Footsteps crunched on the gravel path.
Chato approached, carrying a quarter of freshly dressed venison over his shoulder, wrapped in clean wild fern fronds to keep away the flies. He wore only a deerskin breechcloth and moccasins, his bronze chest glistening with sweat and rain. Over the past three weeks, a quiet, unspoken understanding had grown between them. He did not treat her as a captive or a charity case; he treated her as the sacred trust of a dead brother whose honor was bound to his own.
He set the meat down upon a clean granite shelf by the hearth and wiped his brow with the back of his forearm.
"The riders have returned from the southern road," Chato said, leaning his carbine against the sapling frame of the lodge.
Sarah looked up, her heart jumping slightly. "What news from the valley?"
"Brennan lived," Chato said, his voice flat. "The trackers found him two miles from the stage station, crawling on his belly through the mesquite. His feet were torn to the bone and his arm had swollen to the size of a log with the black rot."
Sarah caught her breath. "Did they take him in?"
"The stage driver hauled him into Silver Creek," Chato continued. "They cut his hand off at the wrist with a bone saw to keep the rot from reaching his heart. The doctor in town says he will not die, but he will never hold a pistol again."
"And the town?" Sarah asked. "What do they say about what happened?"
Chato sat down cross-legged on the elk hide across from her, reaching into his pouch for a small piece of dried mescal root to chew. "Carpenter’s men did not return. That brought fear to the saloons. The merchants think an Apache war party of fifty rifles wiped them out. But the trackers told the truth: they told the sheriff that Brennan led them into the canyon to steal Mitchell’s claim, and that the widow was alive, standing with the Bedonkohe."
Sarah looked down at her hands. "They must think I’m a traitor. A white woman running with the hostiles."
"Let them think what they will," Chato said with a rare, faint smile. "A wolf does not care what the sheep say of his hunting. Brennan is broken. He has no badge, no horse, and no fingers. The town council has taken his office, and the sheriff has put his name on a paper for the circuit judge."
"Then... the debt on my land?"
"The land is gone, Sarah," Chato said gently, his dark eyes meeting hers with unwavering honesty. "The commissioner put the Mitchell section into the hands of a mining company from San Francisco three days ago. They paid the taxes and took the paper. If you walked back down that road today, you would have no door to enter and no roof to shelter your child."
The news should have crushed her, but to Sarah’s surprise, she felt only a dull, passing pang of regret. The cabin where Thomas had laughed, the little garden she had watered with buckets from the creek—it was all part of a past that had already burned to ash.
She had survived the desert; she had faced down outlaws and medicine men; she had seen the wild heights of the Sierra Bonita. She was no longer the frightened, helpless girl who had stood on Henderson’s porch waiting for a charity letter from Missouri that was never going to arrive.
"I am not going back," Sarah said, her voice clear and resonant.
Chato nodded slowly, his expression serious. "Then you must prepare. Tazhi says the moon will be full in five nights. When that moon comes, your labor will begin."
The fifth night arrived wrapped in an ominous, suffocating stillness.
The afternoon rains had not come. Instead, the sky had turned a bruised, yellow-brown hue, heavy with heat that clung to the mountains like grease. The wind, which usually swept down cool and clean from the northern rims, had died completely, leaving the pines standing like dark, silent sentinels under a dome of suffocating silence.
When the moon finally rose over the jagged eastern crest of the Sierra Bonita, it was not the pale silver lantern of the high desert. It was enormous, swollen, and dyed a deep, malevolent crimson by the smoke of distant forest fires burning far to the south in the Chiricahua range.
Inside Tazhi’s lodge, Sarah gasped as a blinding spike of pain tore through her abdomen, seizing her breath and bending her double over the elk-hide pallet.
"Breathe, daughter," Tazhi commanded, her voice steady and sharp. "Do not fight the stone. Let the river move."