"I looked," Maverick said, his voice flat, steady, and dead-level. "And if you want to know what I saw, I’ll tell you. I saw a handsome woman washing her hair in cold water. I saw a woman who’s spent five years letting a pack of cowardly fools convince her she’s a demon because she got burned in a fire."
"You lie!" she cried, her voice cracking.
"I don't lie," Maverick roared back, his patience snapping. "I spent ten years getting kicked across four territories, Hesper! I’ve been cheated by merchants, lied to by marshals, and left for dead in a dry arroyo by my own cousins! I don't give a damn about a line of scarred skin on a woman's cheek! I care if she’s got backbone! I care if she stands her ground when the wolves show up! And you’ve got more sand in your gizzard than any warrior in that village down there!"
Hesper recoiled as if he had struck her with an open palm.
She stared at him through the leather mask, her chest heaving with ragged, uneven breaths. No man had ever yelled at her like that. The warriors of her tribe treated her with either uncomfortable pity or cold aversion; her father spoke to her in solemn, measured riddles. Nobody had ever stood before her and shouted that she had courage.
Maverick turned on his heel, unbuckled his canteen from his belt, dipped it into the overflow creek below the pool, and stoppered it with a sharp slam of his palm.
"I’m going back to the logs," Maverick said without looking back. "Put your clothes on before you catch an ague. The wind’s coming up cold from the north."
He walked back down the trail, his boots crunching loudly in the gravel, leaving her standing alone beneath the weeping ferns with the dark veil dripping wet against her throat.
The peace did not survive the full moon.
On the third week of Maverick’s labor, when the cabin walls were seven logs high and smelled cleanly of fresh-hewn pitch, a sound reached him from the lower valley that was not the rhythmic chopping of wood or the chatter of women at the wash-stones.
It was the high, piercing wail of a mourning chant.
Maverick dropped his mallet and picked up his Henry rifle. He walked to the edge of the river terrace, looking west toward the main encampment.
A group of seven riders had just entered the village from the southern gaps. They rode hard, their mounts lathered with gray sweat, their flanks bleeding from the jab of iron stirrups. Across the pommel of one pony lay a body wrapped in a red blanket; another warrior was tied into his saddle, his head hanging low, his buckskin shirt soaked through with dark, sticky blood.
Maverick racked a cartridge into the chamber of the Henry, whistled for Bramble, and swung onto the gelding bareback, riding down the river trail at a hard lope.
When he reached the perimeter of the village, a crowd of fifty people had already gathered around the central council ground. The dead man was laid out on the trampled dirt. It was a young warrior named Taza, one of the scouts who had escorted Maverick into the valley on his first day. A single gunshot wound had punched through his sternum, leaving a scorched, black-rimmed hole in his deerskin vest.
Standing over the corpse was a warrior Maverick had seen only from a distance: Victorio’s nephew, a tall, broad-shouldered man named Goyathlay, known among the traders as The Iron Lance.
Goyathlay had a face like a hatchet—narrow, sharp, and predatory. His eyes were small, deep-set, and yellowed around the whites like an old hound's. He held a brand-new Model 1873 Winchester lever-action rifle, its blued barrel gleaming in the midday sun.
Lobo Negro stood opposite him, his arms folded across his chest, his expression carved from gray granite.
"They were waiting at the crossing of the San Pedro," Goyathlay said, his voice rising in an angry, rhythmic bark that carried across the listening women and elders. "Ranchers from the San Simon valley. Seven men with long rifles and badges pinned to their waistcoats. They had fifty head of our horses that were taken from the north mesa three moons ago."
"Did you speak to them?" Lobo Negro asked quietly.
"We told them the horses bore the mark of the Mimbreño bands," Goyathlay spat, stepping over Taza’s dead hand. "Their leader laughed. He was the one they call Vance McCall—the red-haired cattle boss who bought the old Spanish grant below the foothills. He said the Apache have no horses in Arizona Territory. He said any Indian found south of the Gila River is a wolf to be shot on sight."
A furious roar went up from the young warriors. Men shook their carbines and lances into the air, their faces contorted with rage.
Goyathlay turned, his yellowed eyes sweeping the crowd until they landed directly on Maverick Cole, who sat quietly on Bramble’s back at the edge of the circle.