The baron looked bored, smoking a cigar as he surveyed the women in the pen as if they were heifers at a county fair. "These are work contracts, gentlemen," Thorne bellowed, his voice oily and practiced. "The government cannot support every stray band that surrenders. These hostiles need to learn the value of honest labor. You sign the paper, you pay the fee for their transport and processing, and you take a servant for a term of 5 years."
It was a lie. Elias knew it, and every man in the crowd knew it. This was a slave auction dressed up in the thin, ragged clothes of bureaucracy. Elias watched the faces in the pen. He saw fear, naked and trembling.
In the younger girls, he saw the dull, glazed look of shock in the mothers. And then his gaze stopped near the center of the corral. Standing slightly apart from the huddled mass was a woman who did not look at the ground. She was tall for an Apache woman, with broad shoulders and a spine that looked like it had been forged from iron. She wore a faded calico dress that had likely been stripped from a settler's cabin or given as charity, but she wore it with a strange, fierce dignity.
Her hair was black as a raven's wing, pulled back from a face that was not beautiful in the soft, easy way of the women in the eastern magazines, but striking. It was a face of planes and angles, weather-beaten and sun-browned. This was Naya. Elias did not know her name yet, but he felt the weight of her presence. She was watching the men outside the rail.
Her dark eyes moved from face to face, calculating, assessing. She was not paralyzed like the others. She was thinking. She was hunting for a way out of the trap. Elias shifted his weight, the leather of his holster creaking softly.
The crowd pressed closer. A miner with a beard stained by tobacco juice shouted out, "What about the young one there, the one with the red ribbon? I need someone to wash clothes up at the camp." Laughter rippled through the group. "Wash clothes?
Is that what you call it, Jeb?" Elias clenched his jaw so hard his teeth ached. He heard them discussing the fate of these women. Some were destined for the brothels in the mining towns up in the mountains, places where life was cheap and women were used up and discarded like broken tools. Others were being traded for labor on distant ranches where they would be worked until they dropped.
Memory surged up in Elias's mind, unbidden and violent. He remembered the smell of burning lodges. He remembered the sound of women screaming as the cavalry charged through the winter camps. He had been a scout then, young and foolish, believing he was helping to bring order to the frontier. He had believed the lies about treaties and reservations.
He had led the soldiers to the hidden canyons, tracking the bands by the signs they left in the earth. He remembered the aftermath, the bodies in the snow, the way the soldiers looked at the survivors. The shame washed over him now, hot and suffocating. He had ridden away from that life 5 years ago, but he had never ridden fast enough to outrun the ghosts. In the corral, Naya shifted her stance.
She saw the way the men looked at the teenage girl near her. She saw the lust and the cruelty in their eyes. She knew her own chances were fading with every minute that the sun sank lower. She was not young. She was in her late 20s, perhaps 30, an old woman by the standards of this hard land.
She had borne a child. She had buried a husband. She had walked hundreds of miles in forced marches. She was not the prize these men wanted, and that terrified her more than being chosen. If she was not bought, she would be sent to the reservation, or worse, given to the soldiers to do with as they pleased, or perhaps she would be sold to the brothel keeper as a discount lot, to scrub floors and serve the men who could not afford the younger ones.