Gideon never once raised the subject of marriage during those long walks, never made a promise he could not be certain of keeping. He simply listened, fully and completely, whenever Sikya chose to speak, giving real weight to every thought she offered him, however small. She noticed, too, that even after the whole territory had begun quietly regarding him as something close to a hero, Gideon remained exactly the same humble, plain-spoken rancher who had first climbed down off his wagon with nothing but flour and blankets and one open, empty hand. One evening along the river, Sikya wondered aloud why he had never once, in all the months she had known him, tried to court her the way other men had. Gideon considered the question a long while before answering, watching the current pull past smooth gray stones.
He had buried both his parents young, he explained, and the hardest lesson those years taught him was that a person could not be talked or pressured into loving anyone, not truly, not in any way worth having. Love that had to be argued for was never really love at all, only a bargain dressed up in nicer words, and he would rather have her friendship honestly than her hand dishonestly. Sikya was quiet for a long moment after that, watching him with an expression he could not quite read, before admitting that she had never once in her whole life heard a man frame it in exactly those terms, and that she intended to remember them. One evening not long after, Standing Elk invited Gideon to sit with him beside the council fire, away from the noise of the gathered warriors celebrating their victory. The chief looked out across the clearing toward his daughter for a long, quiet moment.
And when he finally spoke again, his voice carried none of its old flatness at all. He confessed quietly and with real difficulty that he had once believed with his whole heart that Sikya would never choose to marry any man, not after everything her family had already lost. After losing so many she loved in years past, she had learned to guard her heart the way a person guards an old, still tender wound, believing a quiet, solitary life would spare her from ever suffering that particular grief again. But Standing Elk had watched something shift slowly in her, little by little, over the months since Gideon first rode alone into their canyon with a wagonload of flour and no expectations at all. The rancher had never once tried to win her over through pressure or gifts or grand promises he could not keep.
He had given her only patience and plain honesty and a deep, steady respect that asked absolutely nothing of her in return. Those simple, unglamorous qualities had accomplished what no eloquent suitor speech had ever managed in all her years of refusing them. Gideon sat with that for a long moment before answering honestly that he had never once set out to change the chief's mind about anything. He had only ever wanted to be the kind of man his own father would have recognized as decent. And if that same steadiness had somehow reached Sikya's heart along the way, he counted it as the finest thing he had ever done without meaning to do it at all.