Her grandmother had raised her since, alongside her father, teaching her to weave and to track and to lead, and Sikya had grown into someone the whole village trusted with difficult decisions. Even as she had quietly decided, long before that winter, that she would rather stand alone and steady than risk building a life around someone only to watch grief take him, too. It was not stubbornness that made her refuse every proposal brought to her door. It was a kind of careful arithmetic, weighing love against the cost of losing it, and for years the arithmetic had always come out the same. Later, as the fire settled further into embers and the night pulled in cold around the gathered circle, several of the older women began discussing the marriage proposals that had come to Sikya that season, carried down from young warriors in villages scattered beyond the ridge.
Standing Elk let out a long, tired breath, and the words that followed would echo across the whole territory before the year was finished. "She will never marry." Quiet disappointment threaded through every syllable. "Many have asked. She refuses them all, every single one."
A heavy silence settled over the circle, thick as the smoke curling slowly up into the darkening sky. Sikya did not flinch, did not look away, did not so much as shift where she sat. She simply stared into the fire, calm and unbothered, as though she had heard this exact pronouncement made a hundred times before, and had long since stopped letting it wound her. Gideon glanced toward her, then back toward the chief, and his answer came simple and unhurried, without a trace of performance in it. No one, in his view, should ever put a question to her that she had not already chosen in her own time to answer for herself.
If she wished to remain unmarried, that was hers to claim as a right, and no man's disappointment ought to weigh against it, not even her own father's. The words landed strangely across the gathered circle. No visitor, Apache or settler, had ever answered the chief with such plain, unadorned respect before. Standing Elk studied the young rancher for a long moment in the firelight, weighing something behind his tired eyes before giving a slow, deliberate nod. Not agreement, exactly, but the quiet beginning of something close to recognition.