Old and worn smooth, the way things get when you've carried them too long. This man had a daughter no one wanted. And it was hollowing him out. Can I meet her first? Cole said the translator spoke.
Gray Elk responded, "The chief says no. He's asking me to agree before." Yes. And if I say no, you leave tonight. You do not come back.
Cole sat with this. Long enough that the fire crackled twice and Biscuit outside made her impatient sound. He looked at Gray Elk. Gray Elk looked back. In the old man's eyes, Cole found something he hadn't expected, honesty.
Not salesmanship, not threat. Just a man with the last cards he had left spread on the table waiting. She's probably a disaster. Reasonable assessment. This is probably a mistake.
Also reasonable. You are 25 and alone in the last woman you could have married you let walk away because the timing wasn't right. And Cole, the timing is never right. It just stops being an option. His house, two rooms, too quiet.
"All right." he said. The ceremony was at dawn. He didn't sleep. They gave him a tent near the horses. Warmer than expected because horses are warm and he'd slept in worse.
And he lay in the dark listening to the camp settle and trying to prepare himself for whatever morning held. She's probably angry all the time. That would explain it. Or she's He tried to think of other reasons an entire camp of men would avoid a healthy 20-year-old woman. Every reason he landed on was worse than the last.
The Arizona stars outside the tent flap were extraordinary. Close. The way desert stars always are. His father used to say, "God didn't bother putting them far away out here because there weren't enough people to make the distance necessary." Cole didn't believe in much but he lay there looking up and thought, "Whatever is about to happen, I did something for the right reasons.
That didn't make it wise, but it was something." The pre-dawn ceremony was quieter and more formal than anything he'd imagined. Gray Elk conducted it himself. His voice low and rhythmic in the cold early light. A fire, a circle.
The smell of something burning that wasn't wood. Two elderly women came from the direction of the camp between them. A figure completely covered in a blanket, thick, woven, red and turquoise and the brown gold of canyon walls. Colors that belong to the landscape the way geological formations do. Not decorative, old.
The kind of old that means something has survived. Medium height. That was all Cole could determine. He prepared himself. He was genuinely, honestly preparing himself.
He had spent the night pre-accepting whatever was under that blanket. He had talked himself into a state of radical open-mindedness that he was quite proud of. A man marrying blind into this deserved credit for. One of the elderly women reached out and pulled the blanket away. Cole's brain stopped.
Just stopped. Like a clock that's had its pendulum grabbed mid-swing because there was nothing to prepare for. The woman standing in the early light of the Dragoon foothills was the most purely, simply beautiful person he had ever seen in his life. Not the announced kind of beauty. Not the kind that works at itself.