She touched the pocket near her breast and felt the small shape of the carved bird Grey Horse had given her, smooth under her fingertips. The bone warmed quickly to her palm, as if it had its own pulse. “Please,” she whispered to no one and everything. She pushed the bird back into the pocket and moved.
?
The cottonwoods gave way to a stand of scrub oak and then to open grass that flashed pale under a rasping wind. She kept low, the way she had seen Grey Horse move when he did not want to be seen. A cloud went over the stars and the world went black; when it passed, the Big Dipper swung quiet and cold above the dark line of the horizon. She searched for the sky, the way sailors in books found their way, and found what she needed: the North Star, steady and unblinking.North. Away from the house. Away from him.
The Kiowa camp had been north of Thomas’s ranch. The creek that ran past Thomas’s place angled toward the broader water of the river. The river meant covering high grass, the sound of water to drown her breath and mask her steps. It meant safetyifsafety existed.
She followed the creek to the river, the followed the river itself keeping to the thinner shadows, pausing often to listen. Twice she heard Thomas again, slower now, panting, calling her name with a tone that made her skin crawl. Once she thought she heard a second set of steps—lighter, measured—as if someone with patience were also in the dark. She froze, heart loud, and waited. The sound faded. A night bird called and was silent.
Her bare foot found a patch of sand, soft and cold. The river widened here, braiding into shallow channels that tugged at her calves. She waded, skirt gathered, teeth clenched. The bandageon her heel soaked through and loosened. She knotted it tighter and kept going.
Something moved in the water beside her, the sinuous ripple of a snake. She choked on her breath and stood like a fence post until the slip of darkness slid away into deeper flow. When she could move again, her legs shook so hard she thought they would fold under her.
She went on.
By the time the waters deepened again, her limbs ached and her breath rasped. The river’s broad body whispered against the bank, dark as iron. Cottonwoods massed like watchmen along the edge, their leaves shivering in a wind that smelled of mud and fish and cold. A drift of cloud crossed the moon, softening the world’s edges.
She sank to her knees at the water’s rim and cupped handfuls to her mouth. It tasted like stone. She drank too fast, coughed, and drank again more carefully, feeling life slide back into a throat scraped raw by fear.
The mud sucked at her toes. She had to move again. She knew that as surely as she knew her own name but the brief stillness was a mercy that made her eyes sting with sudden tears. She pressed the heel of her palm to her mouth and swallowed them down.
Not here,she told herself.Not now.
She filled her lungs once more and then slid sideways into the grass bed that fringed the bank. The stalks brushed her shoulders, whispering. She pushed through, choosing a place where the reeds bent over and made a pocket low to the ground—a place a deer might use to bed. She curled into it, drawing her skirts around her, breathing in the damp green smell until it became a kind of sheltering cloak.
She lay with her head on her arm and listened to the river talk.
?
Time loosened. Minutes pooled and ran, then stalled, then leaped forward without warning. Sleep came in bits and pieces and left her raw. She dreamed.
She stood again in the Kiowa camp in her mind, firelight dancing on hides, women’s hands moving in rhythm, children’s heads bowed in sleep. Grey Horse bending close, his hands steady in her hair.Braiding joins the past, present, and the future like us.The memory of the weight of a braid pressing against her back sweetly. Blindly, she reached for it before remembering it was gone. Her fingers found only the damp tangle of her own loose hair, a cold reminder of what had been taken from her.
Pale Moon’s voice slid into the dream like a blade:His heart belongs to the past. If freed, it will be mine.The words bit and bit until Violet pressed her knuckles to her mouth to stop their edge as the river whisperedhush, hush, a mother’s shushing.
She shifted and a reed’s dry head cut into her cheek. The pain pulled her fully into the present again. Somewhere upstream an owl called, low and plush; somewhere closer the stalks of grass ticked with the movement of small night things. Her heel throbbed in time with her heart.
She once again felt for the little carved bird in her pocket, slid it into her hand, and held it in both palms as if it could warm her. She cradled it beneath her chin and breathed around it as if it could lend her something steady.
“Please,” she whispered again to the leaves, to the water, to the bone and the air. “Please.”
The river did not stop for prayers. It went on, faithful to its own long promise.
?
A light moved along the far bank—a slow, bobbing glow. Lantern. She flattened herself on the high grass, making her body small. The light drifted, paused, drifted again. A man’s voice carried in thin scraps that the water shredded: “…damn… ungrateful… mine…” The sound had the shape of Thomas’s anger even when the words were lost.
A second glow came briefly and then winked out. The flare of a match? Another voice, lower, not Thomas. She couldn’t catch the words. She dared not raise her head.
The lantern’s bright smear slid past and dwindled. Night fell back into itself. She waited until the river returned to its usual mutter before she let her lungs fill fully again.
She did not sleep after that, but she rested—something like rest, anyway—counting breaths and stars and the beats of her heart. When the sky at last paled, it did so slowly, a gray lifting that turned the reeds from black cuts to green blades.
Dawn smelled of cold ash and damp earth and the faintest sweetness of crushed weeds.
She unfolded her cramped limbs and scooted from the pocket of grass, each movement careful. The bandage on her heel had come loose again during the night; when she pulled the fabric away, the gash smiled red and ugly. She rinsed it in the river until the sting steadied into a dull ache, then retied the cloth more snugly.
Her hair hung long and snarled down her back. She smoothed it as best she could with wet fingers, the gesture half practical, half an urgent superstition: as if order on her head might call order to the rest of her.
