Lightfall Four: Risk, Rise, Rebel (Lightfall, Book 4)

by Taylor, Jordan

  “Can you?” Rosalía asked.

  “Winter sent us with a jug of sour milk. Enough for two batches. We had the first yesterday while we waited for darkness at the river. We even have bicarbonate of soda. In theory.” She looked at damp bags all around her.

  “I’ll heat coffee. You mix cornbread. Then we’ll bake it in the Dutch oven and get bacon on in the skillet. Did you all plan to sleep, or ride straight there?”

  “We slept. Sort of,” Ivy said, turning before the fire, holding out bits of her tunic at a time while Sam hunted cornbread ingredients. “We made camp two hours before sunset. We had such trouble all day out of Santa Fé, finally to reach the river and find it swarming. I don’t know how you followed on your own.”

  “So you did reach the Rio Grande in daylight?”

  As they boiled, mixed, and cooked, rotating their possessions beside the fire, Ivy explained how they met the river in plenty of time to cross in daylight, but could not find a safe place.

  “In the middle of the night, they’re usually aimless. We had to wait, but it meant crossing in silence. Bad enough them hearing hooves, but our voices would be a dead giveaway. When the horses spooked and Yap-Rat growled, I thought we were being attacked.”

  Rosalía bit her lip as she passed out coffee. “I’m sorry, Ivy. I also thought you saw an attack. I was looking for your camp. Then Volar walked right into you.”

  “That’s all right. Each moment we remained at the river placed us in greater danger. We had to cross sometime.” Ivy set out tin plates. “But why did you follow? You were always welcome along. You could have left with us yesterday morning.”

  “She is not,” Grip said from his place opposite them at the fire, trying to dry and separate cigarette papers and tobacco pouches.

  “She is,” Ivy said. “Why should she not come if she wishes?’

  “Why should she wish to? She has obligations at home—”

  “I told you, I’ve arranged matters,” Rosalía said. “You behave as if I’m leaving three infant children.”

  “We do not have enough for you and your horse,” Grip said. “We haven’t enough even for our own. Monument is close to four hundred miles from here.”

  “First of all, I brought more provisions, in case you didn’t notice. Sombra is in good health now and strong as a mule. Second, Monument is not four hundred miles from Santa Fé, much less from here. We’ve already covered thirty or forty at least. Besides, Volar is a delicate eater.”

  “Is that so?” Grip looked north to watch Rosalía’s horse plow his way through compressed hay, his heap of corn on top of this long gone. The now rejuvenated Sombra chewed beside him with equal gusto.

  “There’s no reason she shouldn’t come along,” Ivy said, avoiding looking at the brown gelding. “I’m glad to have a second woman on the trail.”

  “And I would not mind having a second man on the trail,” Grip said, shifting his gaze to her. “Yet such a novelty grows overly optimistic these days.”

  Melchior stood up from disassembling his Colt. “You know, if it’s not—”

  “Mel—” Sam tried to catch his arm.

  “What?” Melchior rounded on him. “Every goddamn time he starts something—and it’s always him. Noticed? Suppose I stir grief with that rip? No. Poking a hornets’ nest with a short stick, yet—”

  “If met by no hornets, he would desist. You can ignore—”

  “Aim to slip sunup past a rooster also? Only wanting him to lay off.”

  “You could hug him,” Rosalía said absently as she smoothed cornbread batter into the Dutch oven with the back of a spoon.

  Melchior stared at her. “What’d you say?”

  Rosalía looked up. “What? Nothing.”

  Melchior turned to Grip. “Next time you feel need to air—”

  “Quiet,” Ivy said.

  Melchior fell silent. All four looked uneasily around, only Ivy still working, heaping coals on the lid for the cornbread. After glances in all directions they looked at her.

  “What’s wrong?” Rosalía asked.

  Ivy shrugged and sat back from the fire. “Nothing. Only ... thought I would try it again.”

