Violet looked at him across the fire. His face, cut with amber light, held the calm of a man who had spent too long expecting storms. “What will you do?” she asked softly.
“What I always do,” he answered. “Watch. Wait. Move when the river says move.”
Ezra shifted uneasily. “I’ll ride at first light,” he said. “Try to slow them down, maybe turn their tracks another way. But I can’t promise they’ll listen to reason. Fort men don’t take kindly to truths they do not want to hear.”
Grey Horse regarded him for a moment, then nodded. “You will speak with the tongue they understand.” A faint trace of respect threaded his voice. “Go with dawn. Take two riders who know the country.”
Ezra hesitated, glancing toward Violet. “If I don’t make it back quick, you keep her safe.”
Grey Horse’s gaze did not waver. “She is safe wherever I am.”
?
While the men prepared, Violet stayed among the women, trying to weave normalcy from restless air. She helped Red Willow stretch fresh hides and learned the words for what her hands already did:tsóhfor knife,pátáufor fire,kíi-kwahfor friend.
Her tongue stumbled, earning soft laughter from Pale Moon and the younger girls. But every syllable she learned seemed to root her more firmly in the red earth beneath her feet.
Pale Moon surprised her one morning by taking her hand and tracing the pattern of a beaded band laid across her waist. “This means the wind before rain,” she explained, her English careful but clear. “It tells the people to gather their things, not from fear,but to be ready.” She lifted her eyes, steady and knowing. “You should make one.”
Violet smiled faintly. “A band?”
“A sign,” Pale Moon corrected. “So the river will know which way you mean to go when it rises.”
They sat together that afternoon, threading beads under the shade of a cottonwood. Around them, the camp’s rhythm pulsed soft and close, women grinding corn, boys racing ponies along the far ridge, an old man singing to the remaining horses. Violet’s fingers found a peace in the repetition, the quiet click of bead to thread. The storm building on the horizon went unnoticed until the first low growl rolled across the plain.
?
By late day the sky had turned the color of tarnished copper. Wind swept down from the north, flattening grass and shaking the tepees. The scent of rain filled the air that deep sweetness that seemed to rise from the bones of the earth itself.
“Hold the ropes tight,” Grey Horse ordered, his voice cutting clean through the roar. “Make the fires small. The river will climb.”
Violet and Pale Moon worked side by side, tying hides and weighing the skirts of the tepees with stones. Lightning forked across the sky, silver veining the clouds. Thunder answered, rolling and rolling until it seemed the world itself was breathing through it.
Then the rain came.
It fell not in drops but in sheets, driving sideways, hissing against the tepees, filling the air with constant fierce music. Violet’s hair clung to her face; water ran down her arms as she helped Pale Moon drag in bundles of firewood before theyfloated away. Through the din, she caught sight of Grey Horse leading horses higher up the rise, his body black against flashes of light.
She wanted to call out, to tell him to come inside, that the storm would break his bones if it had the chance. But she held her tongue. He belonged to that storm as much as to the calm. Watching him move through the rain, she felt something inside her rise too: not fear, but belonging.
Hours passed before the worst of it eased. The thunder drifted south, muttering like an old man refusing to sleep. The river swelled high, muddy, and restless, its banks devouring small trees and dragging roots loose. Yet when morning came, the camp still stood. Smoke rose again, thin and pale, from every tepee.
?
Grey Horse returned soaked and silent, his hair unbound, his eyes hard with thought. “I saw riders,” he told Ezra, who had managed to circle back before dawn. “Five white men. They do not ride for trade. They follow tracks.”
Ezra’s face darkened. “Perhaps they search for the graves of the white men we buried?”
Grey Horse nodded once. “They will come here.”
“Maybe,” Ezra said, “but maybe not soon. The river’s flooded half the crossings. That’ll slow them.”
“Not enough.” Grey Horse turned to Violet. “When they come, they’ll not ask who struck first. They’ll only see what color our skin is.”
Violet felt the chill behind his words. “Then what should we do?”
He looked past her, toward the gathered people, his people who were already watching him, waiting for his direction. “Weprepare,” he said. “And when they arrive, we speak before we strike.”
Ezra gave a skeptical grunt. “You think they’ll listen?”
