medicine pouch she produced a tin of salve, and he spread it gently while she
watched his face instead of her hand, the way people do when they're
deciding whether to trust the gentleness.
They spent the night in the cabin with the smell of smoke in everything.
Dokan took first watch on the porch with his rifle, motionless as the rock
he'd been raised among. Silas sat at the table and checked the copied pages
by candlelight, smoothing each one flat, reading the names again as if
repetition could make them less true. In her corner, Saya slept with her
crutch beside her and her good hand curled around the medicine pouch, and
her breathing β deep, even, unafraid β finally pulled him under too.
At false dawn he woke to find her already up, the horses saddled, her face set
like a stone in a wall.
Silas looked at the ruined barn β two months of work, the winter hay, his
spare harness, the loft where he'd slept his first summer in this country β
and felt the grief move through him and come out the other side as something
harder. Behind him, Dokan was already checking the horses' legs with the
thoroughness of a man preparing for a long ride.
"No more waiting," Silas said.
"No," Saya agreed. "No more waiting."
73
They rode for Juniper Flats at false dawn, all three of them β Saya on the
paint mare with her crutch tied alongside the saddle, her leg holding, her
medicine pouch thumping against her hip with every stride. Silas had argued.
He had argued strenuously, and at length, and with what he'd felt were
excellent points about rest and healing and the stupidity of riding thirty miles
on a half-mended leg.
Saya had listened to all of it, and then she had said, "It is my evidence too."
That had been the end of the arguing.
The trail west ran through country Silas knew the way he knew his own
hands β every water hole, every grade, every place a wagon could mire in
spring. They made good time, changing the lead, resting the horses at noon in
the shade of a sandstone overhang. Saya's face was pale by midafternoon but
her jaw was set, and when Silas offered to stop she looked at him as if he'd
suggested they turn around and go home.
"Your leg," he said quietly, riding close.
"My leg is my concern."
"It is also, I notice, swelling."
She glanced down, annoyed to find he was right β the ankle above the
bandage had puffed. From her pouch she took dried willow bark and chewed
it with an expression of profound displeasure, the way a person does
something necessary and resents the necessity.
"When this is done," Silas said, "I'm going to say 'I told you so' for a very
long time."
"When this is done," Saya said, "you will be too relieved to lecture anyone."
They camped the first night in a hollow of red rock, and Saya β pale,
74
stubborn, refusing to admit the leg was singing β let Silas build the fire up a
little bigger than caution allowed, because there was no one left to be
cautious of except the dark itself.
"What happens after?" she asked, when the coffee was going. "After the
marshal. After Hale."
Silas looked at Dokan, who was cleaning his rifle with the methodical
patience of a man who intended to need it working.
"After," Silas said carefully, "you go home with your brother, if that's what
you want. The cabin's yours as long as you want it. The garden β" he almost
smiled, "β the garden's yours whether you want it or not. Somebody has to
tell me what half those plants are."
Saya was quiet a moment, looking up at the stars. "My brother taught me
those," she said, nodding at the sky. "He said the hunters put them there to
remember the way."
Silas thought of Lucy, six years old, asking him once whether the stars were
holes in the floor of heaven. He didn't say it aloud. Some memories were his
to carry, not to spend.
Then Saya said a word in her language, soft, and translated: "It means the
place you return to. Not a house. The place."
"The place you return to," Silas repeated, trying the shape of it, getting it
wrong, trying again while Dokan watched with the air of a man enjoying a
private joke.
She corrected him twice, gently, and on the third try nodded. "Close enough
that the place will know you mean it."
He thought about the promise then β not the grand kind men make standing
75
up, but the plain one he'd made in the shelter with fever in the air: then we
find out who's behind those traps. He'd kept it. Whatever came next, that part
was kept.
Juniper Flats showed itself at dusk on the second day: lamplight strung along
the main street, the assay office, the land office with its shutters closed, and
above it all, on the hill at the town's eastern edge, Ambrose Hale's fine house
with every lamp lit, glowing like a promise nobody out here could afford.
The marshal's office was a squat adobe building with a star nailed crooked
over the door. Inside, behind a desk buried in wanted circulars, sat a woman
in her fifties with a long gray braid and eyes that had seen every version of
trouble the territory could produce.
Marshal Ada Quinn listened to Silas's introduction without interrupting,
looked Dokan up and down once, and nodded at Saya's crutch with
something like respect. Then she held out her hand for the copied pages.
She read them the way a tracker reads sign β slowly, completely, missing
nothing. Silas watched her face change: the professional stillness giving way,
page by page, to something grimmer. When she reached the list of names β