The pounding came just after midnight. Three sharp raps sent Naomi Colby's heart into her throat before she had even reached the door. She lived alone at the edge of Miller's Bend in a cabin the townsfolk crossed the street to avoid, and no one came knocking at that hour with good news. She opened it to find two Lakota riders standing in the moonlight, their horses lathered from hard riding, and behind them a third man holding the reins of a spare mount.
The elder of the two spoke passable English, learned, he told her quickly, from years of trading at the fort. "You are the healer," he said. It was not a question. "The one who cured the trader Holloway of the fever no one else could touch. Our chief is dying."
"Our own medicine has failed him three days running. We were told, if all else failed, to come to you." Naomi's first instinct was fear, honest and plain, because a lone woman roused from sleep by armed strangers had reason for it. Her second instinct, arriving fast on the heels of the first, was something closer to recognition. It was the particular desperation in the man's voice, the same desperation she had heard in a hundred doorways over the years from settlers who would spit at her in daylight and beg at her door in the dark.
She had spent 11 years since her mother died being called witch and heathen and worse by people who nonetheless sent for her the moment their children spiked a fever no preacher's prayer could break. "What is the wound?" she asked. "A buffalo gored him three days past, defending a boy who had wandered too close to the herd. The wound closed over wrong."
"It burns hot and will not drain, and he speaks less each day." Naomi already knew from the words alone what she suspected. A wound sealed before it should have been, poison building beneath skin that could not breathe. She had seen it kill two men in Miller's Bend, both times because some well-meaning fool had stitched a wound shut too soon out of fear of scarring.
If she was right, and if there was still time, she might save him. If she was wrong or too late, she would have ridden into a Lakota camp for nothing, a settler woman among people her own town told endless frightening stories about, people she had never once been given reason to fear herself. "I need my bag," she said, "and something to carry my kettle in. Give me five minutes."
She rode through the dark beside men she had never met, toward a people a town called savages in the same breath they called her a witch, and found she trusted the honesty of the men beside her more than she had ever trusted the whispers back in Miller's Bend. The elder rider, whose name she learned was Hawk, spoke little more on the ride. What he did say stayed with her: their chief had led them for six winters without once raising his hand against a settler who had not raised one first. He had turned away young warriors eager for retaliation more times than Hawk could count, believing peace, however costly, cost less in the end than war.
It did not match the stories Naomi had grown up hearing at her own hearth, and she found herself wondering, as the miles passed beneath the horses' steady hooves, how many other things she had been told about the world had been just as carefully, deliberately wrong. By the time the sky began to gray toward morning, her fear of the unfamiliar had settled into something quieter and more useful: simple resolve. It was the same resolve that had carried her through every hard birth and fever-wracked night home. The plain determination to do the work in front of her and let the rest sort itself out later.