The victory in the store felt hollow. The words the cowboy had spoken, "barren, used, empty," hung between them like a toxic cloud. Naya rode with her head bowed, the defiance gone from her posture. When they were 5 miles out of town, the sun beginning to dip low, Naya pulled her horse up. She slid from the saddle and walked a few paces into the desert, standing with her back to Elias.
Elias dismounted and followed her, stopping a respectful distance away. "Naya," he said softly. "Do not listen to them. They are fools. They speak poison because they are small men."
She turned to face him. Her face was not angry. It was shattered. The mask she wore so carefully had cracked, revealing a well of grief so deep it frightened him. "They are not wrong," she said.
Her voice was steady, but tears tracked slowly down the dust on her cheeks. "What?" Elias stepped closer. "My child," she said. Elias froze.
"I told you I could give you offspring," she said, her voice hitching. "I told you I am experienced. That was true, but I did not tell you the rest." She looked at her hands, calloused and brown. "Three years ago, when the soldiers came, when they forced us to walk to the reservation, it was winter.
We had no food. My husband was killed in the first attack. I carried my son. He was 2 years old." She took a shaking breath.
"The walk was long, hundreds of miles. The soldiers, they did not let us stop. If we stopped, they struck us. My milk dried up. The cold, it got into his chest."
She looked up at Elias, her eyes burning with the memory. "He died in my arms, Elias, on the road. And the soldiers would not let me bury him. They made me leave him in the snow. They said to keep walking."
Elias felt the blood drain from his face. He felt sick. He knew that march. He knew the officers who had ordered it. "Since then," Naya whispered, "my body, it has been silent.
No moon blood for a long time. Then it returned, but nothing grows. The women in the tribe, they said grief had eaten my womb. They said I was a dead branch." She looked at him with a heartbreaking intensity.
"I lied to you, Elias. I promised you children to make you buy me because I wanted to live, but I do not know if I can keep that promise. I dream of it. I want to give life again, to replace what was stolen, to honor him. But I may be what they say, empty."