Stones the size of saddles. Can pulled her off. Isha hit her. Can held on. They went down together in the dust and Isha stopped fighting and started sobbing into her sister's shoulder in long ragged pulls like a saw through green wood.
Nobody told her to stop. There wasn't anybody in that cave with the right. Tavana stood with her back to all of it, facing the rock where Yana had been. Her hands at her sides perfectly still. He will not kill her.
Not yet. He needs her. I know he will hurt her. I didn't say anything to that because it was true and we both knew it. How long through the old way?
Dashka answered. Until the sun. If the grandfathers let us, then let's go ask them. The passage at the back of the treasure cave dropped low enough that I had to crawl. Then it rose, then it split, then split again.
The candle threw our shadows huge and crooked along the walls. And after the first hundred yards, I understood why it was not for strangers. They were in the walls, the dead, laid in niches, cut into the rock, one above another, wrapped in hide gone stiff and dark, with age beads and shells and little clay pots set beside them. generations of them lining the passage on both sides like a crowd come out to watch us pass. Wesley stopped dead. I can't.
You can, Marshal. These are their people, and they're letting us walk through their house. Mind your manners and keep moving. Tavana walked first with the candle held high. And as she passed each niche, she spoke a few soft words, not loud, not a prayer exactly, more like a woman greeting her elders as she comes in late to supper.
The others did the same behind her. I didn't know the words. I took off my hat anyway. Some things you don't need translated. We walked for hours down, up, through water once, ankle deep and cold enough to ache.
My knees bled. My back screamed. The candle burned down to a stub and Dashka lit another off it. And I didn't ask how many she had left because I didn't want to know. Somewhere deep in the mountain, in a chamber where the roof opened up higher than the light could reach, Tavana stopped.
Set the candle on a ledge. Turn to me. I will tell you now. So you know what you walk beside. Tell me. 37 The morning they came.
My sisters and I were two days into the hills gathering willow and yakaroot. When we came back, there was smoke where the lodges were. Our father in front of his own door with a rifle in his hands. He never got to fire. our mother beside him. The old men, the old women, my father's cousins, the women who taught us everything we know with our hands.
Her voice was very level, like a rope pulled tight enough that it stops vibrating. We buried them for 3 days. On the fourth day, I cut my arm and made a promise over the last grave. Blood for blood, every man who rode into that village and the man who sent them most of all. Ror and you'll kill him.
I will kill him. Even if he's on his knees with his hands up, even if he surrenders, especially then. The candle hissed. Water dripped somewhere far off. Then he wins.
Her eyes flicked to mine. Hard. Hear me out. For 3 weeks, that man has been telling the whole territory that five Apache women are killers. Sending wires, printing paper, making it true by saying it.
And if you walk up to him when he's done when he's beaten on his knees with his hands up begging and you cut his throat. I shook my head. Then every word he said about you turns into the truth. He gets to be right forever. If you kill him on his knees, you become the woman he told the world you were.
For a long moment, there was only the dripping water. You ask me to forgive him. I don't ask anybody to forgive anybody. That's between you and whatever you pray to. I'm asking you not to let him write the end of your story.
Kane from the dark behind us very softly. He is not wrong, sister. Tavana didn't turn, didn't answer, but she picked up the candle again, and her hand on it was not quite as steady as before, and we kept walking. The air started moving sometime after that, cooler, cleaner. A smell of creosote and wet dust, a draft on my face, then a gray glow ahead.
Then a narrow chimney of rock straight up with a lid of sky on it, pale and blue and stre pink at one edge. Dawn, the fourth day. We came up one at a time through that chimney into the ruins of a mission. Old Spanish, half fallen, a roofless chapel with grass growing out of the altar steps, cloister walls broken down to waist height, and a bell tower cracked from top to bottom, but still standing, with no bell in it, just a hollow square of sky where a bell had been. Wesley lay down flat in the dust of the courtyard and laughed out loud at the morning like a crazy man.
I didn't blame him. I climbed the tower stairs. What was left of them from the top I could see all of it. The broken mountain 2 mi west with a fresh scar of rubble down its face where Ror's charge had brought the canyon wall down. The ironwood stand where we'd left the horses still there, still green. and east maybe 10 miles off across the flats a smudge of rooftops and a water tower and the white thread of a road Saguaro Wells Ro's town's jail and somewhere in it Yon I came back down they were all looking at me Dashka Isha can you get the horses from the ironwood without being seen yes do it then here's what we're doing folded her arms we we all of us but I go into that town first alone no Yes, because I'm the only one of us.