They'll come back, she said. Probably. Clay went inside. They did come back. 3 weeks later in January on the coldest night of that winter.
Klay had been fighting a fever for two days. He had told Nia nothing about it. Men of his time, especially men built like clay, had a habit of keeping every weakness of the body to themselves until there was no longer any way to hide it. Before dawn, he was in the barn, tending the horses beneath a cold, hard enough to feel like stone. Near the water trough, his boot landed on a sheet of ice.
His feet went out from under him. Clay hit the ground hard. For a moment, he simply lay there in the darkness, feeling the cold push through his coat from the frozen earth beneath him. Then he tried to rise. He could not.
That was when he understood how sick he really was. Nia found him. From the cabin, she had noticed something wrong with the lantern light inside the barn. It had stopped moving. A working man's lantern did not stay still for that long.
That silence of light told her enough. She crossed the frozen yard in the darkness and found clay stretched on the ground, shaking violently, his lips pale, fever burning through him after his strength had already been spent. Nia did not panic. She looked at him the way Toma had taught her to look at a sick person, quickly, clearly, without letting fear cloud the part of the mind that had to remain steady when everything else wanted to tremble. She got him back to the cabin.
That was no small task. Clay was a large man, far heavier than she was, and nearly 60 ft of frozen ground separated the barn from the house. Nia took a length of rope from the barn, slipped it beneath his arms, braced her boots against the ice, and pulled him a little at a time. All the while, she spoke to him in a low, firm voice, keeping him awake whenever his eyes began to close. Within 20 minutes, she had him inside and lying on the cot.
Then she worked for 3 hours without stopping. She brought the fever down with strong willow bark tea, giving him small spoonfuls every few minutes. She placed warm wild onion compresses across his chest and behind his neck. She tended the fire carefully, enough heat to warm the room, not so much that his fevered body would have to struggle against it. She watched his breathing with the same attention Toma had once given every Apache patient who came to him for help.
By midm morning, Clay finally came fully awake. He was weak. His clothes and bedding were soaked with sweat. His chest hurt, but the worst of the had broken. Nia sat in the chair beside the cot, still awake, her hands folded in her lap.
She had been there the entire night. You were planning not to tell me you were sick? She asked. It did not sound much like a question. I thought Klay cleared his throat.