And the stars did what stars do. And the fire went silver and lower. And somewhere Gray Elk was sleeping the sleep of a man who has put down something heavy and light. Finally, rest. Dawn arrived the way Arizona dawns did.
Committed, golden, no hesitation. The sun deciding it was time and meaning it. Cole was already up. Good coffee made. The occasion seemed to merit it.
Kaya was already in the garden. The Apache camp was stirring. The sounds of a group preparing to move. Efficient and unhurried. Cole brought coffee to Gray Elk, who took it with both hands in the way of someone who receives things carefully.
She seems settled, Gray Elk said. Looking at the garden. At Kaya moving through it in the early light. The ochre dress bright. The turquoise catching the first sun.
She is, Cole said. More than she ever was with us. She carries everything you gave her," Cole said. "The garden comes from what she learned in camp. The tracking from River Wolf.
The medicine." He paused. "None of that came from me. I just have a place that can hold it." Gray Elk looked at him, then smiled, a real one.
The lines of his face organizing themselves around it. "She chose well," the old man said. Even without choosing, the riders were ready an hour later. The camp cleared, fires scattered, horses prepared. River Wolf came to stand before Cole one last time.
"Spring," River Wolf said. Cole looked at him. "You'll come back in spring to see how the garden grows. It'll be hard to miss." River Wolf looked at the garden, at what Kaya had made from dead ground in 3 months, at the green of it, improbable and complete against the red Arizona dirt.
"No," he said. "It will not." Gray Elk and Kaya. Cole stepped back, not away, just enough. The private radius of something that belonged to them.
The old man held his daughter for a long time. Neither spoke. The way of people who know words are insufficient and have stopped pretending otherwise. Then Gray Elk said something in Apache, quiet, close to her ear. Cole didn't hear the words, but he saw Kaya's face after, and he saw the tears, not the tears of someone falling apart, the tears of someone who has held something for a very long time, and has been finally given permission to set it down.
Two of them, one per cheek. She didn't wipe them, just let them be. Gray Elk stepped back, looked at his daughter, nodded once, with the particular gravity of a man whose heart is at peace, which is different from a man whose heart is happy and much rarer. He mounted, River Wolf mounted. One by one the warriors mounted and they moved west toward the Dragoon foothills in the early light that made the desert gold and the sky impossibly blue.