quiet because he had learned without being taught that questions didn't help right now.
He was 6 years old and he had learned that. That was the thing that kept cracking something open inside her chest when she let herself think about it. She tried not to think about it. The deed was wrapped in oil cloth and tucked inside her coat against her ribs. She could feel it with every breath, a stiff, flat rectangle pressing back like a reminder.
That paper was the only reason they were still moving. That paper was the only reason Ror's men hadn't caught them yet, because as long as she had it, Ror needed her alive. A dead woman couldn't be made to explain where she'd hidden the original. And Ror was too careful, too politically connected, too aware of his own reputation to let an obvious murder investigation land on him. He needed the document returned quietly.
He needed her cooperative or at minimum silent. He was going to get neither. She just had to reach Callaway first. Theodore Callaway, the attorney in the next settlement, 60 miles east of Ironwood Crossing. She had his name written on a piece of paper in her coat pocket because she'd been afraid she might forget it under pressure.
And she had been right to be afraid. Because 3 days into walking, she had forgotten almost everything that wasn't immediately necessary. Her husband's face, she still had Toby's weight against her. The cold, the deed, Callaway, that was about the full extent of what her mind could hold. She hadn't eaten since yesterday morning a strip of dried meat she'd divided with Toby and forced herself to only take half of.