  Rosalía grinned. Melchior threw his wet, wadded-up bandana at her, but returned to work on his revolver after a final glare at Grip. Grip managed to roll a feeble cigarette, gently smoothing warped paper with thumb and forefinger. He leaned around the fire to hold this out to Ivy. She took it without a word and passed it to Melchior.

  He seemed unable to dredge up a thanks, but gave a slight jerk of his head which could be meant as acknowledgment to one or both. Ivy lifted an end of smoldering sage branch from the fire to hand him. He lit the cigarette and threw the limb back in.

  Grip rolled a second for himself before deconstructing his Merwin, Hulbert & Co. revolvers across an empty sack to contain the parts. Rosalía reached past him to grab a fork for turning bacon, blowing in his ear. Grip flinched as if she spat at him.

  Sam rotated clothes and bedding, turning boots upside down, shaking chaps, adjusting Melchior’s laundry lines. When he went to shift a bedroll, he discovered the wet dog stretched across it like a corpse. He left the blanket and rotated saddles to better face the sun.

  Ivy lay back with her hands behind her head, eyes closed against sunlight, feet near the fire to finish drying her stockings and pants. The morning was already hot, despite autumn having dusted mountaintops with snow a week back. All would dry soon enough.

  And Rosalía came after them. Ivy could not help smiling about that. As much as she longed to reach Monument, she had not relished the idea of the long trip with only Sam, Melchior, and Grip for company. But why did she follow now? After expressing not the slightest interest in the journey while they were still packing at home? Not that Ivy was complaining.

  “Would you be so kind, old man?”

  Ivy cracked her lids to see Sam offering Melchior his French MAS officer’s revolver and lever-action rifle. Perhaps she could get her cousin to clean hers as well. He and Grip were the only members of the company who seemed to enjoy doctoring firearms.

  Melchior said nothing, but took the weapons. Sam ran his fingers backward through Melchior’s disheveled hair as he stepped past. He dropped a soggy parcel smelling strongly of peppermint oil by Ivy. She shifted to fold back paper, squinting inside as he lay down on his back, sharing her blanket and another, facing the opposite direction so their heads were side-by-side. She broke off a pink ball from the stuck-together glob and popped it in her mouth, then slid backward until she could rest her head on his shoulder, his face upside down beside hers.

  “Do they have a muddy river hint about them?” Sam asked in her ear, squinting at the few scudding white clouds above.

  “We’ll rinse them when it rains.”

  He chuckled.

  “Not bad. I’ve eaten much worse out here.”

  “I see a sailing ship,” Sam whispered, watching clouds.

  “I see a steamcoach.”

  “What will you do first thing?”

  “I will eat a lobster and an orange. No, first I’ll embrace my father. Then I’ll eat lobster and oranges. Then I’ll get a letter off to Kitty. What will you do?”

  “Sleep.”

  Ivy laughed and almost choked on her peppermint.

  “Real bed. Slats. No insects or scorpions. No inebriates outside the window in the dark. No dirt mattress. Controlled temperature.”

  She took a deep breath through her nose and slowly let it out, pressing her head back against his shoulder, closing her eyes.

  “Then I shall read a book. Any book, only to confirm I have not forgotten how.”

  “Sam, your shoulder is bony.”

  “Your head is bony, though I do not complain.”

  “It seems you just did. Do you know, I cannot remember how many bones are in the human body?”

  “I scarcely recall any verse.”

  “Tell me one you do.”

  “In what distant deeps or
skies ... burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire? When the stars threw down their spears ... and watered heaven with their tears ... did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

  When he paused, Ivy said, “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”

  Camp sounded quieter than it should. She suspected the rest were staring at them, though she did not open her eyes.

  They lay still below the rising sun, smells of mint and tobacco and wood smoke washing over them with leather and wool and horse, gun oil and sulfur, bacon, coffee, and cornbread. Ivy’s tunic, pants, and stockings were nearly dry. Her pliable linen corset and undergarments at least only damp. She felt warm without sweltering, knew a meal was on the way, and suspected she could get Melchior to clean her guns by agreeing to lead Two Pair all day. She was riding west again, not east, but Rosalía showed up and Sam was here and something must be said for this bed.

