The third day dawned cold enough to make breath visible. Violet woke to see her breath plume pale and felt, for the first time since coming here, the clear, clean edge of a season tilting. The river had fallen back into its bed, no longer eating the banks, but it carried debris in its curl and rushed louder, as if rehearsing for ice.
They prepared for movement, not flight. The difference mattered, and the camp held it like a secret shared among kin. Women packed neatly: robes rolled tight and tied, kettles nested, babies slipped snug into carrying boards. Men checked ponies, looked hard at the sky, spoke low about water and grass and winter. Pale Moon showed Violet how to lash a bundle to atravois with knots that could be undone in a hurry and would not slip in the meantime. “Life is this,” she said, tugging the last rope snug. “Tie what you love to what can move.”
Red Willow sent Violet to the river for willow bark and told her exactly where to cut, exactly how much to take, how to thank the tree twice—once with words, once with leaving more than you harvest. On her way back she saw Grey Horse standing at the water’s edge, eyes on the sky, where a hawk rode a column of air until it was only a speck and then not even that.
“What do you see?” she asked, stepping close, the frost-crack of grass under her moccasins sounding too loud.
“Not soldiers,” he said, and she heard the truth of it in the way his shoulders loosened. “Just the day.”
She stood beside him in the long pale light. “Do you think they’ll come back?”
“Everything comes back,” he said. “Even rain in the desert, even men who have forgotten the names of their grandfathers.” He turned to look at her, the corner of his mouth making that almost-smile that felt like a private sign. “We will be somewhere else when they do. Or we will be here and different. Either way, they will not meet us the same.”
“Because we will have changed,” she said.
“Because we are changing,” he corrected gently. “You most of all.”
She thought of the girl who had boarded a coach in Boston with a ribbon at her throat and faith wrapped around her like a shawl she had not yet discovered was full of holes. She thought of the woman who had knelt in the dust with her heart beating like a drum she could not still. Between those two stood a river, wide and blue and honest. The name Red Willow had given heranswered when she called it in her head:After-Thunder.She did not feel larger; she felt truer, and that was a size that fit.
“Thank you,” she said, though she could not have said exactly to whom. Grey Horse nodded as if the thanks had found the right ear.
?
That evening the camp glowed low and golden, as if firelight had seeped into cloth, hair, and skin and decided to stay. Violet and Grey Horse spread a fresh robe near the back of his tepee. Pale Moon brought them a small clay bowl, its rim chipped, its belly perfect. “It holds well,” she said, setting it down where the light struck it. “Like some people.”
Red Willow arrived with a coal cupped in a curved piece of bark. She set it in the bowl and crumbled sweetgrass onto it until the smoke rose pale and soft, smelling of green and a life just opened. “Walk it around,” she told Violet, “and tell it where to go.”
Violet did as she was told, letting the smoke comb the corners, pass over blankets, flirt with shadows. When she returned to the fire, Grey Horse’s eyes were on her in that steady way that saw and did not pin. He reached out, and she stepped into the line of his arm, the rightness of the fit making something in her go quiet and sure.
Outside, the camp had begun to sing again, not in ceremony now but in the offhand way people sing when they are glad to be warm and fed and together. A child laughed; a dog scolded a stick; someone yelped when a coal jumped where it shouldn’t. Ordinary life stitched itself back through the larger cloth.
“We will move tomorrow,” Grey Horse said into her hair. “Not far. Enough to give the river a new angle on us.” He paused.“Ezra will find us. He knows our tracks. If he does not come by the third dawn …”
“Then the next,” she said, smiling into his chest. “I heard you.”
He made a sound that might have been a laugh. The smoke curled around them, drew a soft line around their bodies and then rose through the gap in the tepee to join the dark. Violet lifted her face. He kissed her once, briefly, the way a man kisses a home before leaving it. Not ownership, not appetite. Blessings.
Later, when the fire had settled into a low, red bank and the night had pulled itself closely around the camp, Violet lay listening to the horses talking to one another in their sleep and to the river saying what it always said, each time a little differently. She thought of Barlow’s paper, of Ezra’s road, of winter’s deliberate approach. She did not wish for another kind of life. She wished for strength inside this one.
She slept and woke at first light to the thin cry of migrating birds. High overhead, a long ragged V wrote itself across the sky, each wingbeat a decision, each decision a direction. Grey Horse stood outside the tepee, head tilted back, his hair loose down his back, his body a dark mark on the brightening grass.
“Cranes,” he said when she joined him, his voice low so as not to frighten anything needed. “They do not guess where to go. They know.”
“They look like writing,” she said, shading her eyes. “As if the sky is telling us a thing and expects us to be able to read it.”
He glanced at her waist, at the band Pale Moon had tied there. “Perhaps we can,” he said. “We have a good teacher.”
They broke camp as the sun cleared the rim, moving with the clean, practiced economy of people who have done this before and will do it again. The river gleamed to their left, still swollen, still sure. Violet took up her end of a travois rope and felt the tugof weight, the honest ache of it in her shoulders. She looked once toward a road that ran like a thought someone could not stop thinking, and then she looked away.
They walked. The grass leaned and rose behind them, untroubled by their passing. Far ahead, the land lifted its slow back into low hills, and beyond that, something brighter waited—perhaps a stand of cottonwoods yet uncounted, perhaps winter’s first hard, clarifying cold, perhaps a message carried in Ezra’s pocket that would send them another way.
Whatever it was, they would meet it together, after thunder, under a sky that changed but did not fail. The world was not safe and it had never promised to be. But it was wide, and it was honest, and Violet felt the river in her blood agree.
Chapter Thirty-One: The Joining of Rivers
The morning began like a promise. Mist lay over the river, thin as silk, softening the line between earth and sky. Horses moved through it like ghosts, their breath rising in plumes. The air held that hushed expectancy that comes before something sacred: as if the prairie itself were holding its breath.
Violet slept to the faint crackle of fire and the scent of sage. Grey Horse sat nearby, sharpening the blade of his knife, glancing at her often. When she stirred awake, she caught his eyes on her.
