Bad dream, she said. Not a question. Same one I always get. Want to talk about it? No, Wade said.
And then surprising himself. Yes. Maybe. I don't rightly know. Then don't decide tonight.
She said, sit, breathe. The dream already happened once years ago. It doesn't get to happen twice just because your mind insists on replaying it. He sat, breathed, and somehow, with her steady voice anchoring the dark room, the shaking in his hands eased faster than it ever had on his own. "Thank you," he said quietly after a while.
"Don't thank me. Just remember it next time you're tempted to sit alone with something instead of saying it out loud to somebody who will actually listen." He thought that might be the single was said thing anybody had said to him in five long years. Three more days passed in careful, steady work, and something between Wade and Autumn Sky kept building the whole time, unhurried, the way anything worth keeping usually builds. Small things, her laughing, honestly laughing at some joke he made about the horse.
Him teaching her a few words of English. She pretended not to already half know. The two of them working a channel of water side by side in silence that didn't need filling anymore. Wolfrunner watched all of it with the careful eyes uh who'd started eyes of a man who'd started out suspicious and ended up something closer to a friend. "My people have a word," he told Wade one evening, watching Autumn Sky argue cheerfully with an elder about trough placement 30 yards off.
For when two hearts start beating toward the same fire, "You would not pronounce it well. Try me anyway." Wolfrunner said something Wade genuinely could not repeat. See, Wolfrunner said, not unkindly. Told you.
The seventh day since Wade had first spotted that eagle circling low over the canyon arrived quiet and still, the kind of desert morning. That gives no hint at all of what it's about to hold. Word went around camp early that Grey Talon meant to call a gathering at sundown. Nobody told Wade outright what it was for. He had a guess anyway, watching the way the women glanced his direction all morning.
The way quiet water kept muttering something under her breath every time past, half amused, half exasperated, like a woman watching a slow child finally catch up to something everybody else already knew. He spent the day working the water channel, same as always, sleeves rolled, hands blistered, trying not to think too hard about whatever was coming that evening. didn't work especially well. Autumn Sky staring off toward the horizon twice before noon and said nothing about it either time, which somehow made it worse. By the time the sun dropped low and orange behind the ridge, the whole camp had gathered in a wide circle around the central fire. Faces lit gold, the drums already warming into their steady, unhurried rhythm.