Violet felt the heat rise behind her eyes, not the pain-heat of sorrow but the sharp sting of being met with more grace than she had believed she deserved. “Thank you,” she said, and the word was not thin now. It was heavy with all the things she could not say in any language. “Pale Moon, I… I didn’t come here with a plan. I didn’t come to take. But I won’t pretend it hasn’t been taken. Last night—”
Pale Moon shook her head once, a small, decisive movement. “Last night is in the ground,” she said. “We will stand on it.” She breathed out and half-smiled, the expression surprising both of them. “Besides, if I must lose a man to someone, I would rather it be to a woman who fights with her whole heart than to a woman who hides hers.”
A gust of wind moved through the willow and turned the leaves silver. Pale Moon glanced up, then back to Violet, and in the quick return of her eyes there was an old sisterly mischief that might come, someday, to sit at the same fire with affection.
“Keep that,” she said, nodding at the braid. “It is a gift.”
She left without any ceremony, as if ceremony were too small for the thing that had been done between them.
?
By afternoon the camp had the look of work well taken up. Ezrasat with two boys and a gun laid open on a blanket, showing them the patience of the pieces—the way the spring wanted to leap, how to keep it from doing so; the way the barrel liked to be swabbed with a rag turned slow; the foolishness of loading while talking. Red Willow sorted herbs into small bundles that looked like birds fallen gently asleep.
Ezra stood at last and stretched, touching the bruise at his cheek with a tenderness that had less to do with pain than with gratitude for pain that ended. He saw Violet and lifted a hand.
“I’m staying,” he said, when she reached him. “For a time. Grey Horse asked it of me plain. It seems to me right to answer the asking.”
“I’m glad,” Violet said. “I think we’re all better for the way you read the signs.”
Ezra looked past her, toward the thin line of dust on the horizon that might have been wind and might have been hooves. “It’s a dangerous road,” he answered. “But there are quiet ways to walk alongside it. I reckon I can teach a few boys to hear those.”
She touched his sleeve, the simple cloth of it, worn smooth along the forearm where a man grips his own self when bracing. “Thank you,” she said. “For last night. For today.”
He nodded, then managed to make a grin too wry to be called anything but Ezra. “I’ll expect you to bring me bread now and then for my heroics.”
“I’ll bring you bread for your decency,” she replied, matching his tone, and felt the small relief of that lightness ease a knot she had not noticed. He tipped his hat and turned back to the boys, who had already begun arguing over who would carry the gun when it was whole.
As the sun drew down toward late, Grey Horse came from the pony line, leading a roan whose points were smoke-dark. Helooked in the way of a man after a storm—no less himself, but reassembled around a sky that had been violently cleaned. He lifted his chin toward the river, and she fell in step without words.
They walked to the place where the bank dipped and the willow made a green curtain. The water ran strong, throwing small tongues around stones. Grey Horse stopped at the edge and stood with his body open to whatever the wind brought: heat, cool, the smell of silt, the rumor of rain carrying in from somewhere they could not see.
He did not take her hand this time. He let their arms brush, the briefest contact, the way two horses lean ribs to ribs and trade warmth without ceremony. The river hurried by with its urgent patience, a flaw Violet thought she could live inside for the rest of her days.
“Tomorrow,” Grey Horse said softly, as if not to step on the river’s words, “we teach the young ones to move at night without making a camp sound. We send two men ahead to shadow the road. Ezra will show them how your people read sign. We will watch the sky. We will mend what was torn.” He paused. “We will eat. We will sleep.”
“And we will be together,” Violet said, the sentence arriving with the simplicity of water finding a hollow. “Whatever the river asks.”
“Whatever it asks,” he agreed. “And when it asks too much, we will ask back.”
They stood like that until the light turned honey-thick and the first insects began to write their silver lines above the current. The camp behind them breathed and shifted: a kettle lid rattled, a woman laughed, a child called, a dog answered. Pale Moon’s braid of grass lay light in Violet’s pocket, warm as if it had beenalive a moment ago and might be again if she only believed hard enough.
Violet looked down at the river and saw not her face but the shape of the world running, and in it the traces of three currents braided: the life she had been taught to want, the life she had fled to find, and the life she now opened her hands to hold. They did not fight. They made a single cord.
Grey Horse lifted his hand then, and she set hers into it. Palm to palm. Not a grasping. A joining.
The water ran, and ran, and ran.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Gathering Storm
The days that followed carried a quiet unlike any Violet had known before. It wasn’t peace, not entirely: it was more the kind of hush that waits on a ridge before thunder begins its slow walk across the sky. The camp moved with caution, each morning rising into work that looked ordinary but was edged by vigilance. Horses were picketed nearer the tepees. Children were kept closer. Even the dogs seemed to listen.
The river ran full, its current thick from upstream rains. The river’s voice, once soothing, now carried an undernote Violet could almost mistake for warning.
?
Ezra came back from a hunt one evening with more than meat. He carried talk, talk that soldiers had left Fort Belknap two days prior with a scout who claimed to know the trail of Thomas McBride and his men. They would find three graves and only one white man alive, if the fourth had even survived his wounds and made it back to his ranch. Ezra had heard phrases like, “Savage Indians attack innocent ranchers.”White tongues rarely kept to truth when grief and pride were stirred.
Grey Horse listened without moving. Only his jaw worked, slow and deliberate, as if he were grinding grit between his teeth.“They will not come to mourn their dead,” he said at last. “They will come to find someone to punish.”
