Wait, she whispered into the waiting dark. The lead riders passed the choke point. The main body of the troop bunched together, anxious to clear the shadows. Now the canyon exploded. It didn't begin with gunfire.
It began with the earth itself falling. Cedar poles shoved sideways and tongues of red sandstone, carefully balanced for exactly this moment, tipped into the void. The sound was deafening, a roar that swallowed the screams of men and horses whole. The rocks crashed into the rear of the column, crushing wagons, blocking retreat. Dust billowed up, blinding.
Then the arrows came, raining from 50 crevices at once, silent and deadly. The soldiers, trapped in confusion and dust, fired wildly at the cliffs, bullets chipping uselessly against stone. Silas was positioned high on the outcropping near the south ridge, rifle-shouldered, cheek pressed to the stock. He saw a sergeant rallying. Men trying to form a line to suppress the archers on the north wall.
He breathed out, squeezed the trigger. The sergeant's horse dropped. Sergeant went down in a tangle of limbs. Silas with the lever. Clack shifted his aim.
A corporal raising a pistol toward Tamson's position. He fired again. Dirt exploded at the man's feet. The shot went wide. The man flinched.
He didn't shoot to kill. Not yet. Because these were men who wrote letters home to mothers in places with names like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Because some small stubborn part of him still remembered what it felt like to wear that same uniform without hating himself for it. Then he saw a trooper break from the chaos, charging toward a lower ledge where two older women were throwing stones.
The trooper raised a saber, slashed down. One of the women fell. Blood sprang bright against dust colored earth. Something cold snapped in Silas's chest. The hesitation vanished.
He tracked the trooper, led the target by 6 in, fired. The man jerked backward, fell from his saddle, dead before he hit the ground. Silas felt a wave of nausea, followed almost immediately by a hollow resolve. Because he was no longer a scout, no longer a rancher hiding on the edge of a dying spread. He was a defender of this canyon now, and the price of admission was blood.
The battle raged for 20 minutes. A chaotic swirl of noise and death. The soldiers, realizing they'd been trapped in a killbox, fought with the desperation of animals cornered in a barrel. They dismounted, used dead horses for cover, poured disciplined fire into the cliff faces. Bullets wind off rock near Silas's head, stinging his cheek with stone splinters.
He kept moving, firing, relocating, firing again. Then, through drifting smoke, he saw it. A squad of five soldiers had slipped away from the main fight, scrambling up the steep goat trail, fast, hand overhand, heading toward the upper shelf toward the children. Silas looked across the canyon. Kessa was pinned down by heavy fire, unable to see the flank.
Tamson's attention was locked on the center of the battle. There was no one else. He abandoned his cover, scrambled down from his perch, sliding on loose shale, hitting the canyon floor at a dead run. 50 yards of open ground stood between him and the base of that trail. He sprinted.
There, a soldier shouted. The bullets kicked up geysers of dust around his boots. Zip. Crack. Zip.
He didn't slow down. Reached the base of the trail. Just as the first soldier in the flanking squad pulled himself over the lip of the ridge. Silas raised his rifle. Drop it.
The soldier at the front. A bearded lieutenant turned, startled to see a white man fighting alongside the enemy. He hesitated half a second. That hesitation saved the children. Silas fired.
The lieutenant took the round in the chest and fell backward, knocking the man behind him off balance, but the remaining three opened fire. Silas felt a sledgehammer hit his left shoulder. The impact spun him around, knocked the rifle from his hand. He hit the ground hard world dissolving into white light and agony. He groaned, reached for his pistol.
His left arm hung useless, a dead weight to fire. The remaining soldiers scrambled up, weapons raised to finish him. A shadow fell across him. Kessa slid into dust beside him, bow already singing, "Thip!"The lead soldier gasped, arrow blooming from his throat. "Thip!"The second man took an arrow to the thigh, tumbled, screaming down the slope. The last man, seeing the ferocity of the defense, turned and fled back into the smoke. Kessa dropped her bow, grabbed Silas's collar, dragged him behind a boulder just as a volley of carbine fire chewed the ground where he'd been lying a second before. "You fool!"her voice cracked, face streaked with soot and tears. "You reckless white fool!"Silas looked up at her, vision swimming, clutched his shoulder, blood leaking hot between his fingers. "The children,"he gasped. "They were going for the children."Kessa looked up at the ridge, then back at him, and saw the truth of it. He had run into open fire for them, for her son's memory, even though he had no way of knowing that's exactly what it meant to her. She ripped a strip of cloth from her skirt, jammed it into the wound. Silas cried out, arched his back, "Stay down!"her voice shook, though the command in it didn't. "Do not die, Merrick. I have not decided if I forgive you yet."The tide turned, but the cost was already climbing higher than anyone wanted to count. Tamson, seeing the soldiers wavering, had moved from her protected position to Nice, away from a ricochet zone. She was slow, her bad leg dragged in the dub, but a stray bullet fired blind by a panicked recruit struck her in the side.