Then we deal with what comes. Mara looked at him. She thought about everything she knew of this man in 4 days. The practical efficiency of him, the grief he'd arranged carefully around the edges of himself. The way he'd watched Toby find his voice again with the particular attention of someone who understood exactly what they were seeing because they'd seen its absence.
She thought about him, telling her he knew enough to trust her and meaning it. She picked up the crutch from where it leaned against the wall. All right, she said. Orson made a sound that might have been approval. They took up positions Orson to the barn, which gave him an angle on the yard that the cabin's windows couldn't provide.
Gideon at the side window, slightly back, Mara at the front door. She stood with her hand on the latch for a moment. Then she opened it and stepped onto the porch. The cold hit her like a wall. She had been warm for 3 days, warm enough that she'd started to forget what outside felt like, and the morning air went straight through her coat to the bone.
She stood on the crutch and kept her face level and watched the south ridge. They came out of the treeine four minutes later. Five horses, not four. She counted them carefully as they came across the frozen ground toward the cabinyard, keeping a pace that was slow enough to be deliberate. Ror was the fourth one.
She recognized him at this distance, not by his face, but by the way he sat a horse straight back, unhurried. The posture of a man who has never been in a situation where hurrying was necessary, because the situations always resolved in his favor eventually. He was 50 years old, and he looked at the way powerful men looked their age, not diminished by it, just settled into it, like it had finished shaping something that had always been hard underneath. Cutter was the fifth horse, the one in the back, big as she remembered, blankfaced, watching everything with small eyes that track movement, the way a dog tracks movement. Not with intelligence exactly, but with the specific animal focus of something that has been trained to one purpose and is ready to execute it.
They stopped at the edge of the yard. Ror looked at her on the porch. She met his eyes across 40 ft of frozen ground and did not look away, and she kept her hands visible, one on the crutch handle and one at her side, not reaching for anything, not hiding anything, just present and visible. He took in the crutch. Something moved in his expression, not pity, closer to satisfaction.
The kind of satisfaction a man feels when he believes someone is more disadvantaged than they appear. Mara, he said, as though they were acquaintances. As though this were a meeting he'd been looking off forward to. Ror, she said he shifted in the saddle. You've had a hard time of it.
His voice carried easily across the frozen yard. He'd always had a voice made for that, for projecting authority across distances. That was never my intention. The whole thing has been more complicated than it needed to be. The whole thing, she said,"The property matter.