He wants you gone quietly." Luke looked up and met Ayanna's eyes across the circle. He remembered the kiss in the cave. He remembered the promise he had made. "We don't run." Luke said. "And we don't attack.
Not yet. We prepare. If Morgan wants this land, we make it too expensive for him to take." Nantan watched Luke closely. "You speak as if you are leading this war, Luke Carver." Luke looked at the chief. "I am not leading it, Nantan, but I know how they think.
And if you want to save your daughter and your people, you need someone who knows the enemy." Nantan nodded slowly. "Then we listen." As the council broke up and the tribe began to prepare for a siege they couldn't yet see, Luke walked toward the horses. He passed Ayanna. They didn't stop. They didn't touch, but the air between them was thick enough to choke on.
The unspoken desire, the memory of the storm, and the looming threat bound them together tighter than any marriage vow. "Trouble is coming." Luke murmured as he passed her. "I know." She replied, her voice steady. "But we are not alone this time." She walked on, her head high, and Luke watched her go, knowing that he would burn the whole world down before he let Silas Morgan touch a hair on her head. Summer fell upon the territory like a heavy iron hammer heated in a forge.
The high meadows, which only weeks before had been lush with spring grass and wildflowers, began to yellow and brittle under the relentless assault of the sun. The sky was a bleached dome of white-hot light, devoid of clouds, where vultures circled in lazy, patient spirals, waiting for the land to give up its dead. In the Apache camp, the heat brought a suffocating tension. The creek, once a roaring torrent of snowmelt, had dwindled to a sluggish ribbon of brown water that barely covered the stones. Dust hung in the air, a fine grit that coated everything, skin, food, weapons, and rose in choking clouds with every hoofbeat of the ponies.
The tribe was on edge. Game had moved higher into the timber to escape the flies and the heat, making hunting difficult. But the greater threat was not the hunger. It was the encroaching circle of iron and lead. Patrols were seen almost daily now, lines of blue-coated soldiers riding along the ridgelines, their sabers glinting like mirrors.
And worse were the riders who did not wear uniforms, the hard-eyed men who worked for Silas Morgan, scouting the canyons, searching for the holdout band that stood in the way of the cattle baron's ambition. Luke Carver wiped sweat from his eyes as he saddled Roan. The leather was hot to the touch. Beside him, Nantan adjusted the girth on his paint pony. The chief looked older in the harsh light, the lines of his face carved deep like dry riverbeds, but his back was straight.
"We go unarmed?" Luke asked, though he knew the answer. "We go to talk." Nantan said, "If we carry rifles into the town, we do not talk. We die." They were riding to Fort Verde, the nearest settlement where Captain Harlan maintained his headquarters. It was a desperate gamble. Nantan hoped that a direct appeal to the army's honor might buy them time or a guaranteed sanctuary.
Luke knew better, but he also knew that without an attempt at diplomacy, the end would be bloody and absolute. "I will ride with you." a voice said. They turned. Ayanna stood there, holding the reins of her mare. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat she'd traded for, pulled low to shade her eyes.
"No." Nantan said. "It is too dangerous." "If you do not return." Ayanna said, her voice flat and hard. "Who will tell the people what happened? I will not sit here and wait for a riderless horse. I will watch from the ridge.