would cost: not money, not a signature, but his whole life, given over to a people he had wronged by measuring, under a law he had not made and could not bend. And beside that, the other road: escorted out forever, back to the desert, back to Lark Spur Flat, back to the wandering he had done since 1865, with Sage and his compass and his stopped watch and no place to stop. He thought of the black dirt, three feet deep, and the cold creek, and the cabin he had imagined on the shelf, and he thought of how that cabin would look if it were built on a bargain that made a woman its price. He did not like that thought. He liked the other road even less.
I do not know your daughter, Elias said slowly, "and she does not know me. A marriage made in an afternoon is a poor foundation for a life. I would not ask a woman to pay for my mistake."
Iron Elk's face did not change, but something in his eyes warmed, a fraction, like a fire banked for the night. "That is an honest thing to say," he said. "It is also why the law gives a night. You will not be forced to answer standing here with dust on your boots and my son's riders at your back. You will eat. You will sleep under guard, but in peace. You will think. In the morning, you will give your answer before this council, and whatever you choose, you will be treated as a man who chose it."
Nash stepped forward. "I will watch him," he said, and his voice was flat, but not unkind. "He will not run. If he runs, the desert will do what it does."
Elias nodded. He had no other answer to give, and he knew it. As the council broke up, and the people drifted back to their fires and their horses and their evening work, a woman brought him a bowl of stew and a piece of bread, and set them down without a word, and Elias ate sitting on a log at the edge of the fire ground, with Nash a few paces off and the canyon darkening around him. The stew was good, rich with meat and roots, and it steadied him more than he wanted to admit. Above the lodges, the stars came out, thick and bright, and the creek sang below the camp, and Elias Whitlock, trespasser, soldier, son of a vanished surveyor, sat with a bowl in his hands and a night in front of him in which to decide whether his dream of land was worth the life it would ask him to live.
The night in the camp was not like a night in Lark Spur Flat. There, the piano had played badly and cheerfully below his room, and men had shouted in the saloon, and the wind had rattled the shutters. Here, the sounds were quieter and more ordered: horses moving in the corrals, a child laughing once and then being hushed with affection, the creek running steady below the flat, the fire crackling in its ring, and, now and then, a low voice telling a story that Elias could not follow in words but could follow in its rhythm, rising and falling like a man walking a familiar trail. He sat by the council fire long after he had finished his stew, with a blanket someone had given him around his shoulders, and he thought, because Iron Elk had given him a night to think and he intended to use it honestly.
Elder Hakan came and sat beside him after a while, without ceremony, as if old men in this camp sat where they pleased and no one thought it strange. He was seventy, thin and wiry, with a face like weathered leather and eyes that held a dry, patient humour. He carried a cup of something hot and herbal, and he offered Elias a sip without a word, and Elias took it, and it tasted of mint and smoke and something earthy he could not name.
You are thinking very loudly, Hakan said, after a time. "A man can hear it from three lodges away."
Elias almost smiled. "I am thinking about land," he said. "I have wanted it since I was a boy. My father rode west to find it and never came back. I rode west to find it and got caught measuring another man's creek. It seems a poor joke."
Hakan sipped his cup. "Land is not a joke," he said. "But it is also not a paper. A paper says a man owns the water. The water does not read papers. The water goes where it has always gone, and the people who live beside it either keep it clean and share it fairly, or they fight over it until it is spoiled for everyone. My father remembered a drought when I was a boy, when the creek ran so thin you could step across it without wetting your ankles, and the camp nearly died, not because the water was gone, but because men upstream had dammed it for a mine. That is why our law is hard. Not because we love hardness, but because we remember thirst."