From the first small figures she'd made in the firelight weeks ago, that first night she'd picked up a piece of charcoal and quietly asked permission to this. A world. "My and people and fires and horses and a cabin with two graves and three figures and the suggestion of green. "It's good." Nayeli said simply.
With the weight her simple statements carried, Tsula looked at her sister. "It's true." she said. Which was a different thing and they both knew it. And Hadley looked at the wall for a long time, at the whole of it. The story of the weeks on that wall in black lines and careful shapes.
"Thank you." he said. Tsula turned around. "For what?" "For putting it there." She looked at the wall, then at him.
"I put us there." she said simply. "That's where we are." The conversation he'd been waiting for happened on a Thursday. He knew it was coming. It had been gathering in the edges of the days.
In the way Nayeli and Tsula spoke to each other in the evenings, quiet and deliberate. The quiet weight of people working through something they hadn't said aloud yet. He'd given it space, hadn't pushed toward it or away from it, just waited. He'd gotten good at waiting. Thursday morning, clear sky, cold but not cruel.
The kind of late winter day that reminds you spring isn't a rumor. He'd put the coffee on and gone out to check the barn progress and come back in to find both women at the table, sitting across from each other, not talking, but with the quality of people who just been an expectant quiet. He sat down, poured the coffee in all cups in front of them, sat back. Nayeli put her hands around her cup, both hands. That thing she did.
"The road south will be open soon." she said. "Two weeks, maybe three." Hadley said, "depending on the thaw." "Yes." A pause.
"Our people went south." Tsula said, "before the attack. "We think." "The ones who got away." She looked at her hands.
"Some of them. Some, I know." Hadley said, we could find them. Nayeli said, yes, if we went south. Yes, he said it all calmly.
Because it was all true and truth didn't need to be delivered with anything attached to it. "We've been talking," Nayeli said. "Tsula and I." "I thought you might be." Nayeli looked up.
"You knew we were discussing it." "I could tell." "Did you think about—" She paused, choosing the words. "What you'd want?" He looked at her honest question deserved an honest answer.
"Yes," he said. A beat. "And?" she said. He looked at them both. Tsula had her eyes on the table, but she was listening with her whole body.