Wade found autumn sky standing apart from the rest, watching the same dark horizon Reed had disappeared into. Her jaw set hard. You knew him, she said. Not a question. She'd stopped asking him questions like that days ago.
Started just naming the thing she already knew served under him. Two years before Sarah, before any of this, Wade's voice had gone rough, scraped thin. Man just told me plain as anything that he knew things about her, about where we lived. Practically told me to my face. He had a hand in it and dared me to prove it.
Then we prove it. It's not that simple. Nothing's been simple since the day you dragged me out from under that rock. Doesn't mean we stopped trying. She turned to face him fully.
Fire light catching golden eyes that hadn't lost an ounce of their sharpness. Despite everything, my father won't run from this. My people have run enough for long enough from men exactly like him. Whatever happens next, Waterheart, it happens with us standing beside you, not behind you. Wade looked at her a long moment, felt something settle into place in his chest, something that had been missing, unnamed for five long years.
"All right," he said. "Then let's go find proof." The days after Reed's visit, passed strange and heavy, the whole camp caught between two truths that didn't sit easy together. Relief that the springs water still ran clear and endless every morning, and dread that a man like Reed didn't make idle threats about coming back. Grey Talon doubled the watch.
Wolfrunn and Broken Blade took turns riding the ridge line further out than the celebration had ever required them to look before. Even Quiet Water, who'd spent most of two months treating Wade with amused suspicion, started leaving extra bundles of dried herbs by his door each morning, the kind used for wounds, not fevers. And neither of them said a word out loud about what that meant. Wade spent those evenings teaching Autumn Sky what he remembered of soldiering, how to read a formation, how to judge a man's intent, by the set of his shoulders before he ever reached for a weapon. Small, useless fragments of a life he'd walked away from years back and never expected to need again.
You're worried, she said one evening, watching him clean his rifle for the third time that week, an old habit from his army days, that his hands seem to remember even when the rest of him would rather forget. Man like Reed doesn't ride off after one refusal and just accept it. Not in my experience. So, we're ready. Ready as we can be.
Doesn't mean I like it. Nobody asked you to like it. Waterheart just asked you to help us survive it. She took the rifle gently from his hands, set it aside, and took his hands in hers instead. Calloused palm against calloused palm.