Juniper's Arc

Chapter 5 of 7

They rode out at sunrise. The hunter sat his horse stiff on the left side, his bad knee held straight against the stirrup. Juniper watched him without watching him. By the second hour he was shifting his weight every few minutes. By midday he asked her to stop. He climbed down at a flat place where short grass ran to the horizon and rubbed the knee with both hands. He said the cold made it lock. She gave him water and did not say what she was counting. Four days to the court. Three nights under the moon. The moon would be full on the second night. They lost ground all afternoon. She saw the proof of it later, when she walked back along their own trail to check the picket line. A dark walking staff stood planted in the dirt where the hunter had stopped to lean. Then another, twenty paces on. Then a third. He had cut them from deadwood that morning and set them down whenever the knee gave. She counted seven before she turned back. A fit man crossed this range in three days. They would need five. Dark caught them on open ground. They made camp under a dead tree that stood alone on a low rise, its bare branches spread wide against the sky. Juniper did not like the tree. It threw no shade and gave no cover, and the moon, when it rose, sat caught in the branches like something snared. She pitched the canvas tent close against the trunk where the shadow was thickest. The hunter crawled in without eating. She sat outside with her back to a root and watched the range. The moon was one night short of full. Tomorrow it would be full, and they would still be two days from the court, and any hunter within a mile of open country would be moving by its light. She woke him before dawn. She told him she would ride ahead at first light and bring back a cart from the nearest waystation, and he would wait at the next creek with the horses. He shook his head. He said a sworn witness who arrived alone in a cart was a witness the clerks would question. He said they went in together or his word was worth nothing. He pulled himself up on one of his cut staves and limped to the picket line. She watched him tighten the girth one-handed and knew he was right. She mounted and turned south. They rode through the full moon that night and the next, and the hunter did not ask to stop, and on the fifth morning they came down out of the range with the court road in sight and his knee swollen to twice its size. He was still in the saddle. He could still speak. That was all she had needed to bring him.