Maverick didn't ask for permission. He reached down, lifted the hem of her deerskin tunic, and examined her left side with gentle, experienced fingers. A deep purple bruise was already forming over her lower ribs, but the skin was unbroken and the bone beneath was solid.
"Nothing broken," Maverick said, letting the tunic fall. "You’ll be sore enough to spit yellow jacket venom for a week, but you’ll live."
He looked at her, his eyes taking in the blood on her knuckles, the soot on her cheek, and the fierce, unyielding light that still burned in her dark pupils.
"You killed that man with a knife," Maverick said quietly.
"He came into my space," she answered simply, as if explaining why she had swept dust from her doorway. "He looked at my face, and he thought I was a monster that would cower in the dark. I showed him that the fire did not burn away my teeth."
Maverick looked at the dead man lying down in the water, then back at Hesper.
He didn't say anything. He reached out with his thumb, rough and callused from years of rope work, and gently wiped away a streak of black powder smoke that was smeared across the pale, puckered line of the scar on her cheek.
Hesper did not flinch away this time. Her eyes remained locked on his, wide and luminous in the darkness, her lips parting slightly as she felt the tenderness in his touch.
"Why does your father tell everyone this scar makes you a monster?" Maverick asked, his voice low and solemn. "I’ve seen women in St. Louis and Santa Fe who didn't have half your beauty, Hesper. And I’ve never seen a man or woman anywhere who had half your courage."
Hesper looked down at the river stones, her shoulders dropping as the defensive wall she had maintained for five years began to crumble.
"My father did not make me wear the veil to punish me, Maverick," she said softly.
Maverick frowned. "Then why?"
"Because of who set the fire," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the murmur of the water.
Maverick went rigid. "Who set it?"
"It was not an accident in a lodge," she said, her eyes turning toward the dark mountains in the north. "Five winters ago, before the soldiers pushed the bands south, there was a man named Goyathlay—the same man who threatened you today. He was not a warrior then; he was a leader of the young men who wanted war with every white post in the territory. He wanted to take me into his lodge because I was the daughter of the high chief, and it would give him the right to lead the council."
She paused, taking a ragged breath that made her bruised ribs throb.
"I refused him," she continued. "I told him he was a butcher who fought for blood instead of our people. One night, while my father was meeting with the peace commissioners at Fort Bowie, Goyathlay and three of his cousins came to my lodge. They did not come to talk. They barred the doorway with heavy cedar poles and threw burning pitch onto the willow thatch."
Maverick’s hand tightened on the receiver of his rifle until his knuckles turned bone-white. "They tried to burn you alive."
"They wanted to destroy the daughter of the chief so my father would have no heir to unite the clans," she said, a single tear cutting through the soot on her unblemished cheek. "I cut my way out through the back of the lodge with an elk knife, but the burning thatch fell across my face and shoulder. When my father returned, Goyathlay swore on the sacred pollen that it was a band of white scalp-hunters who had set the fire. My father knew the truth, but he could not prove it without splitting the tribe into a civil war that would have left our women and children helpless before the cavalry."
She looked up at Maverick, her dark eyes filled with the bitter weight of that ancient compromise.
"My father told the village that I had become ugly and cursed by the spirits," she whispered. "He made me wear the veil so that Goyathlay would never look upon me with desire again, and so that no other man would try to take the chief’s bloodline through force. The veil was not my prison, Maverick. It was the only wall my father could build to keep me alive."
Maverick stood in the cold wind, looking at her, feeling a rage so profound and terrible that it made his vision swim with red.
"And Goyathlay knows this?" Maverick asked, his voice deathly quiet.
"He knows," she answered. "That is why he hates you. Because if you stay—if a white man with an honest heart takes me as his wife and holds this eastern water—Goyathlay’s dream of ruling this valley dies forever."
The first gray light of dawn was just touching the high eastern spires when the sound of many hooves echoed up from the western trail.