"I am telling you plainly, as the woman who has spent three days keeping this man alive, that there was no raid planned, no ambush waiting, nothing here but a sick man and the people who love him. Ride home and tell whoever spread that lie that they nearly made murderers of decent men over nothing." The silence that followed stretched long and taut, the militia's horses shifting and blowing in the morning chill. Garrity stood there, shame creeping visibly up his weathered neck.
Finally, he lowered his rifle. After a long moment, he ordered his men to stand down and turn for home, muttering something about being misled that satisfied no one but let everyone walk away without blood spilled. When the dust of their retreat had settled and the camp's held breath finally released into something like relief, Ohetika sank down onto a nearby log, more from exhaustion than danger now. He looked up at Naomi with an expression she had not seen from him before, something unguarded and entirely warm.
"You saved my life twice in three days," he said. "Once from the wound, and once from a war neither of us wanted." "I only told the truth," Naomi said. "Twice."
"In my experience," Ohetika said, "the truth is a rarer medicine than most, and you carry it as easily as you carry your herbs." He studied her a long moment, weak but steady, a man who had faced death and looked at what remained on the other side of it with new and deliberate attention. "You have no home left that wants you, by your own account. We are a people who have learned better than most what it costs to be unwanted by those who should have loved you."
"Stay, Naomi Colby, not as a healer only, though we would be glad of that, too. Stay because I find, having nearly lost my life, that I do not wish to spend what remains of it without you near." Naomi thought of Miller's Bend, of the door people knocked on only in darkness and denied by daylight. She thought of 11 years spent being useful and never once being wanted.
She found the choice, when it finally arrived, was no choice at all. "I have spent my whole life being tolerated," she said. "I find I would rather, for once, be chosen." She took his offered hand, weathered and warm despite the fever it had so recently survived.
"I'll stay." Waikapi, watching from the lodge doorway with Mato beside her, allowed herself, for the first time since Naomi's arrival, a smile unguarded and entirely genuine. The camp that had greeted a stranger with wary silence three days before rose instead, that evening, into the warm and grateful sound of a people welcoming home one of their own.