They gave us blankets. Blankets with the sickness woven right in. They promised us the river valley, Tamson added. Then they found gold in the sand. Kessa spat the words into the embers, and the promise turned to lead.
She pulled her knees to her chest, and there it was again, the memory she couldn't outrun, no matter how far the day's work, carried her, dawn breaking the color of a bruised plum. The bugle cheerful and bright, which was the crulest part somehow, that the sound announcing her husband's death had been beautiful. the thunder of hooves, running with her baby in her arms, the crack of the rifle, her husband falling, and then the second shot, the one that went through the bundle in her arms. She hadn't screamed. She'd gone silent instead, a silence that lasted months.
Now that silence had curdled into something colder, something with a direction. I will never trust them. Kessa's voice cut through the quiet like the edge of the knife at her hip. Not the soldiers, not the ranchers. They are locusts.
They eat the world until there's nothing left. But we are starving. Ren soft. Better to starve on our feet. Kessa's jaw set like stone than to live on our knees.
A pause that felt like a held breath. If a white man ever comes into this canyon, I will kill him myself. I will cut out his heart and leave it for the buzzards. Nobody argued. High above a coyote howled long, mournful.
An echo of the emptiness in all their bellies for Silas Merrick in the tracks. 3 days later, Silas Merrick first light. Two more steers gone. And a man can't afford to keep losing stock. Not with beef prices dropping and the bank threatening to call in his loan like a debt collector at the door of a dying man.
The land here turned treacherous fast. Dry washes, slot canyons, ridges of shale that crumbled underfoot like old promises. The sun hammered down until the horizon shimmerred and lighted about distance. He dismounted, crouched by soft sand, traced a hoof print deep, panicked, and over it the print of an unshaw pony. So Gryom was right.
He muttered it like a confession he hated giving. He checked the Winchester in its scabbard, loosened it, climbed back into the saddle, followed the trail deeper into the badlands. The corridors of rocks swallowed the horizon hole. the no birds, no wind, just hooves on stone, and the sudden primal itch of the hair rising on his arms. He'd felt this before, years back, scouting ahead of a column.
The feeling of eyes on him from somewhere he couldn't see, he scanned the ridges, saw nothing but rock and scrub, but rode another hour anyway. Because pride is a stubborn animal, and his had survived worse than good sense telling it to turn around. The canyon narrowed, walls closing in like the jaws of something patient. He should have turned back. He knew that.
He didn't. He rounded a bend. A boulder blocked the path ahead and passed it, silent so complete. It had a texture. He never heard the rope.
It hissed through the air and settled over his shoulders before his mind had finished registering the shape of the danger. The loop tightened, pinned his arms, yanked him backward out of the saddle so hard the wind left his lungs in one violent gasp. He hit the ground, scrambled up on instinct alone, saw movement, figures pouring from the rocks like the desert itself had grown hands. His horse bolted with the rifle still on it. He reached for the colt on his hip.
A second rope caught his ankle inked him down again, face first into gravel. He rolled, spat blood, dust. A figure loomed above him. The old warrior, the gray hair, the face like a dried apple, the club raised. Silas drove his fist into the man's knee.
The old warrior grunted, buckled, but didn't let go of the rope. Then they were all on him. Not a screaming horde. Something worse. A flurry of desperate, exhausted strength.
Hands in his jacket, his hair, his boots. He struck a shoulder, a jaw, kept swinging until he saw it. A woman. The realization froze him for exactly one heartbeat too long. Something heavy cracked against the back of his skull.
white, then gray, then nothing but the sound of his own knees hitting the ground. Rough hand stripped his gun belt, turned out his pockets, took his knife, took his watch, Jos's watch, ripped clean off his vest before he could even lift a hand to stop it. He blinked against the swimming dark. Six people around him. Two old men, chests heaving, the rest women, buckskin and trade cloth gone to tatters, faces stre with dust in something harder than anger.
Get up. a command in a language he didn't speak, though the tone needed no translation. They hauled him to his feet, bound his hands behind his back with rawhide, tight enough to burn, tied a rope around his neck. They didn't kill him. That surprised him more than the ambush had.
In every story told in every saloon he'd ever sat in, this was where a white man died. They moved, the warrior jerk the rope, they marched him. Brutal pace over loose scree, head throbbing in time with his own pulse. Sun beating down on a scalp gone bare of its hat. As the adrenaline burned off, something else crept in.
Observation. His captors were thin, painfully thin, collarbones sharp as blades under thin cloth. The old men moved with the stiff gate of men who hadn't eaten properly in longer than pride would admit. They passed a camp abandoned maybe a week back. Blackened ash, the cracked bones of a mule split for the marrow inside.
Further on, a shallow grave barely covered. a small pair of moccasins left on top like an offering nobody could bear to keep. Silas looked at the young woman walking beside him, maybe 20. She glared at him with a hatred so pure it radiated heat, but her lips were cracked, split from thirst. These were not the raiders from a dime novel.