Violet ate until she remembered fullness as wind moved the camp, not like a thing pushed, but like a thing breathing. Children returned to play. Work picked back up where it had been set down. Grey Horse conferred with the older man, Ezra at his side, answering any questions that came at him in careful English.
Violet let herself be led to a shade mat. A woman with frank eyes—she learned her name was Red Willow—brought a basin and a twist of clean cloth. “Foot,” Red Willow said, nodding with a sternness that made Violet smile despite herself.
Red Willow unwound the bandage and clucked at the wound. She cleaned it with a gentleness that had strength in it and bound it with a poultice that smelled of crushed leaves and bitter bark.
“Thank you,” Violet said again, realizing how small and necessary those two words were becoming in her mouth.
She lay back, braid resting in a warm line down her spine, and watched the day. Guilt knocked once at her ribs, old and familiar. She marked it, opened the door, let it look, then sent it back outside. The promise she had given Thomas had been written under a false sky. The one she was making now needed no paper.
She closed her eyes for a moment, not to sleep, but to set her spirit in the shape of a woman who would not run again unless running was the bravest thing a body could do.
When she opened them, Grey Horse sat near. He tilted his head the way he did when he saw a hawk before anyone else.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Wind changes,” he said. “Men smell it when they hunt.”
She felt it then: a knife-fine shift in the air, the way a day tilts before a storm. Ezra must have felt it, too; he stood and checked his rifle by long habit.
Pale Moon passed within arm’s reach carrying a bundle of peeled willow. Their eyes met. Pale Moon did not smile, but she did not look away. “Do not sleep too deep,” she said in her careful English. “Your mistakes are not finished with you.”
“I know,” Violet said.
Pale Moon inclined her head the smallest amount. In agreement or in warning, it was hard to tell. Maybe both.
The river shone. The smoke climbed. Violet sat up and let her palm rest for a breath over the braid at the back of her neck, feeling the small, ordinary miracle of being held together by a thing made strand by strand.
“Let them come,” she said softly, not to boast, but to say to herself what kind of woman she would be.
Grey Horse’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. “We will be ready.”
Ezra’s eyes cut to the trees. “Aye,” he said. “Ready and ruthless, if need be.”
The wind shifted again, bringing with it a thin taste of dust and men and the far-off clink of something metal. The camp moved as one thing without panic, like a flock on the rise.
Violet stood. The day leaned into its next shape.
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Night Comes
Night came mild and windless, a black bowl set with quiet stars. The camp breathed into the dark. Fires narrowed to embers, the last talk dwindled, children sagged against their mothers, and ponies hobbled near the river hung their heads low. The day had worn Violet to soft edges, but something in her would not uncoil. She lay in Grey Horse’s tepee with her palm over the carved bird he had given her, listening to the sounds of night-time around her: a child turning into its sleep, a stick settling in a fire’s embers with the faintest sigh.
Grey Horse lay near, not touching, but present in a way that steadied the air. Once in the dark he reached and found her hand. They said nothing. The warmth where their palms met told all that mattered.
Outside, Ezra kept watch. She heard his step pass though the tepees shadows, soft, unthreatening, yet aware as a fox. Somewhere beyond, Pale Moon’s tepee sat in its place among the circles. Violet had seen her at sundown carrying willow bark, her hands sure, face unreadable. In another life, Violet might have hated her. Tonight, she felt only the ache of being measured by a woman whose right to measure had been given by time and tradition.
Her breath slowed. She let the sound of the river sew itself through her chest. Sleep came the way a hawk drops through blue, silent and complete.
?
The first crack was not a crack at all but a tearing of night—one shot, then two, then a ragged ripping that made Violet bolt upright before her mind had words. Grey Horse was already moving. He rolled to his knees and passed her the small bundle he had set near the door before sleeping, a battered striking pistol wrapped in hide.
“Stay behind me,” he said. His voice was the low certainty she knew, but there was iron in it now. “If I say run, run to the river and into the brush.”
She swallowed and nodded. The tepees breathed in and out with the air.
Another shot slammed the dark. Ezra shouted something, his voice edged with a fear that men like him do not waste unless it is fully earned. Thomas’s shouted command cut through the camp like a whip. “Kill them all!”
Violet’s stomach went cold and steady. “Thomas,” she whispered.
