She only held herself with an animal stillness plainer than any words that promised she would run the instant her legs would carry her wound or no wound. The second he gave her one single reason to believe running might actually save her. Rhett had learned patience the hard way. Gentling green horses on his father's spread since he was younger than he could rightly remember being. Taught by a quiet, careful man who believed a horse broken by force stayed broken in ways that never fully mended, and who'd passed his son that same conviction about people long before either of them had caused to test it on one.
His father had died of a bad fall three winters back, and his mother, unable to face the emptiness of the house afterward, had remarried an easterner within the year, and gone back to a city Rhett had visited exactly once, and had no particular wish to see again. He'd stayed. The land was the one thing he still knew how to love without complication. And it was that same worn patience, inherited whole from a father 3 years gone, that kept his hands loose and low now, his voice pitched soft, the way a man talks down a spooked mare rather than the way he talks to another grown person. He didn't press her for a name.
He didn't reach for what had happened to the camp, or who had done this, or where the rest of her people had scattered off to. A man could see plain enough in the wreckage around them that there would be time enough for those particular questions later, if there was ever truly a right time for them at all. Instead, he unhooked the canteen from his saddle, slow and deliberate, and set it down on a flat rock roughly halfway between them before backing three full steps away, palms open, giving her every bit of room a cornered creature needs before it can decide a stranger isn't the danger it first assumed. She watched the canteen a long considering moment before she moved for it, quick and wary, as though she expected him to snatch it back the instant she reached. She drank only a little, an act of pure discipline from someone who plainly hadn't had a clean swallow of water in the better part of a day.
Her dark eyes never once leaving his face while she did it. When she tried to push herself upright, her breath caught hard and her knees buckled halfway there, and Rhett was moving before he'd fully decided to be, though he pulled up two stride short and simply held out an open hand, an invitation. She looked at that outstretched hand a long moment, weighing something in a private ledger he would never be privy to, and then she took it. He lifted her onto the gelding with more care than he would have credited himself capable of that morning, swung up behind her, and turned the horse toward home at a slow, careful walk that made no further claim on her than simply staying upright. Neither of them let a single word pass the whole ride back.