“I should like to shoot Gabriel,” she said, and stared some more, her lips pressed tight together. Then she shook her head and got unsteadily to her feet. “But thee is right. I won’t.”

She drew a deep breath and reached for the bridle in his hand.

“But I must have my girls with me now. Will thee help me to go and get them?”

The light was fading fast and a wind with the cold breath of night came into the barn and stirred the scattered bits of straw along the packed-dirt floor. Ian merely nodded and bent to heave the saddle up.

“Go and fetch your cloak, lass. Ye’ll freeze, else.”

IT WAS LESS than an hour’s ride to the inn, but the sun had gone down, swallowed in a sudden bank of cloud that rose up from the trees like black bread rising. It began to snow.

Ian had put Silvia up before him, saying that she might become tangled in the rope leading their second horse. So much was true. It was more true that while she was no longer starved, she was still thin as an icicle and just as brittle, and he felt an urgent need to shelter her.

The wind had dropped, thank God, but the snow fell thick and silent, muting all sound and burdening the branches of the pines and fir trees. It was a good road, but he still pushed Henry a little, lest it disappear under the horse’s hooves. This wasn’t his country, and he didn’t want to go astray and end up spending the night in the woods with Silvia.

“I met Gabriel in Philadelphia,” she said, unexpectedly. “My parents were still alive then, and we belonged to the same meeting. They’d chosen someone else for me—a blacksmith who owned his own forge. Older than I by ten years, well established. A kind man,” she added after a pause. “With a house and property. Gabriel was a clerk, my own age, and earned barely enough to keep himself, let alone a wife.”

“Well, I was nay more than an Indian scout when I met Rachel,” Ian said, watching Henry’s misty breath flow back over the horse’s neck as they rode. “And a man of blood, forbye. I did own some land, though,” he added fairly.

“And thee had a family,” she said softly. “My parents both died within the year—smallpox—and there was no one left but me; I had no brothers or sisters. Gabriel had broken with his people when he became a Friend—he wasn’t born to it, as I was.”

“So ye only had each other, then.”

“We did,” she said, and fell silent for a bit.

“And then we had the girls,” she said, so softly that he barely heard her. “And we were happy.”