30 seconds. Maybe a few less. She stood up cleanly. She pointed west without looking at him. She mounted her horse and turned off the main trail ahead of them.
She moved in a new direction without explaining a single thing. Ethan looked down the main trail stretching ahead of them. He looked at her retreating back, already moving away. He followed. An hour later, they came around a long and rocky ridge.
The main trail was visible below them, bending into a narrow cut in the rock, high canyon walls rising on both sides of it. No way out once a rider was inside that cut. And on the soft ground at the entrance to the cut, Ethan saw what she had read, deep and restless marks from many horses waiting there. A camp that had been in place a long time, and left not long ago. Someone had been waiting in that cut with patience, patient and quiet, waiting for exactly two riders coming from the east.
Ethan stared at those marks for a long moment. Then he looked at the back of Nahimana's head, already moving on without him. He said nothing. There was nothing adequate enough to say. They reached the ranch on the evening of the third day out.
The sun was going down behind the western ridge in deep layers of color. The ranch appeared below them as they came over the last low rise, a two-room house built from pine timber, gone gray with weather and time, a stable with six stalls and a roof that wanted attention, a barn that leaned just slightly east but had not given way yet. A corral where four horses stood watching them arrive with mild interest. Ethan pulled up outside the front gate. "This is your home now," he said.
He said it the way a man says something he is not fully sure of yet. Nahimana did not respond. She was already studying the property with that same measuring expression. Her eyes moved across the roofline of the main house. They moved to the pitch of the barn roof and the angle of it.
They moved to the condition of the corral posts and the gate hinges. She was cataloging everything in front of her without rushing. Then she dismounted and led her horse to the stable without being told where it was. Ethan followed her. In she went through each stall with the eyes of someone who has worked many stables.
She ran her hand along each wall and checked the grain of the wood. She pressed against every hinge of every stall door and tested their hold carefully. She gathered a handful of stored hay and let it fall through her fingers. She smelled it and let it go. Then her eyes went up to the ceiling.
The two main beams that ran the full width of the stable above them. She looked at them for a long and careful moment. Then she looked at Ethan. Then back at the beams. She shook her head slowly once.
"Those beams are fine. Ethan said. "I put them in myself. Two years back. She looked at him with an expression that was not quite pity and not quite contempt.
It lived somewhere uncomfortable between those two things. Then she picked up her travel bag and walked out of the stable. The message was plain enough. She had warned him. What he did with that warning was his own affair entirely.
Inside the house, Ethan showed her around in less than 4 minutes. There was not much to show her. Two rooms, a kitchen that also served as the main living space, a fireplace built from river stone, a rough-hewn table with two chairs, a sofa against the far wall where he slept most nights. One bedroom with a better mattress than the sofa. "You take the bedroom." he said.
"I'll be fine out here. I've slept on this sofa plenty of nights. He kept talking after that moment. He said more words than he needed to by a considerable amount. He said he had no expectations of her at all.
He said she could take all the time she needed to settle in here. He said the things that nervous men say when the silence grows too large to cross. Nahimana walked into the bedroom without looking back at him. She set her travel bag down on the floor. She closed the door behind her, not with anger, not with force of any kind, just closed it the way you close something you are done addressing for now.
Ethan stood in the kitchen and looked at that closed door for a while. Then he sat down on the sofa and looked at the wall instead. Night came down over the desert fast, the way it always does in September. The air outside dropped 20° in under an hour. Inside the house settled and creaked softly in the cooling dark.
Ethan lit one candle and sat with it burning low on the table. He could not sleep. He lay on the sofa and listened to everything around him, the desert insects building their long nightly chorus outside, horses moving quietly in the stable he had built with his own hands, the occasional far-off cry of a coyote working the dark hills, his own mind going around and around on the same worn question, what was wrong with her? There had to be something specific and real. Men do not walk away from a woman like that without a deep and solid reason.
She was young and strong and healthy and extraordinarily beautiful. So, what was the thing? What was the thing that every warrior in that tribe had seen and walked away from? He thought about her eyes on the trail, the 30 seconds she had spent reading the ground, the ambush they had both avoided because of what she saw in the dust. He thought about the beams she had shaken her head at in the stable.