"Every part of you, Waterheart. I already do." They told Grey Talon together the next morning. And the chief, for all his careful stone composure through everything else this desert had thrown at him, could not quite manage to keep his face from breaking into something helplessly close to joy. I suspected, he admitted the night you both stood too close together at the fire and pretended not to notice you were doing it.
"We weren't that obvious," Wade said. "You were precisely that obvious." Grey Talon clasped Wade's shoulder, the same gesture he'd used the night of the naming ceremony, though it carried a different weight now. Warmer, surer. My people have a saying for this, too.
Waterheart. Two rivers joining do not lose themselves. They simply become something larger than either was alone. Your people, Wolfrunner said, appearing with Broken Blade close behind. Both grinning wide enough that pretending not to have listened at the tent flap would have fooled nobody.
Have a saying for everything. We have lived a long time, Grey Talon said, entirely unbothered. We have had ample opportunity to develop them. Broken blade to Wade's genuine surprise extended a hand the white man's way. deliberate a gesture Wade understood had cost him something to learn and something more to offer freely.
"Welcome, brother," Broken Blade said properly this time. Wade shook it, throat too tight for a moment to manage any words back, and found he didn't need any. Some things this whole desert had taught him over these past two strange, transforming months said themselves plainly enough without help. That evening, once the camp's noise had settled, Wade and Autumn Sky walked back into the cavern together.
Torchlight dancing gold across the water, same as it had that very first day. They sat at the edge of it a long while, saying little, needing to say little, listening to that same steady current that had run generous through the darkest years this desert had ever known, and would keep running, Wade understood now, long after both of them were gone, feeding whatever came next, whoever needed it most. Some gifts given freely enough just kept flowing that way forever if you let them. And somewhere out past the mouth of that cavern, under a sky already filling with stars, a whole desert that had once known Wade Callaway, only as a man running from his own grief, now knew him by an entirely different name.
Waterheart, husband soon enough to a chief's daughter who'd never once needed saving. Nearly as much as she'd needed somebody willing to stand beside her, brother to warriors who'd once wanted him dead on sight. A man finally at peace with the ground he stood on and with the woman standing on it beside him. Home, it turned out, hadn't been a place Wade needed to find. It had been a choice he needed to make, one honest act at a time, until the desert that once held nothing but his loneliest years finally learned to hold something worth staying for. Instead, the