Aikens watching him in the mirror.
She listened without moving. When he finished, she said, "Twelve filings.
And the Garzas' chickens still in the coop."
"Quill didn't say that part out loud. His spectacles did."
"He is afraid."
"Everybody's afraid. Felipe's afraid and he gave me his hammer anyway."
Silas sat on the porch step and rubbed Slate's nose when the gelding ambled
over. "Pell's the key, Saya. That book's got every mark, every deal. Without
it we've got a healer's word and a hermit's suspicion. With it we've got Hale."
She nodded slowly. "Pell's camp. I watched him work the east line, before
the trap. Two days east, in the draw below Red Mesa β" She caught herself;
that was her people's name for it, and she translated: "below the red butte. A
tent, a cookfire, two guards at most. He trusts the country to hide him."
"Then that's where we go."
"We." She looked at him levelly. "You and Dokan."
As if the name had called him, the stacked stones by the creek β the sign
Dokan had left, the sign Saya had answered by restacking them in the agreed
pattern β seemed to lean a little straighter in the moonlight. Or maybe Silas
only imagined it. He was tired, and tired men see signs.
He wasn't imagining the figure that came up the trail at moonrise.
It moved the way Saya moved when she was being careful β no wasted
motion, eyes always working β and Silas felt something tighten in his chest
that wasn't fear, exactly. It was the feeling of a thing he'd been carrying alone
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for weeks finally being set down where other hands could reach it. He'd been
the only one who knew she was alive, the only wall between her and Hale's
men, and he'd been proud of that and terrified of it in equal measure, and
now here came her brother out of the moonlight to share the weight.
Slate snorted first. Silas was on his feet with the rifle before the shape
resolved β a man, alone, walking in the open with his hands visible and
empty, which was either brave or stupid, and Silas had learned that with
Dokan's people it was usually brave.
"Inside," Silas said quietly to Saya, but she was already in the doorway, on
her crutch, and she wasn't moving.
"Dokan," she said.
The man stopped ten yards from the porch. He was younger than Silas had
expected β thirty, maybe β with Saya's dark eyes and a knife at his belt
that his hand was resting on, not gripping, but resting on. His gaze went from
Silas to the rifle to Saya, and his whole body changed when it landed on her.
Then Silas did the thing he had decided to do an hour earlier, lying awake
planning it: he set the rifle down against the porch rail, stepped off the porch
with his hands open, picked up the water dipper from the bench, and held it
out.
Dokan didn't move. The hand stayed on the knife.
"Your sister's alive because she fought a trap for two days and then fought
me for another three," Silas said. "The water's clean. Drink or don't. I'm not
armed."
For a long moment nobody breathed. Then Dokan stepped forward, took the
dipper, drank, and handed it back. His eyes never left Silas's face.
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"He says," Saya said from the doorway, "that if you are lying, the knife is
faster than forgiveness."
"Tell him I appreciate the honesty."
She spoke in their language, quick and low. Dokan's hand came off the knife.
He crossed the yard in four strides and caught his sister as she came down
the steps on her crutch, and the reunion was fierce and brief and entirely in
their language β her face pressed to his shoulder, his hand on the back of
her head, words Silas didn't need to understand to understand.
When they separated, Dokan looked at Silas for a long time. Then he said, in
careful, heavy English, "She says you cut the trap. She says you asked before
you touched her blanket."
"I did."
"Why?"
It was the same question Saya had asked, weeks ago, in the shelter. Silas
gave the same answer he'd given then, because it was still the only true one
he had.
"Seemed polite."
Dokan considered this. Then, to Silas's astonishment, he laughed β one
short bark β and said something to Saya that made her smile for the first
time since the riders had come.
"He says," Saya translated, "that you are either the most honest white man he
has met or the strangest. He has not decided."
"Fair."
They sat by the cold firepit, and Dokan talked, and Saya translated, and the
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night filled in around them. Hale's trappers had set the leg-holds along the
springs trails in the spring β not for game, for people, to frighten the
scattered families off the water. Esteban had been taken three weeks ago,
alive β Dokan's hunters had tracked the party to a line camp in the eastern
draws, five men, a cook, a locked tack shed that wasn't for tack. "He thinks,"
Saya said carefully, "that they keep him to work the stock. Until the filings
are final. Then β" She didn't finish. She didn't need to.
Dokan spoke again, at length, his voice low and even, and Saya translated in
pieces: the line camp sat in the eastern draws, a full day's ride past the red
butte β five of Hale's men, a cook, a string of horses, and a tack shed with a
padlocked door and a barred vent that no tack shed needed. Dokan's hunters
had watched for two nights. On the second night they had heard singing β
one voice, hoarse, in Spanish β coming from the shed. A shepherd's song.
Esteban's song; Dokan had heard him sing it at the springs when they were