And for the first time, something almost like the ghost of respect moved behind his eyes. A man who has lost something knows how to recognize it in another. I see it in you, white man. Same as I feel it in myself. Every day since my daughter disappeared.
Wade said nothing. There wasn't anything safe to say to that. Grey Talon stood. "You saved my daughter's life," he said. "That is a debt, and my people do not forget a debt, good or bad.
But my people also do not forget what white men have done to us. The lies, the theft, the killing, going back further than either of us has lived. One good act, however real, does not erase all the rest of it. "Didn't ask it to," Wade said quietly. "Then you will prove it another way."
"Prove what?" Wade asked, though some cold, tired part of him already suspected the answer wasn't going to be anything close to simple. That your heart is true, said Grey Talon, that you did not save my daughter to use her against me, for for ransom, for land, for anything but exactly what you claim it was. And if I can't prove that, the chief's eyes were unreadable now, flat and ancient as the desert floor at high noon, then saving her life, he said, will not be enough to undo what your people have already done to mine. Kindness from one man does not pay a debt owed by a hundred others.
He turned toward the door, paused there, one broad hand resting on the frame like he was steadying himself against something only he could see. "Three days," he said. In three days, bring me something that shows me who you truly are underneath whatever face you're wearing for me right now. Something no ordinary man would ever be willing to give up. Then he was gone out into the hard morning sunlight, leaving Wade standing alone in his own cabin with a fevered stranger on his cot and a chief's impossible demand still ringing over and over in his ears. three days, which wasn't a great deal of time, Wade thought, to prove a man's entire heart to somebody who had spent his whole life carefully learning not to trust men who looked anything like Wade.
He didn't notice at first that Autumn Sky's eyes had opened again, watching him from the cot with an expression he couldn't quite read. "He means it," she said quietly. The three days. He's not testing you to be cruel. He's testing you because he can't afford to be wrong about you.
Not with everything writing on it. What's writing on it? Wade asked. Beyond you, I mean. She was quiet a moment, like she was deciding how much to say to a man she'd known less than two full days.