The Apache warrior with the bow who'd fallen when my rifle bucked against my shoulder. The woman screaming as she ran to his body. "I didn't know," I said, and my voice sounded like a stranger's. "I didn't know he was your husband."
"It does not matter what you knew. You killed him. And now, by the laws of my people, I belong to you." She smiled, but it was terrible, empty.
"Kuruk knows. He sent me here on purpose, to see if you are worthy of forgiveness or if you are just another white man who takes and destroys."
She turned and walked into my house. Into my life. Into the careful silence I'd built over five years of grief. I stood on the porch as the sun climbed higher and the day grew no warmer.
Inside, I could hear her moving around, opening cupboards, finding her way through rooms that had held nothing but ghosts for so long. I'd saved a boy's life, and in return, I'd been given the woman whose husband I'd killed. Somewhere, God or fate or whatever force moves the world was laughing. I closed my eyes and leaned against the doorframe.
I wondered what price I'd have to pay before this debt was finally settled. The answer, I would learn, was everything. But that morning, standing in the cold with the smell of snow in the air and the weight of the past pressing down like a physical thing, all I knew was that my life had changed again. The careful solitude, the measured days, the slow march toward a quiet death, all of it was gone.
In its place was a woman who hated me, a boy recovering from a bullet wound, and the certain knowledge that the three riders who'd tried to kill Chaska would not simply disappear. I went inside. Takala was standing by the kitchen table, looking at the photograph of Emily and the children. She didn't turn when I entered.
"You lost your family," she said quietly.
"Yes."
"Then you understand." She finally looked at me. "I lost mine too. And you were the one who took them."
I had no answer to that. Nothing I could say would change what I'd done. Nothing I could do would bring Matto back. So I said the only thing I could.
"I'm sorry."
She laughed, a short, bitter sound. "Sorry? White men are always sorry. After."
She moved past me toward the small bedroom where Chaska had been sleeping. "I will sleep here. You will not touch me. You will not speak to me unless necessary."
"I am here because my chief commands it, but I am not yours. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
She closed the door. I heard the scrape of a chair being wedged under the handle. I stood in my kitchen, in the house I'd built with my own hands, and felt like a stranger in my own life. The stove needed feeding.
The animals needed tending. The wood needed splitting. Life went on even when it made no sense. I pulled on my coat and went back outside.
The sun was higher now, burning off some of the cloud cover. In another month, the worst of winter would hit. I needed to finish fixing the barn roof. I needed to check the fences.
I needed to do a thousand things that had nothing to do with the woman in my house or the boy I'd saved or the men who wanted him dead. But all I could think about was Matto. His face as he fell. The sound of the woman's scream.
The way I'd walked away afterward without looking back. Because looking back was how you got yourself killed in a fight. I'd been a soldier. I'd followed orders.
I'd done what I was told because that's what soldiers do. And now, eight years later, the bill had come due. I picked up the axe and started splitting wood. The blade bit into the frozen logs with solid, satisfying thuds.