Two Kinds of Runaway

1852. The caravan left before dawn, the way it always did, because the desert punished anyone foolish enough to trust it in daylight, and Josiah Freeman had learned in the six months since his manumission papers were signed that trust, generally, was a luxury better rationed carefully.

He'd hired on as a blacksmith three caravans back, the only trade that traveled well and paid better than most men were willing to admit a freed man deserved. He kept his papers folded inside his boot, not his coat, because coats got searched and boots — so far — had not.

The girl joined the caravan at the last waystation before the true desert began, dressed like a boy, riding like she'd learned on horses far finer than the caravan's mules, and carrying exactly one bag that she would not, under any circumstances, allow anyone else to carry for her.

"You're not a boy," Josiah said, the second night, when she'd settled too close to his fire out of the mistaken belief that a blacksmith's fire was the least likely to draw questions.

"Neither are you free," she said, which was either a very good deflection or an alarmingly specific accusation, and he found himself liking her immediately for the nerve of it either way.

Her name, she told him eventually, once three more nights of shared fire had earned a measure of trust neither of them handed out easily, was Eleanor Vance — heiress, by rights, to a Charleston shipping fortune she had walked away from four months ago with one bag and a determination that Josiah recognized instantly, because he'd worn the same look himself, six months and one signed paper ago.

"Where are you running to?" he asked.

"West," she said. "As far as west goes. You?"

"Same direction," Josiah said. "Different reasons. Might be the only two on this whole caravan running toward something instead of away from it."

Eleanor considered that for a long moment, watching the fire, and for the first time since the waystation, something in her shoulders loosened.

"Then I suppose," she said, "we'd better travel together. This road doesn't much care whose reasons we're carrying, so long as we're carrying them in the same direction."