“Take her upstairs,” she said. Downstairs was the clinic. Upstairs was where shelived. “Warmer up there, most-times.”
“All right,” Peterson said, and furs and all, carried the girl out of her kitchen, around the corner to the stairs. Darcy followed with the lamp and got in front for the ascent. Peterson carried the girl up, and the preacher came behind her, with the deputy clumping after them, up, up where there was a small landing and a choice of rooms.
The whole upstairs wasn’t warm yet: the kitchen stove was only just getting going. Their breath almost frosted, and the storm had torn something loose outside that banged and thumped. But Mark had planned for stormy days. Mark had set prism glasses in the steeps of the windward side of the roof where snow didn’t stick when the wind blew. The light came down four mirrored tubes, and it didn’t need kerosene to keep the upstairs lit even when the shutters were closed.
Faye’s room had one. She opened the door. Dawn must be starting, because there was a faint glow coming in above the lamplight. She hadn’t noticed how much dust there had gotten to be. But the sheets were clean under the coverlet, and she had the marshal lay the girl down there.
“You sure you’re all right?” the marshal asked her then, and she knew damned well what he was thinking andasking of her.
“Fine.” She wasn’t angry, just ready for them to get out of her way and let her find out what the girl’s chances were. She wasn’t sentimental about Faye’s things. She could use this room when it was practical. And it was practical now, a matter of light that didn’t risk fire or cost money.
Such a pale, cold face. She couldn’t keep her hand from the blond curls. She knew it wasn’t Faye, but it was something to deceive her eyes and her hands and, at least for a while, the blank spot in her heart. “Oh, honey, can you blink for me? Can you do that?”
“Let us pray,” John said, and launched into something about the Lord and lost sheep.
“Yeah,” she said, instead of amen—she said things like that habitually and John kept his mouth shut and winced: John could havethe souls on their way to the next world, but she wanted this one alive.
So she herded the three men downstairs, as of no use, and had no time to spare for tea or cordialities: she shoved them out the door, with them promising to check this afternoon, and John Quarles promising to bring groceries if she needed them.
“I have everything I need,” she said, maybe foolishly, because it wasn’t the truth, and she shut the door on them, then shot the bolt and dropped the bar.
Faye, all done up in furs and softness. It was a beautiful dead child the marshal had brought her, That Day, and she began to cry.
But old thoughts came to her and prompted her to stop sniveling and get something done. She found the dusty warming bricks in the downstairs closet and set them on the kitchen stove top, and stoked it up with another few sticks of wood.
She took the hot kettle upstairs, moving faster than she had moved about her business in long, long months. She knewit wasn’t her daughter—she knewbetter; but she didn’t choose to know: that was the real difference between sane and crazy.
In the thoughts she chose to think, Faye was home, the marshal had brought her, and she had a chance this time to fight death, hands on and by hereffort—slim, but at least this time, a chance.
The smith, Mackey, hadn’t been exactly hospitable.
But Carlo thought now, sitting in a warm nook in Van Mackey’s forge, with the faint glow of embers for light as well as heat, that he was very willing to put up with pain in his fingers and feet. He was grateful that Danny Fisher hadn’t let them quit—even if Danny had missed the shelters in the whiteout.
He could say now that they’d made it. And he’d have wished to talk to Danny before he left, but Danny’d had his head down, ducking things that they’d agreed not to talk about, he guessed, or what he might have to be grateful for, which seemed all there was left to talk about.
Thanks, he’d have said, at least, if he’d had his wits about him, and if that duck of Danny’s head hadn’t stopped him cold. When the rider woman had said he and Randy probably wouldn’t lose toes he’d been so grateful for Danny Fisher’s persistence and bullying toward the last that he’d sat there and sniveled like a five-year-old.
His eyes burned. He wanted just to sleep, and it was so still, so quiet in this place. The whiteout—
He suffered a mental slip, chin on his chest, thinking <himself back on the mountainside with horse-sendings shivering down the nape of his neck and running through his brain.>
At next blink it was <Danny in the rider camp.> And <passageways.>
No, they were in the forge shed. He and Randy. The preacher and the marshal had said they had a place for Brionne, and he and Randy should go on where the deputy took them, warmest place in Evergreen, someone had said.
And it was. From the branching of the dizzying wooden passages they’d parted with the marshal, taken a separate lantern which he lit and carried for the deputy who carried Randy, and they’d gone far down another spur to a side tunnel where it seemed even the earth was warmer.
Knock on the door, the deputy had said, having his hands full with Randy, and he’d knocked. They’d waited. He’d hammered with his fist, though it hurt like hell, figuring people were asleep, and the deputy had carried Randy all the way from the rider camp.
It had taken three such assaults before he heard steps inside, and finally the door opened on a sleepy, burly man in his underwear, who’d gazed blearily past the lantern he carried while they stood in the dark of the tunnel.
“These kids hiked up from Tarmin,” the deputy had said. The deputy had gone on to say they were the smith’s kids from down there, and that the marshal wanted them to have a job, at which Mackey acted as if he’d slam the door in the deputy’s face.
But the deputy had gotten his hand against the door, and without saying anything about why they’d walked up from Tarmin, said something about the tavern and the miners and young boys not being safe in there. Details blurred. The passage doorway had. Carlo had been thinking he hadn’t the strength to go through another round of where to lodge them.
But Mackey had said then that they weren’t firing up the forge in this blizzard anyway and they could stay there till he could talk to the marshal in person. After which Mackey slammed the door.
They hadn’t mentioned the details about Tarmin. The marshal had said not to tell Mackey anything but the absolute least they could say. They didn’t want that public yet, because, the deputy had said, the village had so much stake in Tarmin, and there were people who might take advantage of the situation.
The deputy had brought them through the side door over there, into the forge, this vast shed with stone walls, a blackened timber roof, a stone floor that looked like a solid piece of the mountain itself. The forge was banked and almost dark, but even so the warmth in the air here was considerable.
His greatest desire in the whole universe had been to sit down and peel out of his coat and sweaters and the knee-wraps and all of it, and he’d done the same service for Randy, then covered Randy in his coat, thinking he might need it. At some point—he didn’t even remember—the deputy had left. With the lantern. He’d thanked him. He thought. His thinking wasn’t clear at all.
Randy made a sudden sound in his sleep and flailed an arm from under the coat Carlo had settled over him. His eyes came wide open. “Where are we?” Randy asked in panic. “Where are we?”
“Warmest place there is,” Carlo said. “It’s all right. Nothing to do but sleep.” He didn’t know even whether it was day or night. He thought it might be daylight, but he hadn’t been able to tell in the passages. Mackey might have been asleep, or sleeping late—but if people had come in after risking their necks on that road he thought the man could have been civil about a knock on his door. “Storm’s still blowing,” he said to Randy. “Hear it?” He sat down as close to Randy as he could, while the wind kept on howling like devils outside and thumping at the flue.