Made it sound like a well with better manners. Didn't want to oversell it. Man tells you about something like this beforehand. You show up expecting it to disappoint you. It doesn't disappoint.
No. Wade agreed, watching the tor torchlight dance across her face instead of the water. It doesn't. She caught him looking. Didn't look away from it either.
You gave this up, she said quietly. Just between the two of them, the celebration of the warriors and her father carrying on a short distance off. Two years of solitude, and this was the one thing that made it bearable. And you handed it over to people who spent a week deciding whether to trust you at all. Wasn't really a decision in the end.
Um, once I knew what your people were facing, holding on to it would have made me exactly the kind of man I've spent five years telling myself I wasn't. Most men would have found a way to keep some part of it back. A private corner insurance in case things went bad. I'm not most men. No, she said, echoing his own words back at him.
Soft, almost surprised at herself for saying it out loud. I'm starting to understand that. They rode back to camp as the light went long in amber. Word already racing ahead of them, the way news always does in a small, tight community, faster than any horse, faster than sense, straight to the heart of everybody who needed to hear it most. By the time they crossed back into the main camp, people were already gathering.
Word of the spring had beaten them home. Wade watched hundreds of faces turn toward Grey Talon as he rode in. Watched hope move through a whole community like weather, visible, physical, impossible to miss. That night there was celebration, fires built high, meat roasted, drums low and steady, carrying on long after the stars came out in full. Wade sat apart at first, unsure of his place in all of it.
This wasn't his celebration. He'd only handed over a piece of ground. These people had spent a year watching their own die, slow of thirst. And tonight, for the first time in longer than most of them could remember, that fear had finally lifted. It wasn't his grief to share, so he figured maybe it wasn't his joy to claim either.
Except Autumn Sky, leaning on a crutch Wolfrunner, had lashed together for her that same afternoon, made her way over and settled beside him without asking permission. You're supposed to be resting that leg, Wade said. You're supposed to be at the fire, not sulking in the dark like somebody stole your horse. Not sulking. You're doing something that looks exactly like sulking from where I'm sitting.