Can you do that? Toby said yes with a seriousness that clearly startled even him. The man she didn't know his name yet, hadn't asked, would realize later that she simply hadn't thought to. Which told her something about what kind of state she was in, put one arm under her shoulders and one under her knees with no preamble and no comment about her weight or the difficulty of it and stood up with her like it was a practical matter requiring a practical solution and nothing more. She was too exhausted and too cold and too aware of Toby watching to say anything about it.
She let him carry her. It was the first time she had let anyone help her with anything since Thomas died. And the thing she felt about it was not relief, but an overwhelming, furious, complicated grief that she pushed back down before it reached her face. He walked her to his cabin, Toby keeping pace on his left side, exactly as he'd been told. Inside was warm.
That was the first thing genuinely warm. Wood stove burning well. A cabin that was not elegant, but was solid and cared for in the specific way that working buildings are cared for when one person has been responsible for them for a long time. There was a second chair with a saddle draped over it. A shelf of tools, a table with a coffee mug still in it from breakfast.
He sat her down on the longer bench near the stove, and that was when she finally got a clear look at his face. He was somewhere in his 30s, though the particular kind of weathered that made age hard to determine. Not unfriendly, not especially warm either. He was the kind of man who operated at a carefully maintained baseline, and she recognized that because she had been doing the same thing for 4 months."I'm Mara Vant,"she said, because she realized she should. Gideon Mercer, he said, already moving toward a shelf where he kept what appeared to be wrapped cloth and a tin she couldn't into from where she sat.
This is my ranch. I know I'm She stopped. I know I'm imposing, was she'd been about to say, and it would have been the most idiotic thing to say in this situation. She was lying with a ruined ankle on a strange man's bench in the middle of nowhere with a six-year-old child watching her for cues about how scared to be. Pointing out that she was inconveniencing him was beside the point.
Gideon came back with a cloth and what turned out to be a small jar of something she didn't immediately recognize. He looked at the ankle. I'm going to need to get the boot off. She nodded. It hurt.
She didn't make noise about it, but it hurt considerably, and he worked carefully enough that she understood he knew it hurt and was doing the best he could without being sentimental about the fact. When the boot was off, and he had the cloth wrapped around the swelling, she leaned her head back against the wall and breathed. Toby had found a spot near the stove. He was sitting on the floor with his knees pulled up watching Gideon the way children watch adults they haven't decided about yet not hostile not welcoming just observant. Gideon glanced at him.
You hungry? Toby looked at Mara. Yes, Mara said for both of them. Gideon went to the larder. The thing she noticed watching him move around his own space was that he did not ask questions.
Not one. Not why she was in the territory. Not where she was going. Not why her six-year-old's coat had a badly mended elbow tear and boots that didn't match. He fed them beans and salt pork and cornbread that was yesterday's, but still better than anything Mara had tasted in days.