Thinking then about what? Wade considered how much to say, decided for once to just say it. About how strange it is. three days ago, your father wanted me dead where I stood. Tonight, I'm sitting 15 feet from a fire. His whole tribes dancing around.
Nobody's pointed a bow at me in hours. Autumn Sky was quiet a moment. three days ago, she said, "You were a stranger who might have been lying. Tonight, you're the reason my people aren't burying their children come summer. Things change fast out here. You've lived in this desert long enough to know that better than most.
Guess I have. So come sit at the fire. Nobody's going to bite you." Well, a small smile, quiet water might, but that's just her way. Wade let himself be pulled up and for the first time in five long years, walked toward a fire, surrounded by other people instead of away from one.
The days that followed were the hardest kind of work had done in years, and somehow also the first work in longer than he could remember that didn't feel like it was just keeping him alive out of spite. He helped widen the cavern's entrance, hauling stone alongside men who'd wanted him dead less than a week earlier. Showed them how to build a channel system out of hollowed logs and flat rock, carrying water out to where troughs could be dug for the horses and the cattle. Watched Wikiups go up around the entrance in neat, careful rings. The whole camp reshaping itself around this one impossible gift.
Autumn Sky worked too, leg and all, directing more than lifting, sharp tonged about every crooked log in every badly angled trough. And Wade found himself more than once doing a job twice over just to hear her tell him he'd done it wrong the first time. It was, he thought, one evening, watching her argue a warrior twice her size into rebuilding an entire section of Channel. A strange kind of courting, if that's even what this was. He wasn't sure it had a name yet.
He wasn't in any hurry to find one. One evening, sitting by the fire outside her father's lodge, while her leg finished mending, Autumn Sky decided without asking his opinion on the matter that Wade needed proper lessons. You've been mangling my language for a week, she said. Time somebody taught you correctly instead of letting you keep butchering it. Been getting along fine.
You called quiet water a dead beetle yesterday. She's still deciding whether to poison your coffee over it. Wade choked on the coffee in question. I did not. You absolutely did.
Close enough sounds. Wrong word entirely. Now she's straightened business-like despite the splinted leg propped in front of her. Water. Say it.
He tried. Got it wrong. Tried again. Wronger. She laughed outright, unable to help it. and it took her a solid minute to compose herself enough to correct him.