That's what Tamson said. You are not a mule. Her voice low, trembling just slightly. You are a fool. A brave, stupid fool.
She looked at him. Moon had risen, painting her face in silver and shadow. The exhaustion had stripped away every defense she'd spent years building. What remained was simply the woman underneath. Silas reached out, took her hand.
We might not make it, he whispered. Border still a 100 miles out. I know. A pause. If we die out here, I want you to know know what that I would choose this.
Her voice steadied. Gain certainty even as everything around them fell apart. I would choose dying in the dust beside you over living a hundred years in a cabin without you. Something in Silas's chest broke open at that gentle and total the way a dam breaks when it's finally allowed to. Do not talk of dying, she whispered.
Fierce now talk of living. She leaned in, kissed him. Not gentle, desperate, tasting of salt and grief and an overwhelming terrifying hunger for something neither of them had let themselves want in years. Silas wrapped his good arm around her, pulled her close, felt the heat of her through rough buckskin, felt her heart hammering against his own chest like it was trying to prove to to the both of them at once. There was no romance of soft beds, no candle light, only hard ground and cold wind and the fierce tender union of two survivors claiming one single moment of joy in a world that had spent three years trying to convince them they didn't deserve it.
in the morning. They didn't speak of it. Didn't need to. The way Kessa looked at him now with a fierce protective possession that hadn't been there before said everything words would only have cheapened. They were no longer just allies bound by circumstance.
They were kin. The desert kept demanding its toll, though because the desert never once cared how far two people had come or what they'd finally found in each other along the way. A week later, one of the older women simply stopped walking. She sat down on a rock, looked at the setting sun, closed her eyes, and her heart, tired after years of fear and exhaustion, finally gave out beneath her. They buried her under a pile of stones in a dry arroyo.
They sang the death song in whispers, terrified the wind might carry the sound to the trackers they knew were somewhere behind them. But 2 days after that, a rattlesnake struck the ankle of a young woman traveling with them. The poison moved fast. By midnight, her leg had gone black. By dawn, she was gone, too, and there was no time for the deep grave because the patrol they'd been dodging, a group of armed vigilantes out of a mining town, had closed to within 5 miles. "We have to move."Silas's voice, harsh with the necessity of it. "If we stop to mourn every loss, we all join her."Kessa forced the grieving sister to her feet, but they walked on, leaving another piece of their hearts behind in the dust, same as they'd been doing since the moment they left the canyon. The final test was the river.
Not the great river that marked the true border, but a swollen tributary fed by sudden storms somewhere far to the north. Brown water, angry, churning with debris and the memory of a flood that had come and gone without warning. We have to cross. Silas shouted over the roar of it. Trackers are behind us.
The river will hide our trail once we're through. They formed a chain. The hands locked together. Stronger women on the outside. Children and the sick pressed safe in the middle.
Stepped into the icy water. The current pulled at them immediately trying to drag the whole line down at once. Halfway across. Water rose to their chests. Ren, holding her son above her head with both arms, slipped on a slick stone beneath the surface.
She went down. The current took her in an instant. Ren, Kessa's scream tore across the water. Silas didn't hesitate. He released the hand of the woman beside him.
He dove into the brown water, thrashing against the drag of his own boots, and the pain still radiating from his shoulder, saw Ren's head break the surface, gasping, holding the boy up above the current, even as she went under herself. He reached them but grabbed her tunic with his good hand, kicked hard, driving all three of them toward a submerged log. Grab it. She hooked her arm over the wood, shoved them toward the far bank, using his own body as a rudder against the current until Kessa and two other women waited out from the shallows, forming a human net to pull them all the rest of the way in. They lay there coughing up river water, shaking violently alive.
Silas looked back across the river. On the far bank, riders emerged from the brush. The vigilantes, they stopped at the water's edge, the current too high, too dangerous for horses that weren't already desperate. The riders watched for a long moment, then turned their mounts around and vanished back into the scrub. The water that had nearly killed them had saved them instead.
3 weeks later they walked out of the last stretch of desolation and into turquoise flats, a valley that looked after everything almost like a dream someone had built specifically to mock them with its gentleness. Hidden between two spines of mountains south of every line that had ever tried to divide them. Grass grew yellow and tall. The creek ran clear over white stones. Small adobe houses scattered along the water.
chimneys trailing lazy smoke into a sky that finally finally seemed willing to be kind. A group of riders came out to meet them. Not soldier, the men in white hats, carbines slung casual across their backs, faces brown and weathered by the same sun that had nearly killed everyone walking behind Silas now. The Mexican, Apache, white men with beards gone long and gray. Silas rode forward, handspoken, halting Spanish.