side. It wanted binding worse than it wanted anything else I had."
"She told me you put your own hands on the wound and did not flinch from
it. She told me you gave her the water first and the questions after, which is
the correct order, and that not all your people know it. I have come a long
way on the strength of that report, Emmett Cole.
"I didn't do anything but what the moment required."
"A man is what the moment requires of him. That is the whole of my
philosophy, and I am sixty-four years old." The chief put one hand flat on the
well curb, not claiming it, just resting there, the way a man rests a hand on a
table he is about to speak across. "Now I will tell you my news, and it is bad
news, and I will tell it straight because we do not have the water to waste on
crooked talk. Three days past, the spring at Eagle Rock turned."
"Turned how?"
"The horses that drank first died standing in it, with their heads down. Nine
horses. The children who drank are sick in their bellies and cannot keep
down what little we give them. An old woman died in the night, though she
was old, and perhaps it was only her time wearing the spring's face. I do not
know what is in the water. A dead thing, perhaps, high in the rocks where the
spring rises. Perhaps the earth shifted and opened some bitter vein. I have
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sent men to climb and look, and they found nothing they could move. The
spring was our summer water. It is death now."
Emmett looked east, though the ridge hid everything. A day's ride. He had
watered his own stock at Eagle Rock once, years back, freighting through.
Cold water, sweet as any in the territory.
"My people are strung out a day behind me," Tadan said, "on the trail, in the
order of their slowness. The old ones and the women with children at the
breast are already walking — they started in the night, because the slowest
must start first or be left, and we do not leave ours. The warriors you see are
the escort of families. Three hundred people, Emmett Cole, counting the ones
who ride inside their mothers and have not yet done anything to deserve this
country." Something moved in his face then, not softness — the iron under
the courtesy showing its edge. "I will not pretend to you that they are only an
escort. You are meant to see them. A man who hides his strength from the
man he asks a favor is already planning to steal the favor if it is refused. I am
not planning. I am asking. But I will not insult you by pretending the asking
comes with nothing behind it but my good nature."
Emmett was quiet a moment. He was thinking of a road twenty years gone, a
wagon box with arrows in it, a partner he had buried with his own hands in
ground so hard the grave was a rumor of a grave. He was thinking that the
men who did that had worn paint like the men on his ridges, and that this old
man in front of him knew it or guessed it, and had come down alone anyway,
and put his hand on the well curb, and told his bad news straight.
"Say the rest of it," Emmett said.
"I ask water as a guest asks, under the law. It is the law of my people that a
man who comes to a well in peace and asks may not be refused and live in
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his own mind afterward. I believe it is also the law of yours, though your
people write it in a book and mine carry it in the chest. We will pay. Horses
— good ones, not the poor ones we cannot feed through a dry year. Work —
my young men will mend your fences until they stand better than you built
them, and you built them well, I have seen them. And a guard on your
borders, day and night, while we are in your country, so that no man of any
color troubles what is yours. And this word, which I give you before my
riders, who can hear a shout from the ridge if I choose to shout it: no armed
man of mine will cross your fence without your leave. Not for water, not for
shade, not for a lost child. Your leave first."
He did not raise his voice on any of it. He laid it out like a man laying out
tools on a blanket, each one where it could be seen.
Emmett looked down at the ladle in his hand. Yesterday he had filled it for a
wounded stranger because her lips were cracked white and her eyes had not
begged, and it had seemed the smallest transaction in the world, a cup of
water, nothing owed. Now the cup had three hundred people standing behind
it, and a dying spring, and a chief who dealt in treaties at a wellhead, and
there was no road back to the size of yesterday. He thought of Martha, who
had a saying for moments that grew larger than the man inside them: you
don't get to choose the size of a thing you start, she'd say, you only get to
choose whether you start it honest.
"Then we'll talk about how," Emmett said. "Because a well isn't a river, and