You're doing that on purpose, Wade accused. Making me sound foolish for your own entertainment. Believe me, Waterheart, you require no help from me on that front. Cruel woman, patient woman. There's a difference, though I understand it might be hard for you to tell from where you're sitting.
She made him try the word four more times before pronouncing herself satisfied. And by the end of it, Wade had learned along with a handful of new words, that being teased by this particular woman felt suspiciously like being cared for, wrapped up in the same package and handed over together. Your turn, he said once she'd run him through enough vocabulary to make his head spin. Teach me something useful. English word you don't already know.
She considered ridiculous. You know that word. I know it exists. Wasn't sure I knew it well enough to use properly until his exact conversation demonstrated it so thoroughly. Wade laughed.
Really laughed. The kind that came from somewhere low in his chest and surprised him every single time it showed up these days. Like an old friend he'd stopped expecting to visit. There were harder evenings, too, alongside the easy ones. Broken Blade kept his distance through most of that week, watching from across the fire with the same guarded weight in his eyes, and Wade understood well enough not to push it.
Some wounds don't close because a man wants them to. They close, if they close at all, in their own time, at their own pace, and pushing only ever seems to slow the healing down. It was Wolfrunner who finally bridged it three evenings before the naming ceremony, dragging Wade over to where Broken Blade sat mending a bow string alone. "Show him your hands," Wolfrunner said to Wade without much preamble. Wade held them out, uncertain, calloused deep, scarred across the knuckles, blistered fresh from a week of hauling stone and hollowing logs.
Broken Blade studied them a long moment, then held out his own same calluses, same fresh blisters, same work-worn into the same places. Nobody said anything else about it. Nobody needed to. But three evenings later, when the spears struck the ground in unison to welcome Waterheart into the tribe, Broken Blade landed with the rest. Not first, not loudest, but there, and Wade understood exactly what that particular silence had been worth earning.
Wolfrunner found him alone by the well one afternoon, the metal fragment still tucked, Wade noticed, in the same fold of his shirt where he'd first put it. You still carrying that, Wade said. Elder quiet. Quiet Water knows metal, Wolfrunner said, knows guns. She says this piece, it is not from any rifle.
Traded honest at any post she knows. says it is army issue. New pattern, not five years old like the raid you told me nothing about. Wade went very still. I never said there was a raid. You did not have to say it.