  Besides, she was here, alive for one more sunrise. And, for almost the first time out West, she felt grateful for both.

  Sixty-Second

  The Lake

  “... siempre está confinada.” Rosalía sings through the rest of her verse in Spanish before Melchior starts in English.

  “My horses are hungry, they won’t eat your hay....”

  At the end of the song, Rosalía starts again. “Hard is the fortune of all womankind!”

  And Melchior does his verses about being a poor horseman, unworthy of her affection, in Spanish.

  The sixth, or twelfth—she cannot remember—rendition of “Hard is the Fortune” and Ivy felt no love for the song from the beginning. Rosalía has a pretty voice and Melchior would be acceptable if he strove for tone over volume. But it has been a long week on the trail already, between starting out with the river at night, then the attack and missed opportunity at Sol Valle before the Arizona border, and she is sure she prefers stories over singing to pass the time. A few hours of silence are not unpleasant either. She is no longer worried about risers, none having been sighted since Sol Valle. Yet....

  Ivy tilts her hat below afternoon sun and squints ahead. Her sungoggles dangle around her saddle horn as they are uncomfortable to wear for hours on end. Half a mile ahead, the buckskin horse and rider blend into red-beige landscape of rock and dirt and the occasional cactus, butte, or jagged ridge.

  She has no pack horse now. Melchior leads the palomino Little Bird, Sam with Two Pair, Rosalía with Sombra. She could nudge Corra ahead to catch Grip, but knows the buckskin pair would not appreciate that, regardless of her silence.

  Ivy looks over her shoulder as the songbirds start on something about the troubles encountered by an elderly, spectacled cowhand named Johnny Four-Eye on a cattle drive.

  Sam trails behind, leaning from his saddle to, apparently, study the ground. They recently slowed from a ground-covering canter to a walk and a breather for their mounts. Now Ivy sits back, scarcely lifting the sweaty Corra’s reins for her to slow.

  “What are you looking at?” she asks Sam as Elsewhere plods up beside them with Two Pair, his pack saddle almost completely stripped.

  Sam squints up at her, his own goggles on his hat. “How are you holding up?”

  “Well, I suppose. It’s the horses I worry about.” In truth, the insides of her knees feel chafed raw and she is sore all over, though nothing compared to how she felt after riding in a sidesaddle for days.

  Sam looks at Corra, then around to Two Pair. “They have all lost weight. We should not have attempted it with so few pack animals.”

  “There were no others to be had. And Grip says we’re almost there.”

  “How does he know?” Sam looks past the singers to the distant figure. “Does this country hold discernible landmarks for you?”

  “Not in the slightest. It seems he has made the trip a few times before. How are you?”

  “Dreaming of peach pie.”

  Ivy smiles. He shot an antelope from over two hundred yards the day before, causing jubilation amongst the travelers—Ivy felt certain even Grip almost smiled—followed by feasting. Unfortunately, meat is all they have left besides a little coffee. Packing food for the horses had priority and, without a single sack brought away from Sol Valle, they have been unable to replenish. Rosalía is now unfamiliar with plant life they pass and Grip only shook his head when asked if they could eat tiny rock flowers or cactus roots. Grazing for the horses is equally nonexistent now.

  Ivy’s stomach aches with hunger as she leans forward to stroke Corra’s neck. So easy, leaning forward. If she wants to let her feet dangle from the stirrups and stretch, she does. If she wants to dismount for a consultation about edible wildflowers or a likely spot to dig for water, leaving her horse to stand untethered with her reins hanging in dirt, she does.

  The leather tassel of Luck’s chestnut mane hangs from her gun belt, while her last remaining Boston handkerchief is folded neatly at the bottom of her saddlebags. Not to remind her where she came from anymore. To remind her where she is going.

  “I am still dreaming of that cake,” Ivy says. “You and Winter are miracle workers.”

  “We are both gratified you enjoyed it.”

  “Tell me about your time on the Continent. What led you from there to here?”

