Across the fire, Pale Moon watched, eyes steady. She lifted two fingers to her brow and let them fall to her heart a spare, beautiful motion Violet felt as blessing and boundary both.
The wind came up at last, a light breath off the river that carried away smoke and left the stars sharper. The camp settled into its mending. By the time the moon had walked a hand’s span, the circle was wholly itself again.
Violet stood at the flap of Grey Horse’s tepee and looked out on the place she had dreamed before she knew it, the place where she had minutes earlier killed to live and been accepted for it, the place where a man’s hand could rest at her back without claiming her for a thing. She felt tired, and full, and more herself than she had ever been.
Behind her, Grey Horse lifted the tepee flap wider for her to enter, a courtesy and a welcome. Beside her, Ezra tipped his hat like a gentleman in a Boston parlor and then went to help with the ponies.
“Come,” Grey Horse said, not commanding, inviting.
She stepped inside. The rest of the night would be for quiet and the slow work of laying down fear. Tomorrow would bring a new day. But tonight, the circle had held.
Outside, the river went on with its patient whispering. It sounded, to Violet’s ear, like a long future being spoken aloud.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The River’s Choice
Dawn came in the color of ash and rose, the prairie slow to shrug off night. Smoke drifted in loose ribbons over the camp, touched by the first light so it looked almost beautiful, as if the battle had been a fever dream the earth now exhaled. But the ground remembered. Scuffed soil told where men had fallen, where the far edge of Violet’s fear had burned away and left something hard and bright in its place.
The camp woke heavy but unbroken. Children peered from behind tepee skins with the solemn gravity of owls. Old women moved like shadows, silent and necessary, laying fresh wood, striking sparks, coaxing the day to warm. Dogs nosed through trampled grass, yipping and then falling quiet, as if reminded. Everywhere Violet looked, they began their work: fires rekindled, kettles set to boil, blood lifted from hands with river water in bowls. The sun raised itself, indifferent and reliable.
Red Willow called to her, and Violet went without thinking, as if she had always gone when called, as if this day belonged to the old woman and the old woman to the day. Red Willow had scrubbed the inside of a pot with sand until it shone, then poured into it a measure of water that steamed faintly in the chill. She mixed herbs, ash, and fat into the pot, the smell strong. “Hold him steady,” she said, and Violet held a young brave’s arm whilethe old woman placed a fresh dressing onto his wound, lifting her eyes only once to nod her thanks.
Word of Thomas’s death moved through the camp with no one’s voice attached. Violet felt it as pressure more than sound, like the way river current held a body steady even as it passed. A few of the women looked at her differently: measure, then recognition, then something like respect. None of them spoke to it. They didn’t need to. Her hands spoke for her: rinsing a blood-darkened cloth in a bowl and wringing it clean, standing beside Red Willow when she treated a warrior with an injured thigh, the young man clamping his jaw and refusing to call out.
A low wind ran through the camp, stirring the fringe of tepee covers, lifting the torn ends of rawhide thongs. Somewhere a pony nickered, then another answered. The smell of singed hair, tanned hide, smoke, and boiled bone mixed together into a kind of truth: she had survived.
?
Ezra came toward Grey Horse from the line of ponies, his hat in his hands, his shirt dark where sweat had dried and gone to salt. He had slept an hour, maybe less, propped against a saddle tree. A bruise was blooming at his cheekbone, the color of plums. He would carry it until the bruising moved on and left only a memory of being hit, which is to say, for a long time.
Grey Horse stood with his bow unstrung, the rawhide cord looped over his thumb. He watched the open country as a man watches a river to know what it will do before it knows it. Ezra stopped beside him, close enough to share breath when the wind fell away.
“Word will spread,” Ezra said quietly. “They’ll speak of this at the fort. If not from settlers riding through, then from soldiers ranging. Might be they come to see who did the killing.”
Grey Horse did not answer at once. He looked past Ezra at the sun making silver of the distant water. “We did not begin the fight,” he said finally. “But when it comes, we will stand where we stand.”
Ezra’s mouth made a shape between a smile and grief. “I know it.”
“Your people follow the road,” Grey Horse added, glancing at the rutted trace that led away toward the trading houses, toward talk, toward paperwork that could reorder the world by the stroke of a pen. “It is easy for them to bring more.”
“It is easy,” Ezra conceded. “But not quick. Not if I can help it. I can ride to the settlement. Speak a little calm. I’ll say the talk that keeps fools home.”
Grey Horse considered him, the man who had slept among them and woken to stand with them—who had put his own body where his words lived. “You could go,” he said. “Or you could stay now and sharpen iron, and teach the boys to lay a gun true.”
Ezra rubbed the back of his neck, weighing the two roads. “I’ll stay a while,” he said at last. “Long as I’m wanted. Long as I can do more good here than there.” He looked back toward the cluster of tepees. “Long as she’s safe.” He did not indicate Violet by name, did not need to. His gaze had that softness a brother’s might carry.
Grey Horse’s mouth moved again—less than a smile, more than nothing. “Then stay. We will need eyes that read their maps and ears that hear their lies.”
A crow flapped black against the pale sky, mocking or blessing, it was hard to tell.
?
When her hands began to shake, she took it as a sign to step back from the work. The tremor came first to her fingers and then toher breath, as if the two had been tied together since birth and had always planned to fail her as a pair. Red Willow noticed and pushed a warm cup into her hands. The steam smelled faintly bitter, like something scraped from a tree in winter and saved for the day it would be needed.
“Drink,” the old woman said. “Sit.”
Violet sat on a folded robe near the entrance of Red Willow’s tepee. The deerskin breathed with the slow rise and fall of the morning wind, and in the breathing of the tepee she felt her own ribs begin to move again.
Thomas.
