She took the water with both hands, drank, and returned it with thanks that felt too small and still somehow exact.
Then the crowd moved like wind in wheat, parting without obvious reason. Pale Moon came out of the light like her name, hair a black river down her back, eyes like polished stone. Beauty could make a person cruel, Violet thought; and yet the sorrow in Pale Moon’s mouth was the kind that did not need cruelty to exist.
They stopped a breath apart. The camp listened with its whole body.
“I do not want to steal,” Violet said softly, because anything else would be cowardice.
Pale Moon’s chin lifted the slightest. When she spoke, the words were English arranged like Kiowa, careful and beautiful. “You cannot steal what one cannot hold,” she said. “A heart is a river.It runs.” Her eyes slid to Grey Horse and then back. “But rivers choose their bed.”
Violet’s throat thickened. “If yours is the shore he chooses,” she managed, “I will not fight you.”
Pale Moon’s eyes flared—not in anger, but in a kind of respect she had not expected. “We will see,” Pale Moon said, and stepped aside, not yielding, not conceding, simply making space. It was more gift than Violet had imagined she would be given.
Grey Horse spoke then to the older man, voice low: report, request, promise. Ezra stayed a respectful half-step behind, hands loose, gaze keen but without threat. A boy darted forward to touch Violet’s skirt and then darted back again when his mother hissed. The normalcy of that small boldness steadied Violet more than a sermon could have.
Grey Horse turned and motioned. “Rest,” he told her. “Eat. Sleep. You are in the circle.”
Violet’s legs went to cotton. She sat on a low stool offered by a woman with frank eyes and let a bowl of stew warm her hands and mouth. It tasted of meat, of corn, of smoke, and of a life she could almost name.
“Thank you,” she whispered to the woman and to the day, to the smoke going straight up and the braid lying against her spine.
Across the circle, Pale Moon was speaking to a knot of women, their faces alert, curious, cool. She glanced over once, not unkindly, then lifted her chin in a way that said:We will not pretend this is simple.
Violet breathed and let food and the future sit next to each other without fighting.
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Thomas and his men found smoke midmorning. Rafe pointedwith his chin. “There.”
Thomas tasted copper at the back of his throat that had nothing to do with a busted lip. “Move.”
They kept the river between, dogging the far bank until a shallow place let them cross. Cole, Rafe, and Joe wanted to hang back first and watch. Thomas wanted to charge immediately. They met in the middle, crawling through grass and willow until they could see the camp’s hides ghosting white through leaf-cut light.
“There,” Rafe breathed. “Ain’t that her?”
Violet sat in a circle of the tribe’s women like a piece of sky that had fallen and been set on a stool—hair braided, face cleaner than she had any right to be after running from him, a bowl in her hands like she belonged.
Thomas’s nails bit his palms until he felt skin break. Heat rose in him like a bad fever. The savage stood just behind her—Grey Horse—loose and easy like a man who believed the world would keep its promises.
“I’ll get her,” Thomas whispered.
Cole caught his arm. “Careful or you’ll get dead.”
“Four men with guns can make plenty of trouble,” Rafe said, hungry for it, but his voice had the sense to be low.
“Right,” Joe drawled.
“We wait for dark,” Cole said.
“Dark?” Thomas repeated, his breath ragged. Could he wait that long to claim what was his? He sighed. It was safest. Wait until dark and ambush her and her red-skin. Thomas dragged his tired eyes across the camp. He would have patience.
“Fine,” he said. “We wait.” Thomas’s mouth twisted. “But keep eyes on them to see where he takes her.”
Cole nodded and hunkered down, Rafe and Joe beside him.
Thomas watched Violet and Grey Horse. He let his anger coil in his gut, a hot iron he’d hammer later “Hide with your savages,” he whispered under his breath, more promise than statement. “I’ll bring you home. I’ll bring you to heel.”
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