You plant for a season you have not seen, Ethan said to Ishtah one morning, watching her work.
I plant for the season that is coming, she answered, without looking up. "That is the only kind of planting there is."
It was the third day after the confrontation when Ethan turned his attention to Sable. The dun mare had carried him through the march with a sore front-left foot, stepping carefully, never complaining, and guilt had been sitting in him about it like a stone. He found a spare shoe in the band's pack stores, a plain iron shoe that had been carried for just such a need, and he set to work in the shade with his tools spread on a cloth. Sable stood for him, her ears flicking, her breath warm on his neck, while he cleaned the hoof, trimmed it, and fitted the shoe. When he led her out onto the stone afterward, she walked sound, her head up, and she nickered once, low, and butted his shoulder with her nose.
There you are, Ethan said, and rubbed the white star on her forehead. "Forgive me for the long road."
Nakai had watched the whole shoeing with his chin in his hands, and now he followed Ethan everywhere again, as he had before the fever. The boy was fully recovered, his eyes bright, his step quick, his questions returning in a flood. He wanted to know how Ethan knew where the shoe would sit, how the nails did not hurt the horse, why the hoof sounded different on stone now. Ethan answered each question plainly, and Nakai listened the way he listened to everything, storing it away.
In those first days Ethan also took charge of the basin itself, the way a man tends a thing he is responsible for. Each morning he cleared gravel from the channel, checked the stone lip for cracks, and watched how the water ran after the night's coolness, learning its rhythms the way he had once learned the rhythms of wells in Texas and New Mexico. It was not grand work. It was the work of keeping a promise in good repair, and he found a quiet satisfaction in it that no guiding job had ever given him. Besh sometimes joined him, and the old scout, who had been the first to respect Ethan's reading, now asked questions of his own, about seams and stone and the way water chooses its path, and Ethan answered, and the knowledge passed between them like water passed from hand to hand.
It was Dzeni who found Ethan that evening, down by the lower pool where the light was going amber off the walls. The warrior had been different since the confrontation, quieter, less coiled, as if some long-held tension had finally been given somewhere to go. He did not come with a challenge this time. He came with his hands closed around something small, and he held it out to Ethan.
It was a bead, carved from bone, smoothed by handling, with a pattern cut into it in careful lines: a line of water, Ethan thought, running between two lines of stone. A hole had been drilled through it, and it hung on a cord of twisted sinew.
My father made beads, Dzeni said, his voice low. "He taught me before he died. I made this one after the water came. It is not a payment. A payment ends a thing. This is a token. It means you are known here."
Ethan took it and held it in his palm. It was warm from Dzeni's hand, and light, and the carving caught the last light.
I do not know what to say, Ethan said.
Say nothing, Dzeni said. "Wear it, or keep it in your pocket. Either way, it is yours."
Ethan slipped the cord over his head, and the bead rested against his chest, under his shirt, where he could feel it when he moved. Dzeni nodded once, as if something had been settled between them that did not need words, and the two men stood together watching the horses drink.
That night Ethan sat alone with his notebook open on his knee and the letter from Abel Grange in his hand. The letter was creased and soft from months of carrying, and the ink had faded a little. Freight work at Willow Crossing, thirty miles north on the Old Trading Road. A captain who owed him guiding work. A road he had been riding toward when he found a dry basin and a boy with an empty cup. He had meant to pass through. That had been his whole life: pass through, do the work, ride on. Staying had never been a plan. It had been the thing other men did, men with houses and families and roots in one place.
But the canyon was different now. The shelters were up. The garden was planted. The cattle were watered. And every morning Nakai came to find him, and every evening the chief asked his opinion at the fire as if it were a matter of course, and Ishtah saved him a portion of stew, and Dzeni had given him a bead that meant he was known.