She will be, Ethan said. "She's a tough old girl. Nine years old, and she's carried me farther than most horses carry any man."
Where are you going? the boy asked. "When you leave here?"
Ethan looked at the letter he carried, though he did not take it out. He knew it by heart anyway. "North," he said. "To the Old Trading Road, and the trading post at Willow Crossing. A freight captain named Abel Grange wrote to me, offering guiding work. Wagon trains need a man who can find water on the trail. That's how I make my living, when I'm not digging wells."
Nakai considered this. "My grandfather says water is not owned," he said, testing the words. "He says it belongs to whoever needs it."
Your grandfather is a wise man, Ethan said quietly.
Later, when Nakai had been called away to his sleeping place, Dzeni came to the fire. He did not sit. He stood with his arms crossed, looking down at Ethan, and the firelight made his face hard.
My brother Pash, he said, without being asked, "was killed by settlers two years ago. He went to trade, and he did not come back. They said it was a misunderstanding. There is no misunderstanding in a grave."
Ethan did not defend his own people. He did not explain, or excuse, or offer the easy words men offer when they want to be liked. He listened, and when Dzeni had finished, he said only, "I'm sorry for your brother. That's a hard thing to carry."
Dzeni stared at him, as if he had expected an argument and did not know what to do with the absence of one. "You say nothing in your own defence," he said.
There's nothing to defend, Ethan said. "I wasn't there. And your brother's death isn't a debt I can pay by talking."
Dzeni stood a moment longer, then turned and walked away into the dark, his footsteps sharp on the hard ground. Ethan watched him go, and thought that anger, honestly held, was not the same as cruelty, and that a man who would say his grief aloud to a stranger's face was a man who might, in time, listen to that stranger in return.
Ethan's own story came to him in fragments as he sat there, the way it always did when he was tired and far from home. He thought of the farm in Arkansas where he had been born, and the well that had gone dry in a drought when he was a boy, and the way his family had watched the water sink lower and lower until there was nothing but mud at the bottom, and the way that helplessness had stayed with him ever since, a weight he had carried into every dry place he had ever entered. He thought of Silvano Reyes, patient and sun-darkened, kneeling beside a hole in the earth and listening to it as if it were a living thing, teaching a nineteen-year-old boy that patience was a tool like any other, and that a man who hurried a well would lose it. He thought of his younger brother Tommy, who had died of fever on a trail when Ethan was twenty-four, a boy with a laugh that had filled a wagon camp, gone quiet in a single night, and how that death had taught him the one thing he had never unlearned: that he could not watch children die of thirst and keep walking. That was why he had stopped, really. Not the lost shoe, not the Old Trading Road, not the promise of freight work at Willow Crossing. He had stopped because a camp full of children with empty cups was a thing a man either turned away from or did not, and he had already turned away from too much in his life, and he was tired of the turning.
The fire burned low. The guards changed. The stars moved slowly over Red Mesa. And Ethan Cole, a man who survived by passing through, slept at last under a blanket that was not his own, in a camp that had not yet decided whether he was a guest or a danger, and dreamed of water moving under stone, patient and dark and waiting to be found.
Dawn came pale and thin, the sky lightening from black to gray to a washed-out blue that promised heat but no rain. The camp woke slowly, stiff from the cold night, and the first sound was not birdsong — the birds were gone — but the low murmur of women rationing water, cup by cup, children first, as they had done every morning for weeks. Tahnee stood in line with her empty gourd, which she had carried for two days now, ever since the last of her family's water had gone. She was thirty, the mother of Yana, seven, and Koi, three, and her husband had died in a fall from a cliff three years earlier, so she carried everything alone, and carried it without complaint. Yana stood beside her, watchful and brave, her hand in her mother's skirt. Koi was asleep still, wrapped in a blanket.
Ethan rose before the sun was fully up, and the chief sent Besh with him, and Dzeni, who had insisted on coming, and who watched Ethan's every movement as if waiting to catch him in a lie. They walked the ground near the camp — not far, only the rocks and hollows within a short walk of the shelters, the places the band passed every day without thinking. Ethan walked slowly, stopping often, kneeling, brushing dust with his fingers, lifting stones and looking underneath, knocking on rock with his knuckles and listening.