He should step forward, put his money on the counter, buy the meal himself, and hand it over without a word. He didn't. He watched her turn, face gone carefully blank, and slip past him out the door. She smelled of wood smoke and something else. Something Silas recognized because he carried it, too.
Old fear gone quiet from overuse. He couldn't meet her eyes as she passed. Well done, Barrow. A voice boomed from the back of the store. Gryom.
Big man face a road map of broken veins, a bottle of whiskey already halfgone in his hand, though it wasn't yet noon. Can't feed the stray dogs. He laughed, wiped his mouth on a filthy sleeve. Feed one savage. 10 more come crawling out of the hills.
Gryom's grin widened, ugly and satisfied. Ought to shoot them on sight like wolves. Silas walked to the counter, kept his eyes on the ledger anywhere but on Gryom's face because if he looked too long, he might say something he couldn't take back. A man and a man with nothing left to lose sometimes forgets that other people still have things worth losing. The flour, Silas said.
Tin of coffee. Barrow's righteous fury dissolved into a merchant smile like it had never existed. Good to see you, Merrick. He leaned in with a chuckle. You hear the news?
Silas shook his head. Didn't want to. Was going to hear it anyway. The freight wagon burned on the southern road. Driver killed.
Barrow leaned in like he was sharing candy instead of blood. Apache again. Always the Apache. Heard there's a camp up in the high canyons. Gryom's voice from the shadows thick with whiskey and relish.
Not warriors. Witches. Some say squads that ran when the army took their men stealing cattle to stay alive. Silas paid for his goods. coins clicking against the wood too loud in the sudden quiet inside his own skull because he'd lost three heers last month.
That because that math was starting to add up to something he didn't want to solve. Outside, Sergeant Holt was leaning against the hitching post, rolling a cigarette with the patience of a man who had learned patience the hard way. The uniform seemed too much dust to still look like a uniform. Americus tightened the cinch on his saddle. Didn't look up.
Heading out again soon. Colonel's tired of these raids. Holt struck a match against his boot heel. We're sweeping the canyons north of the border. Clean it out once and for all.
He looked at Silas sideways. You used to be the best tracker we had. We could use your eyes. I'm done with that. Silas swung up into the saddle.
You're done when the job's done. Holt's voice followed him flat and certain as a closing door. And the job's not done till every one of them's on the reservation or under it. Silas wrote out without looking back. He carried the silence home like a stone in his boot.
Because he hadn't defended the woman, because he hadn't argued with Gryom, because he hadn't told Hol that hunting starving remnants wasn't a war. It was just slaughter wearing a uniform. He wanted only to be left alone. Except the desert was starting to sound like an accusation every time the wind picked up. Miles away, past every map a white man had ever drawn, the land rose into a fortress of red rock.
A fissure in the earth, invisible until you stood right in front of it. Inside, the world changed. The canyon walls climbed toward a blue ribbon of sky. Wickiups of brush and scavenged canvas huddled against the base of the cliffs. The strips of meat dried on wooden racks in the punishing heat.
The ground swept clean, kept in order by women who had learned to build a kind of dignity out of almost nothing. Kessa knelt by a low fire, turning a piece of hide through smoking sage. at 28 years old and carrying the weight of it like she'd aged past it and come out the other side. Harder. The two braids of black hair fell over shoulders that had learned to carry more than any one person should.
Her eyes held a grief gone old enough to have hardened into something like iron. Tamson limped over. Her leg had been shattered by a rifle butt two winters back, healed crooked, though her mind stayed sharp as the knife at her belt. Water skins are low. Tamson's voice grinding stones over gravel.
Meat won't last another moon. We have hunters out. Theessa didn't look up from the hide. Old men, the boys. Tamson corrected.
Gentle as a blade can be gentle. The warriors are gone, daughter. Dead or in chains? We can't stay here through winter. This canyon will turn into an ice box.
We are not going to the reservation. The words came out sharp enough to draw blood. Kessa looked up, eyes blazing. I won't take my sister's children to a place where they die of coughing sickness and eat flour crawling with weevils. Ren's boy is sick again.
Tamson's voice softened only a little. Coughs deep in his chest, then let him cough in freedom. Kessa's voice wavered on the last word, just barely, enough that only someone who'd known her a lifetime would catch it. Because that night, the women gathered around uh Firefet on scarce mesquite roots. Because there were 12 grown women left, four old men who could no longer fight.
Seven children, which was what remained of a band that had once numbered in the hundreds, they spoke of the old days. Not for comfort, for memory. Because if nobody said the names out loud, the names would disappear, same as everything else had. Do you remember the treaty at the fort? Eda's voice, older than the fire itself, or so it seemed.