She slept. He kept watch until the gray came up, and by then he knew what
they had to do.
The riders had passed within a hundred yards of the shelter in the night.
Maybe less. Silas had found their sign at the spring β three horses, one with
a damaged rear shoe β and men who rode that close once would ride that
close again.
"We can't stay," he told Saya when she woke, the morning light thin and cold
at the mouth of the overhang. Her fever had eased a fraction in the night, but
her leg was still swollen tight against the splint, and her color was bad.
"I know," she said.
"My homestead. Mouth of CaΓ±on Seco. Half a day if we go slow, and we'll
go slow."
She studied him. "Your riders will look there first. A man's home is the first
place."
25
"They don't know about me yet," Silas said. "All they know is somebody cut
a trap and took their prisoner. They don't know who, or where." He checked
the tightness of the bandage, his hands careful. "One more day here and that
changes. The longer we sit, the smaller this canyon gets."
"Today, then."
"Not today." He met her eyes. "You can't ride today. That leg won't take a
horse, and that fever won't take the sun. We go at first light tomorrow. I'll
risk the night here β I'll post myself at the mouth and Slate'll hear anything
on four legs before I do."
She was quiet a moment. Then: "You decide quickly for a man who asks
permission to move a blanket."
"I decide about ground and weather," Silas said. "People decide about
themselves." He tucked the blanket around her splinted leg. "I'm not telling
you what to do, Saya. I'm telling you what I see."
Something shifted in her face β the same look she'd had yesterday when
he'd said most men ought to learn. Respect, and underneath it something
warier, like a person setting down a weight she hadn't known she was
carrying.
"Tomorrow at first light," she said.
"Tomorrow."
He spent the day making ready. He re-splinted her leg with fresh-cut pine
and strips torn from his spare shirt, and she supervised every knot with the
severity of a general, which made him grin despite himself. He boiled water
and packed her medicine bundles in oilcloth, and as he worked she told him
about the pouch β her mother's pouch, worn soft as cloth, the charcoal
26
marks her own hand now.
"My mother taught me the plants. My grandmother taught me the patience."
Saya watched his hands, correcting his folding with a look. "When my
mother died, the elders said the medicine chooses its keeper. It chose me. I
was nineteen. I thought I knew everything." Her mouth twisted. "The first
winter, a child died of a fever I couldn't break, and I learned I knew nothing.
That is the real teaching β the one that costs."
Silas tied off the oilcloth and set the pouch gently in her lap. "You kept going
anyway."
"The sick don't wait for you to feel ready." She met his eyes. "Neither do
traps, apparently."
He huffed a laugh despite himself, and she smiled β small, tired, real β and
for a moment the shelter felt less like a hiding place and more like a camp.
He walked the canyon mouth twice, memorizing the approaches, and set
Slate's picket where the gelding would catch any scent on the night wind.
At dusk he built the fire small and fed her broth from his own cup β the
dented tin one, not the clean one. She noticed.
"You have a clean cup," she said. "I've seen it. On the shelf in your pack."
"It's for company."
"I am company."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he got up, went to his pack, and
came back with the clean cup β white enamel, unchipped, the one thing he
owned that Martha had picked out and he'd never once used, not in eight
years.
27
He poured her broth into it.
Saya held the cup in both hands and looked at it, and then at him, and said
nothing at all. But she drank every drop.
They left at first light, and it was the hardest half-day Silas could remember.
He'd rigged a pad of blankets behind his saddle, and Saya rode pillion with
her splinted leg braced against his stirrup leather, her arms locked around his
waist. She was light β too light, fever had burned the flesh off her β but
every jolt of Slate's walk went through her like a hammer strike, and by the
second hour her nails were digging into his coat and her breath was coming
in short, controlled bursts that scared him more than screaming would have.
"Talk to me," she said through her teeth, somewhere past the third ridge.
"Your foolish words. Anything."
So he talked. He told her about freighting β the mule teams, the alkali dust
of the long hauls, the cook on the Barlow run who could make beans taste
like sin and redemption both. He told her about the time a mule named
Providence sat down in the middle of a river crossing and refused to move
for two hours while the whole team stood in water up to their bellies. He kept
his voice steady and easy, the way you'd talk to a spooked horse, and he
steered around the one subject the way you'd steer around a washout.
Until she asked.
"Your wife," Saya said. Her voice was thin with pain and fever both. "And
your daughter. You carry them the way I carry this leg. Tell me plainly, Silas
Wren."
Slate plodded on. The canyon walls leaned in, red rock going gold in the
morning sun.
28
"Piedra Creek," Silas said at last. "Eight years ago. Spring storm, the kind
that comes once in a lifetime. I rode out to warn the families downstream β