Six months later, the white building on the hill stood empty.
Tala rode past it on her mule one October morning, on her way back from a confinement case at the copper camp, and she looked up at it the way you look at a scar — acknowledging it, no longer flinching. The Foundling Home of Río Verde. The shutters were closed. The flower beds had gone to weed. Someone had taken down the sign by the gate, leaving four pale nail holes in the post like a small, surprised face. The territory had seized the property to settle the fines, and no buyer had come forward. People in Río Verde had developed a sudden, convenient blindness about that particular hill.
Victoria Ashford had not been so fortunate in her blindness.
The trial had been in Santa Fe, in a federal courtroom with high windows, and it had lasted eleven days. Tala had sat in the second row through all of them, Paloma beside her, Jonah on her other side with his hat turning slowly in his hands. They had brought the placement ledgers in on a hand truck — all of them, every page, names and numbers and prices and the signatures of the men who had paid. Rosa had testified, her voice shaking but never stopping, about the laudanum and the night transfers. Tomás — fifteen now, and furious at the witness stand in the way only a boy who has decided to be brave can be furious — had told the court about H-17 and the hatch under the wagon bed. Jonah had told them about the schedules he had written, his voice flat, his right hand shaking against the rail, and when the prosecutor asked him why he had come forward, he had said, "Because I was the man who wrote them, and I am trying to be a different man now."
And Tala had brought the small brown bottle, and the testimony of a dead child, and six years of names.
Victoria Ashford was convicted of trafficking in children and of fraud against the United States, and she was sentenced to twenty years in the territorial prison at Yuma. She had listened to the sentence without expression, the way she had listened to everything — and then, as the marshals led her away, she had looked back once, directly at Tala, and Tala had seen in her eyes not remorse but a terrible, bewildered incomprehension, as if the world had changed its rules in the middle of her game and no one had thought to tell her.
Mrs. Quill had fled on the second day of the trial and was believed to be in Mexico. The Reverend Oates had resigned his pulpit and left the territory. Sheriff Boone had lost the autumn election to a young deputy who campaigned on a single promise, printed on a single handbill: *I work for Río Verde.*
Tala rode on past the empty hill, and did not look back again.
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The house at the edge of town had been a saddler's shop before the saddler drank himself into the grave, and it had stood vacant for two years with pigeons in the rafters and dust an inch thick on the floor. Now it was whitewashed inside and out, and the front room held six cots with clean blankets, and the back room smelled of dried herbs and lye soap, and over the door hung a sign that stopped traffic on slow afternoons.
It was a wagon wheel — an old one, the wood gone silver with age, the iron tire rusted at the rim. Jonah had spent three weeks on it in his shop, truing it and sanding it and carving the letters deep into the hub with a gouge, filling the cuts with lampblack so they would read from the street. CASA DE TALA, it said, in letters a child could read. And beneath, smaller: HEALING.
People came. They came with fevers and broken bones and babies crowning too fast. They came with coughs and cuts and the thousand small calamities of a hard country. They came, some of them, because they remembered calling her *bruja* and wanted to be forgiven without having to ask — and Tala, who had learned the difference between a wound and a punishment, treated them exactly the same as everyone else. That was her answer, and it was enough.
On market days the front room filled before the lamps were lit. A copper miner with a hand crushed between two ore carts, white-faced, trying not to cry in front of his son. A girl of sixteen, big with her first child and terrified of it, who held Paloma's hand through the whole of the labor and afterward named the baby for her. An old prospector with a cough like gravel in a tin cup, who paid in stories because he had nothing else, and whose stories Rosa wrote down on the backs of flour sacks because, she said, somebody ought to remember them. Tala moved among them the way she had always moved among the sick — unhurried, certain, her hands smelling of herbs — and Paloma moved beside her, learning the rhythm of it: when to speak and when to be quiet, when to hold a hand and when to fetch the hot water. Healing, Tala told her, was mostly paying attention. The medicine did the rest, if you let it.
On this particular October morning, Paloma was in the back room, grinding feverfew with a mortar and pestle, her dark hair tied back with a strip of blue cloth. She worked slowly, carefully, the way Tala had taught her — *the medicine knows when you are hurrying, and it hurries too, and that is when it harms* — and she was humming.
It was the lullaby. All the way through now, the words right, the rhythm steady. She had been humming it for weeks, first unconsciously, then — when she caught herself — defiantly, as if daring the memory to stay.