The sun went down over Río Verde the way it always did in late summer: first the light turned the color of weak tea, then the Sangre de Cristos caught fire at their rims, and then the whole valley filled up with a blue so deep it seemed to rise out of the ground itself. Tala rode into it on Ceniza, her old gray mule, with her medicine bag thumping soft against her hip and six years of dust worked so far into the seams of her skirt that no washing would ever take it out again.
She had been to Río Verde once before, three years back, when the copper camp up the canyon still had men in it. The camp was played out now. The town remained — a single rutted street, a church with a bell that leaned, a rail spur that ended in weeds, and the false-fronted stores wearing their paint like aging women wear rouge: hopefully, and from a distance.
What she had not seen before was the livery stable at the far end of the street, and she would not have stopped there at all except that the sound found her first — the flat, wet crack of leather on skin, and then a boy's bitten-off cry.
Tala reined Ceniza to a halt.
In the stable yard, a thick-necked man in a stained apron stood over a boy of about fourteen, a harness strap in his fist. A feed sack lay burst at the boy's feet, oats scattered across the packed dirt like spilled coins. The boy was curled around his middle, one arm thrown up to shield his face, and there was blood on his mouth.
"Please," the boy said. "It tore. I didn't — the sack tore, I swear it —"
"The sack tore," the liveryman said, "because little thieves drag it."
The strap came up again. Tala was off the mule before it came down.
"Stop." She did not raise her voice. In six years of walking into mining camps and rail gangs and ranch bunkhouses, she had learned that a quiet voice in a violent yard carries farther than a shout. "The oats are spilled. Beating the boy won't unspill them."
The liveryman turned, strap still raised, and looked her over — the travel-worn skirt, the graying braid, the leather bag with its pouches and stoppered bottles. "This ain't your business, woman."
"Then make it mine." She bent, scooped a handful of the scattered oats, and let them run through her fingers back onto the pile. "How much was in the sack?"
"What?"
"How much. Name a price."
He stared at her. "Two bits."
Tala fished in her skirt pocket and held out the coins. "The oats are paid for," she said. "The boy is not yours to price."
For a moment she thought he would use the strap on her instead. Then something in her face — she had seen that calculation before, in harder men than a liveryman — told him the price of it, and he snatched the coins and spat into the dirt.
"Get him out of my sight. He sleeps in the loft. He works it off."
"He'll sleep where he's put," Tala said evenly, "and he'll work. But not tonight."
She knelt beside the boy. Up close he was thinner than she'd thought, all wrists and elbows, with a split lip swelling fast and one eye already darkening at the corner. But it was his eyes that stopped her hand for half a breath: too still, too far away, the pupils pinned small in the failing light. She had seen that look in rail camps and company towns. She knew what made it.
"I'm Tala," she said. "Let me see your mouth."
He flinched when she touched his chin, then held still — a boy practiced at holding still. She cleaned the split lip with water from her canteen and pressed yarrow into it, her fingers gentle and quick.
"What's your name?"
"Tomás."
"Tomás, I'm going to hold your wrist a moment. It will help me steady your head."
It was a lie, and a small one, and she forgave herself for it. She needed his wrist. When she turned it, there it was on the pale inside skin, faded to the color of old bruise: H-17, inked in a clerk's careful hand.
Her own hand did not tremble. Six years had taught it not to.
"How long have you been at the livery, Tomás?"
"Two months." He tried to sit up straighter and was betrayed by a cough — a dry, scraping thing that doubled him over and left him gasping. "It's nothing. Dust."
Dust, she thought, and leaned closer as if to listen to his chest, and breathed in. Under the dust and the blood and the boy-sweat, sweet and sharp as a struck match: paregoric. Camphorated opium. The cough syrup of every company doctor west of the Pecos.
They dosed him. They were still dosing him.
"Tomás." She kept her voice level. "This cough — how long?"
"Since the Home." He said it the way other boys said "since the fever" or "since my father died" — a place in time, not a place on earth. "Everybody coughs there. They give us medicine for it. It helps us sleep."
The Ashford cough, Tala thought, and the name rose in her like something she'd been waiting six years to say aloud. But she said nothing yet. "Open your mouth," she said instead, and gave him a lozenge of honey and horehound from her bag. "Real medicine. Chew it slow."
He chewed, suspicious, then surprised. "It doesn't taste like the other."
"No," she said. "It doesn't."
The liveryman's wife came to the door then — a tired woman with a knee swollen thick as a fence post, moving like every step was a negotiation.
"Can you do anything for this?" she asked, without much hope. "The doctor in Las Vegas wanted two dollars just to look at it."
Tala knelt, unlaced the woman's boot with care, and palpated the joint — hot, fluid-filled, the kneecap floating. "Water on the knee. I can draw some of it out and give you something for the pain. It won't make you young again, señora, but it will get you to church without crying."