She listened with her arms crossed and her face still, then went to Tsala without appearing to hurry. Eli stood at the edge of that conversation and followed enough of it to get the shape. Scouts to the high draws, women and children to the upper hollow, warriors positioned along the three main approach routes. It was a practice thing, a plan run before, refined through use. Watching it move with that calm efficiency told him something he filed away, that this band had survived this exact kind of threat before and had survived it by being better prepared than whoever was coming.
Tsala looked at Eli, said something in Chiricahua about the eastern trail, the draw where Eli had found the sign, which offered a line of sight down the whole lower approach. Eli said, "Yes." No hesitation. He meant it the way he had meant the refusal at Sulphur Springs, not a decision requiring deliberation, just a statement of what he already was. He spent the next 2 hours in a juniper thicket above the draw with a rifle borrowed from a warrior named Chato, watching the trail below.
The scalp hunters came at first light, moving in loose file. Eight of them, exactly as he had guessed from the sign. They came around the lower bend without caution, in the unhurried way of men who don't expect to be watched before they're ready to be seen. What happened in the next 15 minutes was fast and not clean, and he did not feel good about any of it afterward, which was, he thought, probably the correct response. Three of the eight turned back in the first minute when shots broke from the rocks above camp.
Two more scattered east toward the lower desert and did not come back. The remaining three made a push toward the high hollow before Chato's men drove them off the trail with fire from three positions. Nobody in the camp was killed. One of the band's younger warriors took a round across the shoulder, not deep, that Itsa packed and dressed before the sun was fully up. She worked quickly and without fuss, talking to the warrior in a low, steady voice the whole time.
Eli held what she needed and handed things to her without being asked, and tried not to think about the men down in the draw. The three who had scattered east would reach a settlement within 2 days. He knew that. Whatever quiet the band had kept in that part of the dragoons was probably finished now. He told Itsa that afternoon, straight, without softening it.
She said, "We know." He said, "I can't be the reason they find this camp. I won't be what leads soldiers here." She looked at him and said, "Are you leaving?" The question was simple.
Her face was its usual steady surface, but he had been watching her face for 6 weeks by then, long enough to read what wasn't on it, the careful stillness she put up when something mattered and she didn't want it to show. He said, "No, I'm staying. I wanted you to know that I understand what that means." She held his gaze and said, "I know what it means, too." He said, "Then we understand each other."
She said, "We have for a while." They stood in the afternoon shade for a moment, and then she went back to her patients, and he went to help Chato's men cover the camp's tracks in the eastern draw. Neither said anything else because there was nothing left to say on the subject. The camp moved 3 days later, north and west into a new canyon that the band knew and Eli was still learning. It took two full days, the practiced work of people who had survived by being willing to unroot themselves without making a ceremony of the grief.
Eli worked alongside the band's men both days, carrying and lashing and driving the horse herd through the narrow trail, and felt the satisfaction of a body working hard at something that needed doing. Tsala said four words to him on the second morning. Itsa translated. He said, "You carry like someone who intends to stay." Eli said, "Tell him he's right."
The new canyon was cooler, walls high enough to block the late afternoon sun, a spring running cold even in August. The band settled in within 3 days. The rhythms came back fast, the way they do when people have long practice at making home from whatever the land offers. About a week after the move, Tsala called a gathering and spoke for a long time about the land and its changes, about what survival required, about the warriors who had held the eastern draw. He spoke about Hadesta's healed arm.
He spoke about the man who had stood on the trail that morning and fired when he didn't have to. Then he looked at Eli and said a sentence that Itsa translated quietly. The camp claims him. No ceremony was made of it. The gathering just shifted in a small, definite way, the way a group shifts when the last point of argument is taken off the table.
The men around the fire looked at Eli with the uncomplicated directness of men who have made a decision and are done deliberating. The women went back to their work. The children who had been watchful at the edges of things moved a few steps closer, the way children do when the adults have decided something is safe. That night at the fire, the silence between Eli and Itsa had a different quality. Settled, finally.
The difference between two people still deciding and two people who have decided and who both know it. He said, "You never asked me if I wanted to be your husband." She said, "No." He said, "I'm telling you now that I do." She looked at him for a long moment in the firelight.
Her face did something it rarely did, a slight softening around the eyes, a giving way of the controlled steadiness she wore, as naturally as most people wear their expressions. She said, "I I know." He said, "Is that an answer?" She said, "It's the only one I have." He put his hand flat on the ground between them.
After a moment, she placed her hand over his and they sat that way while the fire burned down, the camp moving through its quiet sounds around them, and neither spoke because there was nothing left to decide. Before the ceremony, there were things to arrange. Itsa explained the obligations carefully over several evenings, and he listened the way he listened to everything she taught him, without interrupting, asking questions only when she paused and looked at him to see if he had followed. There were gifts to be made and received, acknowledgements that had to pass through the proper hands before anything could be considered settled. Eli spent two weeks braiding a set of horse hobbles from good rawhide for Itsa's nephew, another week repairing a cracked rifle stock for one of the elders, fitting a new piece of cherry wood, shaping it with a borrowed knife until it sat right.