The camp moved quietly, tending wounds, rebuilding fires. Ezra sat near the river, hands shaking slightly as he cleaned his gun. “Could’ve gone bad,” he murmured to Violet. “If not for him.” He nodded toward Grey Horse, who stood alone by the water.
Violet went to Grey Horse. The moon was rising, silver over the flooded banks. His shirt clung dark with blood on his forearm, though he didn’t seem to notice.
“They’ve gone,” she said softly.
“For now,” he answered.
“You saved both us and them. You saved both sides.”
He shook his head. “No. The river saved them. It kept its voice loud enough to drown our anger.” He looked at her then, and the hardness left his eyes. “But it will rise again, someday. It always does.”
She stepped closer, touching the wound on his arm, gentle as breath. “Then we’ll stand side by side when it does.”
He caught her hand, holding it against his chest. “We will stand,” he said quietly. “Together.”
The river murmured beside them, its waters still high, reflecting the stars. Somewhere in the distance a wolf howled, not in mourning, but as if to mark the fragile truce between heaven and earth.
And Violet, standing in the moonlight beside the man who had become her compass and her home, understood that they had reached the edge of one world and the beginning of another.
Chapter Thirty: After the Thunder
The days that followed felt like the long breath a horse takes after the gallop stops. The prairie smelled rinsed, the river ran fat and brown, and the wind came gentler, as if it had remembered its manners. All the same, the camp moved like a creature that knew it had been seen. The birds watched from the cottonwoods at dusk and dawn. Children were called closer at the sound of hooves. Fires were stacked low and even. The quiet had a rim to it, a thin edge of watchfulness that nicked the skin now and then and reminded everyone what lay beyond.
Grey Horse wore a strip of cloth on his forearm where the bullet had kissed him. The wound was shallow, the kind that hurt because it had not ended a life and therefore insisted on being felt. Violet helped him clean it each evening with water warmed in a small pot and herbs Red Willow pressed into her hand. She worked as the old woman had taught her—slow, steady, the way a river cuts stone—blotting until the water cooled, binding the cloth snug but not cruel. He did not flinch, not even when her fingers brushed the newness of the wound. His eyes were always on her then, as if her face were a horizon he needed to learn.
Barlow’s men were gone, their tents packed away and their tracks filled with rain. They left only the memory of blue cloth moving against green grass and the knowledge that Fort Belknap could point itself toward them whenever it chose. Ezra said the captain would write a report that tried to tell the truth withoutdissolving under the weight of it. “He’s got a soldier’s mind and a farmer’s heart,” Ezra said, half a laugh in his throat and half a prayer. “If the first wins, they’ll come back with orders. If the second wins, we’ll buy ourselves a season.”
“Then give his farmer something to plant,” Grey Horse replied. “Carry him a seed he can name.”
They sat with that between them for a while, the way men sit with a problem they respect enough not to talk to death. Finally Ezra sighed and ran a hand over the bruise at his cheekbone, now turning the yellow of prairie grass in late summer. “I’ll ride to Belknap in two days’ time,” he said. “I’ll go to the fort and talk to any man who’ll listen and to half of those who won’t.”
Grey Horse nodded once. “You’ll return on the third dawn.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then the next one after,” Grey Horse said mildly, which made Ezra smile in spite of himself.
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Violet’s days filled with small, necessary things. She finished the beaded band with Pale Moon under the cottonwood shade, threading wind-before-rain into wind-after-rain, the pattern bending to include both. When it was done, Pale Moon circled Violet’s waist with the band and tied it snug. The beads pressed lightly against Violet’s body, as if saying: you belong to what you have chosen, and it belongs to you.
“You will forget it is there,” Pale Moon said, tugging the final knot tight. “This is good. Forgetting a thing that protects you means you can live.”
Violet brushed a thumb over the pattern. “I thought forgetting meant losing.”
Pale Moon shook her head. “We do not forget to lose. We forget to be free.” Her mouth twisted into a brief smile. “If a wolf must think about his teeth all day, he will starve.”
They worked in easy silence for a time, mending a tear in a tepee skin, turning meat on a rack. When Pale Moon spoke again, her voice had the weight of news dropped lightly. “There will be a small gathering tonight,” she said. “Red Willow asked it. We will sing for those who fought and did not die.” Her eyes rested on Violet’s. “And we will call you by a name that fits this camp.”
Violet’s hands stilled. “A name?”
Pale Moon’s chin dipped once. “The name you were given in Boston tells our people nothing. Names are maps. We must be able to read you.”
“What will you call me?”
Pale Moon’s gaze returned, steady. “We will listen to what the river says.”
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