"Now, this moment. Ethan's heart was doing something strange and urgent in his chest. 25 years old and never married. Always telling himself there was plenty of time for that later. He kept pushing later further and further down the road.
He thought of the girl in the canyon. Her small fists gripping his shirt like he was the only solid thing left in the world. He thought of the route home. He said yes. Chaska called out a single order in Apache.
Two elderly women came out from a tent across the open ground. Between them walked a figure covered entirely in a bright and heavy blanket. Red and yellow and deep blue all together. It covered everything from the crown of her head down to her feet. Ethan felt his legs go uncertain beneath him right then.
He steadied himself hard. He told his face to stay completely neutral. He had said yes, and he was going to honor that. Whatever was under that blanket, he would deal with it straight. Scar, deformity, something worse he could not yet imagine.
He was going to stand here and not flinch. He had made a deal and he kept his word. That was something he still had. One of the old women reached up and took the edge of the blanket. Ethan breathed in slowly.
The blanket fell. He blinked. Then blinked again. He had braced every muscle in his body for something terrible. And what stood before him in the morning light of that Apache camp?
What stood there and looked back at him with complete composure? Was the most beautiful woman he had seen in all his 25 years of living. Hair black as a night without a single star falling straight past her waist. Her features were clean and precisely made as good stonework. High cheekbones and a firm and perfectly shaped mouth.
Skin the deep and warm color of good earth after a soaking rain. She wore a traditional Apache dress and her figure beneath it was strong and slender. No marks, no scars, nothing wrong. Nothing wrong at all. Ethan stood there with his mouth slightly open.
He felt like a man who had spent a full hour bracing for a bad fall and then discovered the floor was perfectly solid after all. Then she looked at him. Her eyes were dark amber, almost brown, catching the desert light beautifully. They did not look at him the way a woman looks at a stranger she is meeting. They looked at him the way a person looks at a problem to be solved.
Flat, patient, measuring carefully. Not afraid at all, not curious. She was simply looking at him with those extraordinary eyes and she appeared to find him entirely unremarkable. Ethan had never been so completely evaluated and so quickly dismissed. Nahimana, Chaska announced clearly.
This is Ethan Miller. He saved your niece from the canyon today. He is now your husband. Nahimana held Ethan's gaze for exactly 3 seconds. Then she looked away.
The ceremony happened the following morning at first light. The sun came up red over the eastern ridge of the canyon. Chaska stood before them with a length of braided leather cord in his hands. He wrapped it once around Ethan's right wrist and Nahimana's left wrist. He spoke words in Apache that Ethan could not follow at all.
His voice was low and formal and carried the weight of very old things. Then he cut the cord with a clean single stroke of his knife. He pressed the cut cord into Ethan's open palm. Now you are one, Chaska said quietly. He looked at Ethan with those still and sharp eyes.
Take care of her. White man, she is worth more than you know. During the entire ceremony, Nahimana had not looked at Ethan once. Not when the cord was tied around their wrists. Not when the old words were spoken.
Not when the cord was cut. She looked straight ahead at a point somewhere beyond all of them. When it was done, she was already walking toward the horses. She mounted in one single fluid motion that took no effort to witness. No hands on the saddle horn.
No pause or hesitation of any kind. Ground to seat in one clean arc that came from a lifetime spent riding. She did not look back to check if he was following her. Ethan stood there holding a short piece of braided leather cord. He looked at it lying in his open palm for a moment.
Then he mounted Luther and followed her west into the morning. They rode for 2 hours in absolute silence. The desert moved past them without any comment. Red rock and pale scrub brush and wide open blue sky above. A hawk made long lazy circles somewhere high overhead.
The trail was narrow and the dust rose under the horses' feet. Ethan watched the straight back of her head and thought hard. He tried twice to open a conversation between them. Nahimana. I'm sorry if this isn't what you wanted at all.
I'll do right by you. That I can promise you. Nothing. Her eyes stayed on the trail ahead of them. Her back was perfectly straight and entirely still.
You could at least look at me now and then. I'm not going to disappear on you. Nothing. He let it go after that. He told himself there were worse things than a quiet companion on a long trail.
He told himself she would talk when she was ready. He told himself a lot of different things during that long desert ride. He did not entirely believe any of them. Then she stopped her horse without any warning at all. She was off the animal before he had registered that she had even pulled up.
She knelt in the red trail dust and pressed her flat hand to the ground. Her fingers moved across the surface with slow and deliberate precision. She read the ground the way a careful scholar reads a very difficult page. She studied the depth and angle and direction of the marks in the dust. She leaned close and examined something that only she could see clearly.