Then it is ours, the chief said. "All of ours. Not yours, not mine, not Murdock's, not Webb's. The water is a guest in this canyon, and we will treat it as a guest, and share it as guests share. If Murdock's men thirst, they will drink. If Webb's cattle thirst, they will drink, so long as they do not dam the stream. That is my word, and it will be the band's word. And you, Ethan Cole — you found it, and you gave it away in the same breath. That is a rarer thing than finding."
Ethan felt his throat tighten, and he looked away, into the fire, because he did not trust his own face just then. He had spent his life passing through, digging wells for other people and riding on before the water could become a responsibility. Tonight, for the first time, he understood what staying might mean: not a house, not a name on a claim, but a promise kept in common, a seam of water that belonged to no one and therefore to everyone who needed it.
There is one more thing, he said, when he could speak evenly again. "Murdock will not hear this truth as good news. A man who sells water does not love to learn that his well and our basin are the same stream, and that he cannot dam one without killing the other. He will come back with guns, not papers. We must be ready for that, and we must be ready not to become like him when he comes."
The chief nodded, slow as always. "We will hold a council," he said. "Tomorrow night, when the work is done and the basin is ready to open. And we will make a plan that does not begin with a rifle."
Above them, on the rim, one of Murdock's fires flared briefly, as if someone had fed it a fresh branch, and then settled again. Ethan watched it, and thought of the seam running south under the dark ground, joining two enemies by water neither of them owned, and he wondered whether that joining would be enough.
Beside the fire, Nakai stirred in his sleep and murmured something soft and unintelligible, and his small hand closed around the wooden cup. Ethan reached out, without thinking, and tucked the blanket a little closer around the boy's shoulders. The chief watched him do it, and said nothing, and in that silence Ethan heard the council's answer already given.
The water would be shared. Whatever came at dawn, that would not change.
The next day the work at the rockfall finished, and the council met when the sun went down, because a council held in daylight, with rifles on the rim, would have been a council held under a gun. The work had finished in the morning — the last gravel shovelled out of the basin by hand, the last stones carried away, the hollow of sandstone swept clean and waiting, dark and cool as a room with the door still shut.
Ethan had spent the day at the basin with Besh and Kani, making it ready. They cleared a channel for the water to run out of the hollow and down toward the flat ground where the band camped, laying flat stones along its edges so the first rush would not wash the banks away. They set the last plug-stone in place: a broad, flat slab, wedged with smaller stones and packed with clay, holding back the buried stream where it pressed against the basin's throat. When Ethan pressed his ear to it, he could hear the water behind it, stronger now, impatient, a low, steady push against stone. One lever, one pull at dawn, and it would come.
It is ready, he told the chief at dusk, wiping clay from his hands. "At first light, if you give the word, I will pull the plug and open it."
The chief nodded, and said only, "Then we will talk about what first light will bring."
The council fire was built a little apart from the other fires, in a hollow of rock where the light would not carry to the rim. Around it sat the chief, and Besh, Kani, and Chinche, and Ishtah, and Dzeni, and Jolon — the last two sitting apart from each other, as they had sat apart ever since Jolon's confession, two men with a wound between them that forgiveness had closed but not yet healed. Tahnee sat at the edge of the circle with Yana asleep against her side, because the council concerned mothers as much as warriors. Ethan sat beside Besh, his notebook in his lap, the small, battered book of water-marks that had been his companion for years.
The chief spoke first, and he spoke of the truth Ethan had told him the night before, in plain words, so that all of them would hear it and hold it together. The basin and the southern seep were one water. Damming one would kill the other. The spring could not be owned without being destroyed. He spoke slowly, and when he finished, no one spoke for a while, because a truth like that needs silence around it to settle.
Then Dzeni spoke, and his voice was hard with the pride and the grief that had always driven him. "Murdock will come at dawn," he said. "He watched us clear the stone. He will not watch us drink and do nothing. He has seven rifles, and Wade, who likes to use his. We should meet him on the rim before he comes down, and hold the high ground. Let him see that this canyon is guarded."
He will come, the chief agreed, "but we will not meet him with rifles first. A rifle fired at dawn will be heard by his men as a beginning, and beginnings are hard to stop. We will open the water first. Let them see the band drink. Let them see children drink. A man can argue with a claim. It is harder to argue with a child holding a cup."