The wind died completely first, which was somehow worse than any gust. A vacuum of silence that made the dogs whine and pace, and the children go quiet without being told to. Then the horizon simply disappeared. A wall of brown thousands of feet high, rolling toward them and swallowing the mountains, whole as it came. Storm, someone screamed it.
Then everyone was screaming it. The camp erupted into motion. This wasn't a dust devil, but this was a monster born of dying summer heat. and it hit them like a fist made of gravel. "Get the children inside,"Silas roared, though the wind stole his voice half a second after it left his mouth.
He saw Ren fighting the flap of her shelter, wind tearing it from her hands. He lunged, grabbed the canvas, lashed it tight to the st. Inside, he ordered, shoved her and her son into the dark. He moved to the next shelter. Eda's the support pole cracking under the pressure.
The old woman huddled inside, wailing, he dove in, grabbed the fracturing pole, wrapped both arms around it, and braced his shoulder against the wood, became the pillar. The structure groaned, shook. He held it. The storm raged for hours. The sand filled his nose.
His mouth, his eyes scoured his skin raw. He didn't let go. Outside in the howling gray, Kessa checked the horse lines and saw a shape moving through the merc. Silas, leaving Eda's stabilized tent to run toward a knot of children, huddled behind a rock, shielding their faces with his own jacket as he hustled them toward the mouth of a cave. He was coughing, eyes streaming red.
Didn't stop, didn't take shelter for himself, turned back into the wind to check the next tent instead. Kessa watched him, shielding her own eyes against the grit. Something twisted in her gut, ugly and unwanted and impossible to name cleanly. He was fighting the wind for them. He was bleeding for them.
And it was becoming harder every hour to see the monster she'd sworn to hate. The storm died at midnight. Left the canyon buried under drifts of fine silt. The silence after ringing loud in everyone's ears. Silas collapsed just before dawn.
6 hours of fighting the wind. 6 hours of breathing dust into lungs that had already been half ruined by years of rough living. His body chose that moment to finally violently rebel. He fell near the fire pit, shaking with a fever that came on hard and mean and immediate. The by morning it was burning him alive.
The women gathered around him. Eda looked down unmoved. "He is done,"she said. "The fever takes the strong ones fast. We should let him go.
He served his purpose,"another voice. "Lo, if he dies, the debt is paid."Tamson stood at the head of the pallet, looked at his flushed, unhealthy red face for a long moment. "He saved your shelter, Eda."her voice sharp enough to cut through the old woman's certainty.
He shielded Ren's boy over my head. He is still white. He is useful. And eyes narrowed. And perhaps, perhaps he is more.
She turned to Kessa, who stood at the edge of the circle, arms crossed tight against her own chest like she was trying to hold something in. You will tend him. Me? Kessa stepped back like the words had physical weight. Why?
Because you wanted to kill him the most. Tamson's voice left no room for argument. If he lives, it will be because you w it. If he dies, it is on your hands. A test, daughter.
For him and for you, Kessa argued. Tamson's word was law anyway. For 3 days and three nights, Silas drifted in the dark water of delirium. Kessa sat beside him in the small sick wickiup, wiped his forehead with cool water, but trickled herb tea between his cracked lips, listened. In the grip of the fever, his defenses crumbled entirely.
he mumbled, thrashed, voice thick with a panic that had clearly been waiting years for permission to surface. Amos, get down. A shout that startled her badly. The ridge. They're on the ridge.
She held his shoulders. Sh. There's no one on the ridge. I told them his cracked, tears from closed eyes. I told them the village was empty.
I didn't know. Amos. I didn't know about the women. Kessa froze, her hand hovering above his chest like it had forgotten how to move. Drywash Creek, he whispered it, barely audible.
The river, the fire. Oh god, Josie, I'm sorry. Kessa sat back. Something cold settling behind her ribs where the anger usually lived. Because she knew that name, but because everyone in this camp knew that name the way you know the name of a wound that never closes, right?
He wasn't dreaming of glory. He was dreaming of horror. She listened to the names of places she knew. Places where her people had bled out into the sand and the anger that should have flooded through her didn't come. Not the way she expected.
Instead, something else arrived. Something quieter dowsed almost by the sheer misery in his voice. He is haunted, she thought, just like us. She looked at his face, stripped bare of every guard he usually kept up, but felt a confusing tangle of pity and suspicion not itself tight in her chest. He was the enemy.
Yes, but he was also a man carrying his own ghosts and the weight of them was crushing him. Same as her own weight crushed her every single night in the dark when nobody was there to watch. He broke the fever on the fourth night. Woke to darkness and the smell of sage smoke. Weak body feeling like it had been worked over with clubs.
He turned his head. Kessa sat near the entrance, half in shadow, mending a moccasin by the light of a single tallow candle. The water he croked. She moved instantly, lifted his head, held a gourd to his lips. He drank too fast.