Page 167 of The Fire Line

“Your side.”

“Got hit.”

“When?”

“Tree.”

Jay stared at him. “You didn’t say anything.”

“Was busy.”

Despite the exhaustion, Jay’s expression sharpened. “That is a terrible standard.”

Harris almost smiled. “Been a bad twenty-four hours for standards.”

Jay looked as though he wanted to argue further, but another cough took the energy out of him. Harris waited until it passed before they started moving again.

They tried the radio every fifteen minutes and got nothing but static.

The Forest Service road should have been less than two miles east, but the fire had erased familiar markers and dropped enough timber that Harris repeatedly had to alter their course. Each detour lengthened the distance. Jay’s breathing worsened whenever the ground climbed, and Harris began measuring the route by how many steps he managed before the next cough.

Around eight, the smoke thickened again. Jay pulled his collar over his mouth and kept walking, while Harris checked him more often than he intended.

After the fourth or fifth time, Jay caught him.

“I’m still here.”

“I know.”

The answer came rougher than Harris wanted.

Yesterday, the words had meant proof. Today they felt like something Harris needed to keep hearing.

Nearly an hour later, a horse called somewhere beyond the smoke. Harris stopped so abruptly Jay nearly walked into him and stood listening until the sound came again, faint but unmistakable. Rain. He was moving before he consciously decided to, following the call through scorched timber until they emerged into one of the surviving sections of the old burn.

Rain stood near the far edge, soot streaking her pale coat and several inches of mane singed rough along one side. Red was farther back near a slab of granite. The sight of both horses standing hit Harris hard enough that he stopped for a second before Rain saw him and started toward him. He met her halfway and put both hands against her face, barely registering the pain that tore through his burned palm when she pushed her nose into his chest.

“Hey, pretty girl.”

His voice didn’t work properly. Harris closed his eyes and rested his forehead against hers, remembering how much force it had taken to strike her and send her away when every instinct in him had wanted to follow. He had promised Nell he would keep Rain safe, and last night keeping that promise had required him to do the one thing that felt most like breaking it: let her go somewhere he couldn’t protect her. Rain had known what to do without him. She had survived.

When Harris finally lifted his head, Jay was already beside Red. He had crouched near the gelding’s left hind leg, and something about the way he was studying it made Harris cross the distance quickly.

“What?”

“His leg.”

Now that Harris was looking for it, Red was favoring the left hind badly. The leg had swollen from the hock down, and a long raw strip ran along the outside where hair and skin had been scraped away, with dried blood darkening the lower edge. Harris ran a careful hand down the uninjured side, then asked him to take a few steps. Red obeyed but shortened the stride sharply and shifted weight off the leg as soon as he stopped.

Jay watched Harris’s face. “How bad?”

“Could be worse.”

“That answer has lost considerable value since yesterday.”

Nothing felt obviously broken, and Red could walk, but there was enough swelling and pain that Harris wasn’t willing to put a rider on him. “He can follow. Nobody’s getting on him.”

Jay glanced toward Rain and then back at Harris, already looking suspicious.