cupped hands side by side, water running down their chins, and felt
something loosen in his chest that had been tight for longer than he could
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remember. Saya knelt at the creek's edge and filled her palms and drank, and
then she did something that made him catch his breath: she beckoned to him,
and when he knelt beside her, she lifted water to his mouth in her cupped
hands, the way her people did for someone they were welcoming home.
He drank. The water was cold and tasted of stone and snowmelt.
On the ride back they passed a rusted trap, still set, half-buried in the grass
near the old trail β one of Hale's, or some hunter's, it didn't matter. Silas
reined Slate to a stop, dismounted, and with a long stick tripped the jaws.
They snapped shut on nothing, loud in the quiet afternoon. He stood looking
at it for a moment, thinking of Saya's leg, of the scars she would carry, of all
the things in this country that waited with iron teeth for the unwary.
"No more traps," he said quietly, and left it sprung and harmless in the grass,
and they rode on.
He went to the cottonwood alone, the next morning. He had known, riding
out to the springs, that this was coming β the last thing, the hardest thing,
the thing he had been walking around for eight years the way you walk
around a grave.
The two mounds lay under the tree as they always had, the stones he had set
grown into the earth now, moss at their edges. Martha. Lucy. He sat down
between them, the way he had sat a hundred times, and for a long while he
said nothing, listening to the wind move through the leaves overhead β that
particular cottonwood sound, like water, like whispering.
Then he spoke. Aloud. The whole truth, at last, with no one to hear it but
them and the wind.
"I chose," he said. "That day. I heard about the bridge, and I rode
downstream to warn the families, and I knew β I knew the water was
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coming fast, and I went anyway, and I didn't come back in time." His voice
broke, steadied. "I've told myself for eight years that I should have stayed.
That a better man would have stayed. But the families downstream lived
because I rode, Martha. The Jensens' boys. The widow Alvarado. They
lived." He pressed his palms to his eyes. "And I would choose it again. God
forgive me, I would choose it again, even knowing the price. That's the part
I've never been able to say."
The wind moved through the leaves. It sounded, absurdly, mercifully, like an
answer.
"I'm asking your forgiveness," he said quietly, "not for choosing. For
surviving it. For the eight years after β for drinking, for drifting, for being
half a man at a half-lived homestead. You deserved better from the years I
had left. Lucy deserved a father who was alive, even if she wasn't."
He sat with that for a while. A hawk turned slow circles above the canyon
mouth.
"There's someone," he said at last, and found, to his astonishment, that he
was smiling β smiling, here, at this spot, for the first time in eight years.
"Her name is Saya. She's a healer. She'd have liked you, Martha β she'd
have argued with you about poultices and won. And Lucy β" His throat
closed. "Lucy would have followed her around like a puppy."
He told them about the promise. About Dokan, and the red notebook, and the
springs running free. About the way Saya hummed when she worked, and the
way Slate had gone fat and glossy, and the medicine garden she was planting
by the cabin.
"I kept a promise, Martha," he said. "A real one. To the living." He touched
the stones, one and then the other, gently, the way you'd touch a sleeping
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child's forehead. "I think β I think you'd be glad I finally learned how."
He left a sprig of the bitter herbs from Saya's pouch on each mound β her
idea, when he'd told her where he was going that morning; she had pressed
them into his hand without a word, understanding everything β and he
walked back to Slate feeling lighter than he had in eight years, as if he had
set down something he had carried so long he'd forgotten it was heavy.
Dokan's people broke camp three days later, bound for the summer hunting
grounds in the high country. The morning of the leaving, Dokan came to the
homestead alone, leading his pony, and found Silas mending harness by the
cabin door while Saya worked in the new medicine garden, her leg β healed
now, though it would always ache before rain β folded under her as she
pressed seedlings into the dark earth.
Dokan watched his sister for a moment, and something in his face softened.
Then he turned to Silas.
"It is time," he said.
Silas set the harness down and stood. He had been dreading this and
expecting it in equal measure, the way you dread and expect the first frost.
Dokan held out his forearm, and Silas gripped it, wrist to wrist, the way
Dokan had taught him that first night by the fire.
"You kept your word," Dokan said. "All of it. You said you would see her
safe, and she stands here whole. You said you would finish it, and Hale
wears irons." His dark eyes held Silas's. "That is rare among your people."
Silas started to protest, and Dokan raised his other hand.
"It is not rare among mine," Dokan said. "But I honor it anyway."
He turned to Saya then, and spoke to her in their own tongue, low and quick,
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and she answered the same way, and whatever passed between them made