She looked at him again, and this time her expression carried something heavier, acknowledgement, maybe respect. As they ate, Rowan's thoughts circled. He wondered where they had come from, what had scattered them, why no men had come with them. The eldest seemed to sense his questions. When the meal was finished, she said, "Slowly, soldiers came.
Settlement men came, too. Our home burned. We left. We walked many nights." She lifted her chin, steady. "Now we are here." Rowan didn't ask for details.
He knew what that meant. Raids, force marches, killings. He had seen it before when he scouted the frontier. The women who survived had nothing left but what they could carry. Their presence here was not chance.
They had come looking for someone who had not send them away. Later, Rowan pulled on his coat and stepped outside with the axe over his shoulder. The cold bit hard, but he needed wood for the stove. He chopped slowly, the sound echoing through the still valley. When he carried the first armload back in, he stopped short.
The youngest was already carrying smaller pieces inside, her arms straining, but her face stubborn. The middle sister was at the table, sewing a torn seam in her dress with sinew thread she had pulled from her own garment. The eldest was kneeling by the hearth, washing the bowls carefully as if the act of keeping them clean meant something. Rowan set the wood down and stood there watching. A thought pressed into him.
These women had not come only to beg. They had come to stay. That night, after another meal of beans and salt pork stretched thin, Rowan sat at the table carving a handle for a broken hammer. The firelight made the room glow. Shadows dancing on the log walls.
The sisters huddled close, speaking softly in their own tongue. But every now and then the eldest glanced his way. He felt it. Her eyes on him, measuring his silence, testing how much room there was between them. Rowan thought about the questions that still hung unanswered.
Did they have family still alive? Would they being sought? Would trouble follow them to his door? He didn't voice them. He had lived long enough to know that answers did not always matter.
What mattered was the choice standing in front of him. He could turn them out tomorrow, keep his life the way it had been. Or he could let this continue, accept the weight that came with it. When he finally set the knife aside, he realized the door was still unlatched from earlier. For years, he had locked it each night out of habit.
Tonight, he hadn't. That was his answer, even if he hadn't spoken it aloud. The women slept close to the fire again, their bodies pressed together for warmth. Rowan sat awake longer, his thoughts heavy but steady. The silence of his cabin was no longer empty, and though he hadn't decided it in words, he knew already.