They were homeless now. A drift in a sea of sagebrush and silence. The journey became a crucible almost immediately. The land they crossed was beautiful in the crulest possible way. Vast empty basins.
The jagged mountain ranges tearing at a sky that never once offered rain when it was needed. Heat during the day sat on them like a physical weight. A hammer that never stopped swinging. Cold at night slipped through thin blankets like a knife looking for the softest place to enter. They moved like shadows.
Slept during daylight hours, hidden in dry washes or beneath cliff overhangs, huddled together for warmth and cover. Walked at night instead, navigating by stars in the shape of ridges against a darker sky. Silas rode point on the black stallion, scouting ahead. Kessa rode rear guard. They communicated in hand signals and bird calls, a silent language forged entirely in the fire of everything they'd survived together.
On the fourth day, the water ran out. They were crossing a stretch of alkali flats, a blinding white expanse of salt and dust that seemed to stretch on past the edge of the world. The canteens, their heads, tongue swollen. The children had stopped crying, not because they'd calmed, but because their bodies no longer had the moisture left to spare on tears. "We have to stop,"Ren, cracked and bleeding.
The little ones can't walk. Silas looked at the horizon. A faint line of green willows maybe 10 mi south. There's a soak there, he said. I remember it from a campaign years ago.
Called it Coyote Springs years a long time in the desert. Kessa's voice rough as the sand under their feet. We have no choice. He gave his horse to Ren, lifted her and her son into the saddle himself, careful of his still healing shoulder. Walk pal beside Kinistad, gave her his arm when she stumbled, and after a long moment of visible hesitation, she took it.
They walked in a days, one foot in front of the other, driven only by the terrifying animal will to keep living one more hour. When they reached the willows, the spring turned out to be little more than a muddy depression trampled by cattle. But there was water they dug with their bare hands, frantic, waited for brown sludge to seep up into the holes they'd carved, drank it through straining cloths, and it tasted of mud and cow manure, and it was without question the sweetest thing Silas had ever put in his mouth. They camped two nights at the springs, letting the children and the horses recover before the next hard push. And it was there on the second night that the desert nearly took something else from them entirely.
The pack horses had been hobbled near the willows, close enough to the fire to feel safe, far enough to graze. Ren's boy, restless the way children get restless, when fear finally loosens its grip for a few hours, wandered off toward them in the dark with a fistful of dry grass held out like an offering. Nobody saw him go, which was how these things always happened. Not through carelessness, but through the small human forgetting that comes after days of nothing but crisis. A rattlesnake buzzed somewhere in the brush close to the horse's feet.
Then one of the mares, the half- wild anyway, spooked hard, reared, the hooves lashing at the dark. And no, Silas was on his feet before he'd finished understanding why. He'd caught the shape of the boy in the fire light, small and frozen, standing directly in the animals path. He didn't think. There wasn't time to think.
He crossed the distance at a dead run, his bad shoulder screaming with every stride, and threw himself between the boy and the horse's hooves, arms up, roaring loud enough to startle the animal sideways. The mare's shoulder caught him a glancing blow, spun him hard into the dirt. He held on anyway, but one hand catching the boy's collar, dragging him clear as the horse crashed away into the brush, snorting wildeyed gone. Silence, then just the ragged sound of his own breathing, the boy sobbing against his chest. Ren reached them a heartbeat later, scooping her son up, checking him over with shaking hands, finding nothing worse than a scraped knee and a fright that would probably visit his dreams for a week. "He's fine,"Silas said, wincing as he sat up, just scared. "Ren looked at him, but really looked at him. The way a person looks at someone, they've decided in that instant they will never doubt again." "Keep doing this,"she said, voice unsteady. "Throwing yourself in front of things that could kill you.
Old habit. Silas managed a tired half smile. Used to be paid for it. Nobody's paying you now, Ren said. No, he agreed.
Guess I just kept doing it anyway. Watched from across the fire, arms wrapped around herself against the night chill and said nothing at all, but something in her face had gone soft in a way she wasn't yet ready to let anyone see too closely. That night, after the camp had settled, Kessa came and sat beside him while he cleaned the fresh scrape along his ribs. "Your shoulder,"she said, held out a small gourd of salve made from grease and crushed herbs. He unbuttoned his shirt, exposed the angry red pucker of the healing wound, freshly aggravated by the fall.
Her fingers cool and gentle, applied the salve, the sharp smell of the herbs cutting through the dust in the air between them. "You're burning,"she murmured. "It's just the walking."a lie and they both knew it. She finished, sat back, didn't leave.
You gave your horse to Ren, she said. Walked 10 miles on a bad leg and a worse shoulder. Then you throw yourself under a spooked horse for a boy. I'm the mule, remember? Faint smile in the dark.