the bridge was going, everybody knew it. Martha wanted me to stay. Lucy β
she was six β she hung on my coat and made me promise to be back before
dark."
He stopped. Slate's hooves scuffed the trail.
"The water came faster than anybody reckoned. Took the farmhouse clean
off its stones. I found Martha three days later, half a mile down. Lucy beside
her, under the cottonwood." His voice didn't break. That was the worst of it,
somehow β eight years and it still came out flat and plain, like reading a
manifest. "I warned eleven families that day. Most of them lived. That's the
arithmetic. It never once balanced."
Saya was quiet behind him for a long while. The only sounds were Slate's
breathing and the creak of leather.
Then she said, "My mother died two winters past. The coughing sickness.
She was the healer before me β she taught me the bundles, the leaves, which
roots to dig and which to leave. I held her hand for three days while she
drowned on dry land, and there was nothing in my pouch that could save
her." A pause. "Grief is a country, Silas. I have lived there too."
He didn't answer. There was nothing to answer. But something in his chest,
something that had been clenched like a fist for eight years, loosened one
finger.
By midday her fever was spiking again, and he could feel the heat of her
even through his coat. He found a stand of cottonwoods by a seep, got her
down as gently as he could, and unwrapped the splint to look. The leg was
angry β hot, swollen, the skin stretched shiny around the trap wound. She
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bit down on a strip of leather while he cleaned it and rewrapped it, her whole
body rigid, tears leaking silently from the corners of her eyes. She never
made a sound. That scared him worse than screaming would have.
"You're doing well," he told her, his own hands shaking as he tied the last
knot. "Better than well. Most men I freighted with would've been howling."
"Most men you freighted with," she said thinly, "were not healers being
judged by their own medicine."
He got water into her, and she dozed against his shoulder while Slate cropped
grass, the dun gelding's ears swiveling at every sound, standing guard the
way good horses do. In her sleep she murmured in her own tongue β soft,
urgent words he couldn't understand β and once she gripped his arm and
said, clear as day, "Not the little shoes. Don't take the little shoes."
Silas sat very still and held her hand until the dreaming passed, and thought
about blankets folded in an empty wagon, and about the arithmetic of
powerful men, and about how a woman who'd been in a steel trap three days
ago was now apologizing to him for being a burden.
"You're no burden," he said quietly, though she was asleep. "You're the first
thing in eight years that isn't."
They rode on.
The homestead sat at the mouth of CaΓ±on Seco the way a tired man sits down
β low, settled, done with pretending. A cabin of weathered pine logs, a
corral of juniper rails, a lean-to for Slate, a garden plot gone mostly to weeds.
Poor, but orderly: wood stacked square, tools hung straight, the door hung
true.
And beyond the corral, under a lone cottonwood, two small graves with
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stones set careful and level.
Silas felt Saya's arms tighten around his waist as Slate carried them past. He
didn't explain. She didn't ask. Some things the land said for itself.
He got her inside and onto his own bunk β the only bed β and she was too
far gone with fever and pain to argue. The cabin was one room with a stove,
a table, his bunk, Martha's old rocking chair, and shelves holding exactly
what a man needed and nothing he didn't. Saya took it in with half-lidded
eyes.
"You live like a man waiting to leave," she murmured.
"I live like a man who already did," Silas said, and went to boil water.
That night the fever came back hard, and the next day harder, and Silas
learned what it meant to nurse someone the way Saya had taught him β
clean boiled water, fresh cloth, her directions followed to the letter even
when his hands shook. She drifted in and out, sometimes lucid and giving
orders like a field surgeon, sometimes murmuring in her own tongue, once
crying out for her mother in a voice so young it stopped his heart.
On the second night, the fever broke.
He knew the moment it happened. He'd been dozing in Martha's rocking
chair, jerking awake every few minutes to check her, and sometime past
midnight he touched her forehead and found it cool and damp instead of
furnace-hot. She was sleeping β truly sleeping, deep and slack, her face
unknotted for the first time since he'd found her.
Silas sat in the rocking chair with his hands over his face and shook for a
while, silently, the way men shake when terror finally lets go of them. Then
he banked the stove, covered her with his own blanket on top of hers, and
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slept on the floor like a dead man until morning.
Before that β in the worst hour, when her breathing had gone shallow and
her skin burned his palm β he had knelt by the bunk and bargained the way
men bargain when there is no one to bargain with. He had sat up exactly once
before with someone burning like this: Lucy, age four, a summer fever,
Martha asleep on the other side of the bed and him holding a cool cloth to his
daughter's forehead all night, whispering that the river would wait, the