What the Long Road Demands: Sacramento Could Cost Them: 8

WHERE THE SNOW CLAIMS GROUND BOOK EIGHT Elias Mercer is a fugitive now, walking because his leg will not carry him any faster, on a crutch someone else built while he was too far gone with fever to remember it. Two days of standing trial and two more in a jolting transfer wagon left him hollowed out before Netsuwa Blackwater ever cut him loose from it. Captain Redd called what she did aiding the escape of a federal prisoner, and meant it as a threat. She heard it as a fact she had already chosen to live with. Behind them, the mountains they escaped are burned, flooded, and finally quiet. Ahead of them is Sacramento, and the only proof that any of it, the falsified survey, the desecrated burial ground, the fraud dressed up as law, was ever more than a surveyor's word against a syndicate's, is somewhere on the road with a man named Purdy who has not been seen since he rode off alone to carry it there. Howsa's arm is freshly broken. Kosa's hand may never close around anything again. Whitfield Coe, unraveled and finally willing to say aloud the ugly truth of what he has always known, is still out there, and he has stopped trying to win this with paperwork. What is left of the group, a fugitive surveyor, a Washoe woman the territory has put a price on, her brother, a grieving trader, and a haunted man who spent seasons watching over a grave he helped hide, has to reach a city that has never heard their names except as a warrant, carrying nothing but each other and the hope that a man they cannot find is still carrying the rest. Redd has not decided whose side he is on. Coe has stopped pretending he needs one. How much of what they are walking toward will still be standing when they get there?