“Every settler has cause to believe something,” the officer said. “We’ve seen no white women with the parties we’ve shadowed. Just camp sign. Cold sign.”
Ezra said mildly, “Found tracks fresh this morning on the far bank. Light feet. Small. Not soldier-sized. And a pearl button.”
“What you going to do?” the lieutenant snapped. “Waltz into an Indian camp and ask nicely? You’ll die for the privilege. I won’t spend men on your private errand.”
“I didn’t ask for your men,” Thomas said.
“You didn’t have to,” the officer muttered. He looked at Ezra. “Keep clear of our patrols. Hear a bugle, you turn your mounts. That’s an order whether you recognize it or not.”
He wheeled away. The dust of him stuck in Thomas’s throat.
Ezra spat dryly and watched them go. “He’s not wrong about dying,” he said. “He’s just not right about everything else.”
“I didn’t come for a sermon,” Thomas said. “I came for direction.” He pointed. “Let’s go.”
The current shoved hard against their legs as they entered the shallow water, not much more than belly-deep to the horses, but Ezra kept his mount steady, eyes scanning the far bank where willows leaned low, while Thomas urged his bay through with a firm hand. Mud sucked at the horses’ hooves, water slapping cold against the men’s boots. On the far side the prints showed clear—told a story of ponies scrambling up the bank in a rush, moccasins sliding in the wet clay, a woman’s smaller step dragged by the weight of skirts. Thomas studied them a moment, his face set. “They crossed here,” he said flatly. “With her.” He urged the bay onward to the shore.
?
Afternoon burned itself dull. The land slid from grass to sand to clay. They found a skirt hem torn as if caught and wrenched free, calico pale with a sprig of green. Thomas touched the edge with the back of his knuckles. It smelled faintly of smokeand something once floral, long gone to dust. He folded the scrap and put it with the button and the letter. Not keepsakes; exhibits.
“Could be any woman,” Ezra said. No gentling in it, just truth.
“Or could be mine,” Thomas answered. “Which is the only portion of the truth I am equipped to spend.”
“You talk like a storekeeper,” Ezra said.
“I am one,” Thomas said. “I store what’s mine. I keep tally. I collect.”
At a willow hollow they found the ghost of cooking—stones blackened, bones cracked to suck marrow, a place where a child had played with a stick in mud and cut a crooked pattern. Thomas stared at the small marks too long, then shook off the useless drag in his chest. He had no interest in the innocent habits of other men’s children.
They camped in the lee of a fallen sycamore and ate with the muteness of men who preferred food to talk. Thomas raged silently at the thought that Violet had been stolen from him. But he gazed into the hot coals and said nothing. He had learned long ago that heat, held tight, made iron workable. He would fault no forge that burned hot.
He slept, woke, slept again, the night broken into uneven measures. In one waking he took out the letter, not to read it, but to feel the scratch of paper against his fingers. He reminded himself of the sequence: he had asked, she had agreed, he had paid, she had set out, something had intervened. He would now intervene harder.
Chapter Fourteen: Braids in the Moonlight
The battle smoke had thinned, yet the smell of it clung to everything—her dress, her hair, the very skin of her hands. Even now, as dusk settled along the river and the water darkened to bronze, she could not escape it. The cries of the wounded still echoed in her ears, the shouts, the gunfire, the rush of hooves.
The new camp was different. Fires were smaller, voices hushed, children held close. Women worked steadily, cutting strips of hide for bandages, fetching water, laying out food for those who could still eat. Death had passed through them, leaving pain and silence in its wake.
Grey Horse sat not far from her, his back against a cottonwood trunk. His arm was bound with hide, dark with blood that had seeped through. His face was streaked with soot, and his hair fell unbound about his shoulders. He had not spoken much since they returned. He had given his orders, seen to the dead, and then gone still, as though all the fire that had carried him through battle had drained into the earth.
Violet could not bear the sight of him slumped that way. Something within her rebelled at it: the thought of him strong one moment and then diminished, alone, the next. She rose and crossed to him.
“Let me see your wound,” she said softly.
His eyes lifted, sharp at first, then weary. “Not bad.”
“I’ll decide that.” She knelt beside him and touched the edge of the hide binding. “Please.”
For a long moment he did not move. Then, with a quiet breath, he extended his arm.
?
The cut was deep but clean, a bullet graze across the muscle of his shoulder. She unwound the hide carefully, her fingers trembling. The blood was tacky, dried in places but still fresh at the center.
He watched her as she worked, his gaze steady, unblinking. She tried to ignore it, tried to focus on the wound, on tearing strips of her underskirt for bandages, on rinsing the blood away with water from the river. But she felt the weight of his eyes like heat across her skin.
