Thought of the sheriff who'd stood silent while Harmon laughed off 200 lives freezing to death. Thought of how a town decides without ever voting on it whose suffering counts and whose doesn't. We need proof, he said. Real proof enough that even a town that doesn't want to listen has to. First, Ayanna said, already moving back toward the horses, voice sharpening back into focus.
We need to survive long enough to gather it. They rode through what remained of the night, putting distance between themselves and the relay camp before anyone came looking for the papers that had gone missing. By the time they made camp again, deep in a narrow defile, where the rock walls rose high enough to swallow their fire entirely, exhaustion had settled into all three of them like something physical. Await in the shoulders, a grit behind the eyes. Still, sleep didn't come easy.
Ezra lay staring up at the strip of sky visible between the canyon walls, turning Harmon's name over and over in his mind like a stone he couldn't put down. Because it wasn't just greed anymore, was it? It wasn't just a rich man refusing to lift a finger. It was a rich man architecting the very disaster he publicly refused to solve, profiting twice over. once from the theft and once from the town's gratitude when he eventually generously decided not to help clean it up, which meant this fight had two heads now instead of one. Which meant even if they beat Crane, even if every stolen horse walked back into that camp by the river, Harmon would still be sitting in Redstone counting his money, untouched, unaccused, ready to do it again next season.
Except that wasn't tonight's problem. Tonight's problem had teeth and rifles and was somewhere past the next ridge and dwelling on Harmon wouldn't get Chaitton's people their horses back any faster. Ezra rolled onto his side, found Ayanna awake across the fire, watching the flames instead of sleeping. Same as him. You're not resting, he said.
Neither are you. Touche. She almost smiled at that. The expression flickered, uncertain, like a muscle that hadn't gotten much practice lately. "You keep doing that," he said.
"Doing what?" Almost smiling, then stopping yourself like you caught yourself doing something you weren't allowed to do. Something shifted behind her eyes, guarded suddenly in a way that hadn't been there a second before. "Careful, Colton," she said. "Keep talking like that. I'll start thinking you're paying attention to me instead of the horses.
Can't a man do both? A man who wants to keep his teeth learns to prioritize. Chaitton, half asleep a few feet away, muttered something in his own language that Ezra didn't understand. But that made Ayanna throw a small stone at her brother without even looking. Chaitton grunted, rolled over, said nothing further.
Though Ezra was fairly sure he caught the ghost of a grin before the man's back turned fully to the fire. He's protective, Ezra said. He's exhausting, but there was no heat in it. Only the particular fondness people carry for family they'd walk through fire for and complain about the entire way. He raised me some after our parents.
She stopped there. The sentence just ended mid-thought like a door swinging shut on its own weight. Ezra didn't push, had learned over one long night and one longer day that pushing Ayanna anywhere she hadn't chosen to go herself was a losing strategy. So instead, he waited, watched the fire instead of her face, giving her room to decide whether tonight was a night for doors to open or stay closed. Long minutes passed, the fire popped.
Somewhere distant, something small skittered across rock and went quiet again. Raiders, she said finally. So quiet he almost missed it when I was nine. Not Crane's men far as I ever learned. A different band entirely, though cut from the same rotten cloth.
They hit our camp in the worst part of winter when the horses were weak and the men were out hunting what little game the season left us. Ezra went very still. understood somehow that stillness was the only right response to what was coming. My mother hid me and my brother in a dry creek bed, told us not to make a sound no matter what we heard. Ayanna's voice had gone flat. The particular flatness of someone reciting a memory they'd worn smooth from replaying it too many times alone.
We heard everything, every single thing. And we didn't make a sound because that's what she told us to do. And we were good children. And good children listen to their mothers. Even when listening is the crulest thing anyone has ever asked of them.
Ayana, she didn't come back for us. The words came faster now. Like once the dam cracked, there was no slowing what poured through it. Chaitton found her. Not me.
He wouldn't let me see. I was nine and he was 13. And he decided right then that some things a sister shouldn't carry. even if carrying it herself might have been easier than wondering forever what he wasn't telling her. Silence, heavy and complete, settled over the fire. "I learned the bow that winter," she said.
"And now there was iron back in her voice. Iron that had clearly been forged specifically to replace whatever had broken." "The elders said it wasn't a woman's place." Said, "Grief makes people foolish. Makes them reach for things that won't actually fix what's broken. her jaw tightened. They were wrong about the bow. They were right about the grief part.
I have never once in 16 years stopped being furious about a thing no amount of arrows can undo. Ezra sat with that a long moment before he spoke. Chose his words the way a man chooses footing on unstable rock. I never told anyone the whole of what happened to my family, he said. Not really.
People in town know the shape of it. Ranch burned, parents gone, boy left alone. They don't know I was 17 and hiding behind a water trough the whole time it happened. Watching, not moving. Her eyes came up to his sharp with sudden recognition.