But in the same heartbeat and in deep confusion she had to amend that harsh judgment. They’d carried the girl to her with heroic effort. There were frost burns on their faces. How did they love her enough to do that—and not come to see her?
“She’s doing pretty well,” she said—hardly a breath having passed in those thoughts. Their arrival disturbed her for reasons she didn’t even want to look at in herself. She didn’t want to let them through the door to talk to them, much less admit them to the girl’s room— but she couldn’t say go away. They had rights. They could go to the marshal and complain, and Eli would have to come back and say, Darcy, you have to let them see her, and how would that look? And how would that feel?
“Come in,” she said. She wondered whether she should ask them to take off their coats. She wondered whether she should offer tea. She wanted them out of the way, out of this house, but how fast could she push them and how much could she keep secret that wouldn’t ultimately get back to them and color how they dealt with her?
Friendly. Friendly seemed the best approach. Court the boys. Make them comfortable so they couldn’t turn on her.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked. “Would you like to sit down?”
“To see our sister,” Carlo said—and very businesslike, very much in possession of his rights over the situation. She was afraid.
“Come along upstairs,” she said, then, constrained to cooperate.
“Nice house,” the younger brother said as if he was estimating the value of the set-abouts.
“Thank you,” she said, while her mind was racing over what they wanted and whether they meant to take Brionne and what she could do about it. She winced at bringing two such enemies into the heart of the house, into things that were hers and Mark’s and Faye’s, where they could see what she had and maybe calculate it wasn’t as fine as where they’d come from and wasn’t really a house they’d want their sister in. But she had no choice but take them up the stairs and into Faye’s bedroom.
There they took off hats and gloves and loosened scarves. They brought deep cold with them. It clung to their clothing, on which snow didn’t melt. They brought noise. They brought foolish fears into her heart—even to think of them taking her back. The brothers didn’t know how to deal with her. They didn’t understand how to take care of the girl—they’d failed. They stood above a sleeping sister—having failed.
And then—then—maybe a creak of the floorboards, or maybe just a sense the girl at times seemed to have—she opened her eyes and stared at them.
“Carlo?”
“Yeah,” he said, and got down on one knee and took her hand. “Hi. How’re you doing, Brinny?”
Dreadful nickname.
“All right,” she said. Her hand rested listlessly in her brother’s as he squeezed it.
“You slept all the way up,” the younger brother said, and squatted down by the older. The girl lay on her prop of pillows and gazed into their faces.
“I don’t remember.” Her hand moved on the lace and yellow ribbons of the coverlet. “Isn’t it a pretty room?”
“It’s real pretty,” the older boy said and squeezed her hand again. “—Listen, Brinny-boo, we’re down by the gate. Got a job in the smith’s setup here. We live there. We’re fine. Randy and I are fine. You need anything?”
“Where’s mama?”
“Mama and papa are gone, Brinny. So’s aunt Libby. They’re all dead. Nothing left of Tarmin but us.”
The blue eyes clouded. She turned her face into the pillow and tore her hand from her brother’s fingers.
“Brinny?”
“I want mama.”
“Yeah. I know, I know.” Carlo patted her shoulder as he got up from his knees and looked at Darcy. “I don’t know what I can pay you right now, ma’am, but I will, as soon as I come by any money. As could happen.”
“I’d like her to stay here. No charge. I have the room. I don’t mind her using it.”
“That’s awfully kind of you.”
“I’d be glad to take care of her.” She became desperate, fearing she’d led herself into a dangerous dead end of reason, and having lost all her sense of what anyone truly wanted, she had nothing left to throw to the hunters but a tidbit of her privacy, to make them think they were friends and to make logical to them her position. “I had a girl about her age. She died. The house has been real empty. The girl needs someone all the time—a stable environment. She can’t be moved to still one more strange place.”
“If Brionne could live here, if you were willing to do that for her, we’d be grateful. We might be able to help out, do some fixing up and all. Next spring—next spring it looks like we’ll be able to give you some kind of payment.”
That didn’t matter to her. Money didn’t matter. Their separation from Brionne was the currency she wanted. It was wonderful news.
“I’m well set,” she said, and walked out to the head of the stairs, luring them to follow as she kept talking. “I can take care of her. Of course you’ll come and see her.” By spring—by spring if they changed their minds and wanted their sister back, she’d argue the child was too delicate to travel with them and live in a ravaged village. It was a stupid idea for them to go back there, and by what she’d heard of Tarmin, though the buildings might be intact and all, they’d still have to get supplies there. By the time the boys were in any fashion set to want her back she’d have Brionne attached to her, that was what she’d do. So they’d never get her back. By that time Brionne wouldn’t even think of going—to brothers she hadn’t been tearfully glad to see.
“We’d really be grateful,” Carlo Goss said; and the younger brother said, as they followed her down the stairs:
“Carlo and me get along all right. But it’s pretty rough down at the forge.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” She knew the smith, his surly brat. And his wife, as vicious and self-seeking a woman as ever she’d met— only woman in town who could have made Van Mackey worse than he was. “Your sister owes her life to you. It was a miracle you got up the Climb at all.” She reached the front door and, since they had never taken their coats off and seemed in a hurry, gave them no grace at all of invitations to stay and talk. “You come back whenever you want. You’ll know she’s just down the street.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” the older boy said. “I’m grateful. We are. Really.”
“Any time.” She opened the door, waited just long enough to see the boys leave down the snowy steps.
Then she shut the door and latched it against the kind of drunken fools that sometimes mistook the private door for the office, and calmed herself enough for a sigh of relief.
The girl was hers. They hadn’t, after all, come to make any other arrangements. They were no more than kids themselves, the younger boy young enough to need someone’s care—but not hers. It didn’t need to be her business. Nothing about them needed to be her business.
But in one thing she was puzzled—the impression she’d gotten that, after all they’d done to save her, they’d not been shattered by her condition—or cheered by her improvement. They’d just offered money—and left with nothing in evidence but relief.
Odd, she thought. That certainly wasn’t the behavior of loving brothers. It just wasn’t. And Brionne had shed no tears, none at all.
The kids hadn’t come back down from the midway shelter when the weather cleared—which meant the two of them had a choice of going up what Tara called a hellish road, or going up a straight-up-the-mountain route that Tara swore she could make, and that Guil maintained, against her protestations, that he could make.