Stay down, Elias said, and the words came out rougher than he meant. "Nash. Stay down. You have done enough."
Nash looked at him with eyes that were furious and embarrassed at once. "They took Night?" he asked, and Elias turned and counted, his heart hammering, until he saw the black mare standing at the far side of the corral with her head up, trembling but unhurt, and Sage beside her, the buckskin mare pressing close as if to keep her calm.
Night is here, Elias said. "Sage is here. The herd is here. Breathe."
Ayasha came running then, her hair loose, a lamp in one hand and her herb bag in the other, and the sight of her kneeling beside her brother with the lamp set carefully on the ground steadied the whole corral. She did not cry out or scold. She spoke to Nash in a low, even voice, asking where it hurt and how he had fallen, and she examined his arm with hands that were sure even in the lamplight, binding it with clean cloth while Grandmother Luta arrived behind her with water and a blanket. Elias held the lamp for them, because his hands were the steadiest thing he had to offer, and he watched Ayasha work the way he had watched her tend horses — patient, exact, refusing to be hurried by fear. When she had the arm bound and Nash's shoulder eased into a sling, she looked up at Elias, and her face in the lamplight was tired and fierce and wholly unafraid.
Go to Little Elk, she said quietly. "He will have woken. Do not let him come out to the dark."
Elias found the boy standing in the doorway of his family's lodge, wrapped in a blanket, his eyes wide, trying hard not to cry. Elias knelt beside him, put a hand on his shoulder, and told him in simple, true words that his uncle was hurt but alive, that the horses were safe, that the bad men had run, and that his job tonight was to stay inside where the lamp was warm. Little Elk nodded, leaned against Elias's side for a moment, and then went back inside with his mother, and Elias stood in the doorway until he heard the boy's breathing settle. When he came back to the corral, Ayasha was still beside Nash by lamplight, and Iron Elk stood nearby, silent, watching the creek where the half-built dam waited like an unfinished sentence. Elias understood, standing there with the cold working into his bare feet, that the raid had not ended anything. It had only shown, plainly, what Tanner was willing to do, and what the camp would have to answer.
Dawn came up over the red peaks in thin bands of rose and grey, and the canyon filled slowly with light, as if the day itself were feeling its way forward. Elias was awake before it, standing at the corral with a rope over his shoulder and his father's compass in his pocket, though he had no intention of taking a bearing. He had slept little, and only in snatches, and the memory of Nash's face in the lamplight kept returning to him — the stubborn set of his jaw, the way he had tried to stand on legs that would not hold him. Nash was still in his lodge, his arm bound and his shoulder eased, watched over by Ayasha and Grandmother Luta, and Elias had promised him before dawn that no horse would be left to Tanner's men, and that no man would ride alone.
He rode out with three of Nash's riders, men who knew the lower trails the way Elias knew the road from Missouri, and they followed the sign the raiders had left in their hurry. The ground told the story plainly to anyone willing to read it. The cut fence, the churned dirt at the gate, the hoofprints running hard toward the lower trail, and then, further on, a place where the creek had been meddled with — a brush dam, half built and half fallen, branches and stones piled across a narrow run of water, the creek already working its way around the edges and finding its course again. Elias stood in the cold water up to his ankles and pulled the branches apart with his good hand, while one of the riders worked beside him, and they watched the water run free and clear again, carrying leaves and small stones downstream. It was a small thing, pulling a dam apart, but it felt like answering a threat in the language the creek itself understood.
Beyond the dam, in the soft dirt of the bank, lay a folded sheet of paper, half trampled, its corner dark with mud. Elias picked it up carefully and opened it, and saw a rough map of the canyon, the spring marked, the creek marked, the corral marked, drawn in a looping, hurried hand that was not his own. His own hand, when he wrote, was plain and upright, the hand of a surveyor's son who had learned to make letters stand straight so that a stranger could read them in bad light. This hand looped and leaned and hurried, and Elias felt a cold, clean relief at the sight of it, because here was proof that did not depend on his word alone. He folded the map and put it inside his shirt, against his ribs where the old wound thumped, and rode on.