“We’ll meet here in one month, now don’t forget me, Billy,” Cecily said as she rode away.

“I won’t forget you, Snow,” Billy promised.

“Snow?” I asked, when the woman was out of hearing.

“She said to call her that—it’s like a pet name,” Billy said.

PART V

Let Me Fall

1.

We had scarcely ridden a mile before Billy Bone began to seem like himself again. Cecily’s blushing light faded, and the boy who had seemed to be only a contour became solid again.

“Billy, are we going any place in particular?” I asked. We were riding northwest.

“Just to the north pole,” he said, laughing his familiar childish laugh.

“Oh, is that all?” I said, going along with the joke.

“I’m going to kill Isinglass’s whelps,” he said a moment later. “Snow told me where to find them.”

“Billy, they had nothing to do with Joe’s death,” I said, assuming—incorrectly—that he was determined to enact a terrible revenge for Joe Lovelady’s murder.

He looked at me as if I had gone completely daft.

“Who said anything about Joe?” he asked.

“But if it’s not revenge, why kill them?” I asked. “From what I hear, they lead miserable lives as it is.”

“Then maybe they’ll like dying,” he said, turning a stony face to me.

I shut up, and we rode many miles without a word being exchanged. Of course, Billy always turned sulky at the merest hint that something as impractical as morality applied to anything he did or might do—particularly killing.

At that point, though, it was not the fact that he contemplated killing Isinglass’s half-English children that shocked me most: it was the realization that he was not thinking of his dead friend. Revenge I can understand—it was the custom of the country, perhaps the custom of the race.

But Billy was shedding no tears for Joe Lovelady, perhaps the truest friend he ever had. The murders he contemplated sprang from quite a different motive, and I found out what that motive was that night, as we sat around a campfire eating the three or four biscuits Cecily had generously left us as provisions for our trip.

Billy could never hold any mood long—he seemed to be in the grip of one of his terrible headaches, and he just looked forlorn and depressed.

“I wish Snow could have come,” he said. “A whole month is a long time. She might forget me completely in a whole month.”

“Doubtful,” I said. “If ever there was a woman of firm purpose, she’s it.”

“I got a headache,” he admitted. “Do you have any more of those general pills?”

I did have a few, pilfered from the well-stocked medicine cabinet at Winds’ Hill.