She came out of sleep the way wild animals do, not gradually but all at once, fully present, eyes open and fixed on him before her body had finished registering. Her body was moving. Her right hand found the leather parcel and pressed it harder against her ribs. Her left hand went to her coat pocket, and what it found there was a folding knife already open. Levi held his hands out where she could see them, palms forward, and kept still.
He was not armed with anything that mattered in the next few seconds except the low, careful voice he had been using. He used it now, telling her she was safe, that he had found her through the horse, that he was not going to touch her or the parcel or anything she wanted left alone. He had no idea if she spoke English. He talked anyway because silence felt like the wrong answer. She watched him for a long moment.
The knife stayed where it was. Your horse. He tilted his head toward the paint. She looked at the paint. Something moved in her expression, not softness exactly, but recognition of a particular kind.
She had a private name for that horse, which he would learn much later. She used it now quietly in Apache, and the paint's ears moved forward. Her name was Shenoa. That much came out in the first hour of Firelight, along with the fact that she could walk if she needed to, and that she was not going back toward Cimarron under any circumstances. Nothing else.
Not where she had come from, not how she had come by the wound, not what was in the leather parcel. she had not once released her grip on, even while unconscious, even while he was dressing her shoulder. Levi didn't push. He had learned from cattle and from his own history that pushing a frightened or wounded thing produced exactly two results, neither useful. Instead, he reheated the last of his trail coffee, black and gritty and nearly cold, and left the cup on a stone near enough that she could reach it without moving toward him. They spent the night on that mountain.
He slept in 2-hour stretches, keeping the fire up. Shenoa slept more than she was awake, which was the right medicine. When she was awake, she watched him with the cataloging attention he was getting used to, full, direct, without embarrassment. By morning, her fever had dropped enough that she could sit up without shaking. The color had come back to her face in a way that told him how frightened he had been by its absence.