Gideon Mercer had not planned on having any kind of day. That was the most honest way to put it. He had planned the back fence needed another post before the ground froze any deeper. The second mayor had been favoring her left forleg for three days, and he needed to check it again. And the larder needed to be inventoried before another week passed.
These were the kinds of plans that filled his days reliably, one task leading to the next in a way that left no significant gaps where a person might have to sit down and think about something other than work. He was good at that. He had been good at that for 4 years. He was in the barn when he heard the knocking. Except it wasn't knocking.
It was something more urgent than knocking. Someone hitting the cabin door with what sounded like both fists, fast and irregular, the way someone hits a door when they're not thinking about how they're hitting it. He came out of the barn with a hand near his belt out of old habit, scanning the yard. What he saw was a small boy, probably six, maybe seven. Coatless.
No, not coatless. He had a coat, but it was too thin, and one of the elbows had been torn and sewn back with a different color thread. His nose was running. His boots didn't match. He was breathing so hard from running that he couldn't immediately speak.
When he saw Gideon could only stand there with his chest heaving and his hands still half raised in fists from the knocking. Gideon came closer slowly."All right,"he said."Take a breath."The boy took one visibly like someone following an instruction. Then my mama can't walk anymore. Three words would have been enough. My mama can't.
But the boy had given him all of it, given him the full weight of it in the plainest possible language, and Gideon felt something shift behind his sternum that he didn't examine. Where the boy pointed. Gideon grabbed his coat off the peg by the barn door, told the boy to keep up, and moved. She heard them before she saw them boots crunching frozen ground, too heavy to be Toby alone, and she pushed herself up onto one elbow with her free hand already moving toward the inside of her coat before she caught herself. The deed?
She'd been reaching for the deed, not a weapon, not a plan, a piece of paper, as though holding it would help. The man who came through the cottonwoods was tall, darkcoated, moving with the kind of efficiency that suggested someone who had crossed rough ground many times and had stopped being impressed by it. He stopped when he saw her, looked at her, the way people look at a situation they're already calculating, not shocked by it, just assessing. Toby appeared behind him and ran to her side. That's her, Toby said unnecessarily.
The man crouched down to her level without being asked. Up close, he had dark eyes and a jaw that needed attention, and a scar along his left hand that had healed badly, the way cuts heal when they're not properly tended. He looked at her ankle, not at her face, not at the coat, or the way she was holding herself, or any of the 50 other things that might have told him she was hiding something, just the ankle, direct practical. Can you put weight on it? No.
Tried already. Three times he nodded once. Okay. Then he looked at Toby. You're going to walk next to me, not behind.