The soldiers on that side hate us same as the ones on this side. There are rumors. Silas spoke up. The voice still rough from three days of barely sleeping, arm bound tight across his chest, where the bullet wound still wept through its bandage. Every eye in the circle turned to him.
He stepped forward, leaned on his rifle like a crutch because that's exactly what it had become. I heard talk in the settlements before all this. He gestured a small tired motion that took in the whole canyon, the whole broken history of it. There's a valley south of the border near the high mountains. Folks call it Turquoise Flats.
A place where the lines on a map stop mattering so much. Apache Mexican families now people who just want to be left alone. How far? Ren. Quiet.
300 miles. Maybe more. Silas met Kessa's eyes across the fire. Every mile hostile. We'll have to move at night.
Avoid every town we pass. We'll have to become ghosts. And then, Kessa asked, "Then we survive."A pause waited with everything neither of them wanted to say out loud in front of the whole camp. Or we don't, but we do it free.
The debate raged for hours because it was a terrifying choice either way. To surrender was to accept a slow humiliation of the soul. To run was to risk a violent death of the body out in open country with nothing between them and the world but stubbornness and prayer. Ren looked at her son looked at the canyon walls that had been the only home he'd ever known. I would rather my son die thirsty in the desert, she said softly, then live in chains.
The decision was made. They would run. The departure wasn't a flight so much as a funeral for a way of life. They took only what they could carry. Grinding stones left behind.
Heavy todge poles abandoned. Extra hides, trinkets, anything with weight and no chance of keeping a child alive. All of it left to the wind. Before they left, they gathered at Tamson's grave. A fresh mound of stones near the spring that had kept them alive for so long.
Kessa knelt placed a small pouch of corn pollen on the rocks. We leave you here to guard the water, mother, her voice barely audible over the wind. We will carry your name to the new place. Silas stood back. felt like an intruder in this sacred moment.
The way he'd felt like an intruder in almost every moment of grief he'd witnessed in this canyon. Then Kessa turned, beckoned to him. "Come."He walked to the grave, looked down at the stones. "She accepted you,"Kessa said. "You should say goodbye."He remembered the old woman's fierce eyes, her sharp tongue, the final mercy she'd granted him when every reasonable argument said she shouldn't have. "Goodbye, Tamson."His voice cracked around the words. "Thank you for the life."He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small folding knife, one of the few things the women had let him keep after the battle, placed it gently on the stones for the journey, he said. They stood there a moment longer than the others, and Kessa didn't move away, which was how Silas knew there was more coming. I never asked you something, she said. Quiet, careful. The way a person is careful walking toward a wound they're not sure is finished bleeding.
Your brother, Amos, Silas went still. Was he there? Kessa said at Drywash Creek. He didn't answer right away because some troops take a runup before a man can say them out loud. He was young.
Silas said finally wanted to prove something to me. I think signed on for that one campaign because I told him it would put gold in both our pockets. He wrote in that morning with the rest of the column. He stared at the stones on Tamson's grave like they might tell him how to finish this. There was return fire from the camp.
From your husband, maybe from someone I never knew who exactly. Amos took a shot in the chest before the sun had even cleared the ridge. It died before I could reach him. Kessa's breath caught. Something in her face shifted.
The anger not gone, never gone, but rearranged around a new shape. So your brother died the same morning as my husband. Her voice hollow. The same morning as my son. Yes.
And your wife later, Silas said. Some of your people, the ones who survived, they came for our stock. I understand why now. Didn't then. There was a raid on my ranch.
Josie ran out onto the porch trying to pull Amos'. I mean, he stopped, corrected himself, throat tight, trying to pull our stock in. A stray shot took her instead. I never knew whose gun it came from either. Two mornings, she said.
Not one, but they came from the same fire. Yes. You've been carrying two graves that were born from the same lie, Kessa said. And there was no forgiveness in her uh voice yet, but there was for the first time something that sounded almost like recognition, like grief, finally finding another grief it could stand beside instead of across from. As have I. Silas nodded.
Couldn't speak past the tightness in his throat. We do not have to carry them the same way anymore, Kessa said. But then she turned before he could answer and walked back toward the waiting column of women and children because there wasn't time left in the world for standing still. They walked out of the canyon at dusk left the fires burning behind them to trick any scouts watching from a distance didn't look back. The rocky walls, the prison for silus warns, the fortress for these women always faded into purple shadow behind them and then into nothing at all.