“You fought as though nothing could touch you,” she whispered.
Grey Horse tilted his head slightly. “But it touched me.”
“Yes,” she said, dabbing at the wound, her throat tight. “And it could have been worse.”
He did not flinch when she pressed the cloth to the gash. He did not draw away when she bound it tight. He only studied her face, as if trying to read something written there.
When she was finished, she sat back on her heels, her hands stained with his blood. “There,” she said. “That will hold.”
He lifted his arm, tested it, then nodded once. “Good.”
But still he did not look away.
?
Later, as the fire burned low and the river whispered in thedarkness, Violet sat with him again. He had said little, yet she felt no need for words. The silence between them was not empty; it was full, like the space between drumbeats.
She gazed across the camp. The shapes of tepees stood against the sky, pale in the moonlight. Women moved in quiet rhythm, children curled into sleep. The scene was uncannily familiar.
Her breath caught.
She had dreamed of this place.
Not exactly—but close enough that her skin prickled. In Boston, she had woken from dreams of wide camps, of fires glowing like scattered stars, of dark-haired figures moving in and out of shadow. Dreams she had told herself were nonsense, the inventions of a childish mind.
But now here she was, living them. The smells, the sounds, even the shapes of the hides in the firelight—all matched the phantoms of her sleep. It felt as though her life had walked into the path of her dreams and made them flesh.
She closed her eyes, dizzy with it.
Grey Horse’s voice came quiet. “What do you see?”
She opened her eyes again. “Dreams,” she murmured. “Dreams I thought could not be real. But they are. I’ve stood here before … in my sleep. In my sleep, I saw this camp.”
He nodded, as though it did not surprise him. “Your spirit walked ahead of you. Now your body has caught it.”
The thought unsettled her and steadied her all at once.
“Come,” he said and she got to her feet and followed him. They made their way through trees, shrubs, and grass, all bathed in moonlight until they reached the riverbank.
“Sit,” he said, laying down a piece of deer hide he had brought with him. She obeyed, wondering what he wanted, but not fearing him at all. He was the one who had promised to protecther and she believed him. When he dropped to his knees behind her, she felt no alarm.
As they sat by the river, under the light of the full moon, he quietly began working her hair with his strong hands, carefully overlapping the strands to form a thick braid. “My mother did this for my sisters. Mother said braiding joins the past, present, and the future like us.”
Violet did not move, hardly dared breathe. The touch of his hands in her hair was unlike anything she had ever felt. Firm, sure, yet careful, as though each strand mattered. His voice was low, his breath warm against her ear.
When he finished, the braid hung heavy down her back, bound with a strip of hide. She lifted her hand to it, her fingers trembling.
“No one has ever done this for me,” she whispered.
Grey Horse’s eyes were dark, unreadable. “Now I have.”
She wanted to speak, to tell him how much what he’d done had meant to her, but no words came. Instead, the river flowed on, carrying their silence like a secret.
?
That night as she lay in his tepee, listening to the steady whisper of voices outside, her mind would not be quiet. She thought of Grey Horse’s eyes on hers as she’d tended his wound, of his hands on her hair, of the braid in her hair.
He had promised her safety, and in the thick of battle he had kept that promise. But it was not safety alone she felt now. It was tethering, binding, as though something unseen had wrapped around her heart and drawn it close to his.
