The name surfaced like a drowned thing, reluctant, rolling onto its back to show her the face she had known and the face she had not. She could still feel the weight of the gun in her palm, the smoothness of the handle in her fingers. A small thing, in the scale of the world. Yet when she had used it to stop him, the world had changed its shape around her and would never again fit in the old frame.
She tried to think of him as Boston required: a man with ambition, a man who had written letters that made promises as easily as steam makes a whistle shriek. But all she could recall was the unshaven jaw, the cruelty in his eyes. He had approached her with impunity, meaning to claim what he thought was his. There had been a time she might have mistaken that for love.
Her stomach tightened. Free and burdened—the two weights contended in her chest like wrestlers in a pit, arms locked, faces pressed close. She was free of him, of Boston, of dresses shaped to someone else’s notion of a woman. She was burdened by the knowing that the freedom was won with blood, and by her own hand.
She remembered the dream that had come to her more than once, back when all she knew of this country was the flat, polished surface of maps and the talk of men who had never stepped off the road. In the dream, the camp had breathed around her just as it did now; smoke had moved in the same language; the river had said her name. She saw again the way tepee poles forked toward the sky like the ribs of a prayer. She had woken on winter nights in Boston with her throat full of smoke that wasn’t there and her fingers curled around air as if it were rawhide. She had thought it was madness, or a longing for something nameless. Perhaps it had been a map of another kind.
“I dreamt this,” she whispered, not realizing she had spoken aloud.
Red Willow lifted her head. “What?”
“Nothing,” Violet said, then could not bear the small lie. “I had dreams before I came. Of here. Of this. I thought I was imagining. But now…” She swallowed. “I wonder if the path was already under my feet, even in Boston. If I was already walking.”
Red Willow considered her, the old woman’s gaze clear as river glass. “The river does not ask the stone if it may pass,” she said simply. “It finds the low places. It takes the way that is true.” She touched the cup in Violet’s hands. “Drink.”
Violet did. Bitter ran across her tongue and then turned, oddly, to sweet. She felt heat gather low and steady, like coal raked into a banked fire.
She breathed, and the world came back into one piece. Not the old piece, but a piece that held.
?
Grey Horse found her when the sun had lifted to hat-brim height, and the shadows of the tepee poles were sharp as arrows laid on the ground. He stood a moment watching her laughsilently at a small boy who had stolen a strip of dried meat and ran in circles with a dog snapping at his heels. The boy’s hair flew; the dog’s tongue lay out of its mouth; both were alive and beautiful and unafraid.
“Come,” Grey Horse said quietly, when she turned and saw him. “There is something the river must hear.”
They walked without speaking, passing between lodges where women pounded roots, where a grandmother scolded a child for tracking mud across a sleeping robe, where two boys leaned foreheads together in the way of conspirators and made plans that could not possibly come to end but would be sweet to try anyway. The river sounded nearer with each step—an old, confident sound, not proud, not humble, merely constant.
At the bank, cottonwoods stood like keepers of a gate, their leaves whispering with the secrecy of water. The current slid bright over stones and set little swirls turning behind each one. Grey Horse went down to the sand and stood with his boots in the damp place where the line of wetness had receded as the night gave way.
“You are not a captive,” he said, still watching the water. “Not to me, not to this camp, not to this life.” He shifted his gaze to her, and the weight of it was like the weight of a hand on a shoulder: steady, reassuring, unyielding where it needed to be. “You are not a guest who must mind her manners until she finds her road again. I tell you this because I need it to be true in both our mouths. I choose you. But choosing is a circle; it turns and comes back. If you do not choose as well, then the circle is broken. I will not hold a broken thing and call it whole.”
The river seemed to listen. A dragonfly stitched the air between them and the water, its green body lit like a shard of bottle glass. Violet felt the words in her throat before she knew their shape.
“When I travelled here, I thought I was running,” she said. “From a city that I couldn’t see as my true home.” She put a hand behind her ear and fingered her birthmark there. “Last night I did something I never believed I could do. It didn’t make me less. It didn’t make me more. It made me real; it made the world real; it asked me to answer.” She lifted her face to him. The sky beyond his shoulder was the color of unspun wool. “I answer. I choose you. I choose this place, this river, this wind. Not as a slave in fear, not because some misadventure brought me here, but because a river runs before me and I will step into it with you.”
The words left her like breath after a long dive. She felt the relief and the weight together, braided like rope. Grey Horse’s mouth softened into something that wasn’t a smile and wasn’t not, the sort of expression men wear when they recognize home standing at a distance and raise a hand to it without meaning to.
He stepped forward and took her chin gently between thumb and forefinger. “Then we will see what the river wants of us,” he said. “And we will argue with it when we must, and go with it when we can.”
The dragonfly returned and hovered at the water’s skin, then flicked away. Grey Horse let his hand fall and set his palm over hers. “Come,” he said again, though softer. “There is bread somewhere, and boys who will think they are not hungry until they see you eating.”
?
Pale Moon watched them climb back from the river, her body half-hidden by the shadow thrown from her tepee. She had plaited her hair high and wrapped it with a strip of red cloth: a color that says both heart and blood and anger, a color thatalways looks like truth no matter what story it tells. Her mouth was set for battle and for mercy, both at once.
She waited until Violet passed, then stepped out and touched her wrist. “Walk with me,” she said, and did not wait for consent before turning away toward the edge of the camp where the grass rose untrampled.
Violet turned to Grey Horse with a questioning look. When he shrugged, she decided to follow Pale Moon, walking beside her. Eventually, they stopped beside a small willow that had forced itself up through the aftermath of a flood and now clung with a stubborn grace to the riverbank. Pale Moon stood with the tree’s leaves caressing her shoulder, her gaze on the far bluff where the sun laid its hand.
“I used to be angry when I looked at you,” she said without preface. “Angry like a fire that finds dry grass. It was easier to burn than to cry.” Her eyes were steady, not accusing. “I loved a thing I should never have, a man who was not mine. I thought if I held the camp’s ways like a spear, I could drive that truth away. I was wrong.”
Violet did not look down. She did not say she was sorry, because the word would be too thin. She kept her eyes where Pale Moon’s were, standing like a post in a storm.
Pale Moon reached inside her belt and brought out a small braid of sweet-smelling grass, pale and green as if summer had put her fingers into winter and made a path there. The braid was tight as a secret kept for too long. She held it with both hands, considering the thing as if it were a child who needed both a scolding and a kiss.
“My grandmother told me,” Pale Moon said, “that when a river finds a new course, the old one does not disappear. It lies there, full of stones and memories, and sometimes the water goes back to it when the rains are heavy. But the river’s face what we cansee turns where it must.” She looked up, and in her look there was no bitterness, only the ache of a song sung to its end. “The river cannot be stopped. I see where it runs now.”
She set the braid in Violet’s hands. The scent rose clean and green, like the inside of a new leaf when it is first unfurled. “This is for keeping away what we do not want near,” she said. “Smoke it in your lodge. Sleep in its smell. Let it tell you when a spirit walks crooked toward your door.” Her fingers lingered an instant on Violet’s knuckles. “I am not your enemy.”