  This was picking up an off-and-on conversation they had going for some days. Intermixed with discussions about libraries, music, food, and fashions they approved of versus those they did not, Ivy told him about Kitty, about Donataious’s shop, her father’s work. Sam told her he had six brothers, Sam being the second youngest in a family of all boys, and about his favorite hunter, Bayard, and leaving England to travel as a young man.

  “I stayed in Germany longest, having a good deal of extended family there,” Sam says. “My mother was already trying to arrange my marriage to a Prussian heiress by then.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “The heiress? I never even saw her, though I met her father in Berlin and I cannot say the gentleman seemed overawed by the idea. I had nothing to gain from my own family, so I had to be married off to someone who did from hers. All was transparent.”

  “Did you enjoy Berlin? I should like to go.”

  “Berlin....” Sam smiles vaguely skyward. “Berlin is the best aspects of British, American, and French society with none of the sentimentality and a good deal of added sense. It is a thinking man’s city. A remarkably enlightened and forward-looking society of philosophers and scholars and makers. Much freer in expression and conversation than the British. Much more refined in both than the Americans. I could have lived in Berlin many years and never grown tired of such a place.”

  Ivy consciously tries to avoid reading between the lines of this when he pauses and she asks, “Why did you leave?”

  “I was called away. This was only a few years ago. First for my brother’s wedding, then my mother’s health was declining. I remained with her at the manor in Blagdon as a second wedding approached. I felt crushed in that house for years. After Berlin....” He shakes his head, not looking at Ivy. “It is best, often, if one does not know what potential lies beyond immediate circumstances.” He glances at her. “If you grew up on a farm, you may marvel at a city like Santa Fé. Had I never spent a year in Berlin, I should not have so acutely felt Blagdon garrote me.

  “Now ... I never thought I could just as powerfully yearn for my home. I have been too single-minded all my life. Too caught up in pitying myself and trying to find some place better to realize I could make a go of what lies before me.”

  Ivy gazes ahead for several strides before speaking. “If we are unhappy, is it not natural to seek something besides what we have? Be that material or personal or even a matter to sort in our own minds?” She looks at Sam beside her. “One man seeks a wife and family. Another seeks academic achievement. Another longs to go home. If we did not pursue goals, happiness, what would be accom
plished in the world? If it takes places like Texas and New Mexico and Arizona to illustrate the perfect climate in Somerset, it’s no matter to beat yourself up over.”

  “I believe that is what one calls ‘learning the hard way.’” His smile is rueful.

  “What were the circumstances of your coming to—?”

  “¡Mira!” Rosalía calls out.

  Ivy and Sam both look, but Ivy sees nothing except another red rock rise and increasingly rough ground. She squeezes Corra with her knees, clicking her tongue, and they jog up to Rosalía and Melchior.

  Then she spots it: beyond uneven rocks and ridges, something far ahead to the south and west reflects the sun in faint glints and sparkles, like glass.

  Ivy catches her breath.

  “Remarkable.” Sam says beside her.

  “Who wants a bath before town?” Rosalía slides her toes back into her stirrups and the rest follow at a canter to catch up with Grip.

  Once they settle on a campsite below a rise, then climb the hill to gaze across, the lake dazzles their eyes with its gleaming surface until Ivy must pull on her sungoggles.

  “Not been swimming in a coon’s age,” Melchior says, shielding his eyes despite his own goggles. “’Less you count a flood and river crossing.”

  “We get to go first,” Rosalía says, which Ivy suspects is an instinctive reaction after growing up with four brothers.

  “Bet you don’t want to,” Melchior says, grinning. “Whoever’s first has to come back to last camp chores. Who’s second’s already done their share. Hit the sack without cooking grease in their hair and oat dust and horsehair in their eyes.”

  Ivy never realized Melchior was interested enough in cleanliness to notice cooking grease or horsehair. Even Rosalía looks thoughtful.

  North, where they stand, and east are raised and rocky, while the south and west banks stretch into relatively smooth desert. Nearest their steep bank a few clusters of baked red boulders jut from water to make tiny islands. Otherwise, the lake stretches undisturbed. Bright blue sky, bright blue lake, and red earth.