Amma emerged an hour later, sat at the table, looked at her map, then at Gideon, I need to tell you something about what Apprentice actually wants. He put down his coffee. It's not just the land, Amma said. Not ours. Not Not yours either.
She smoothed her hand across the map. There's a northern railroad route being surveyed through this territory. Through these foothills, her finger traced a line. Your north 40 is the narrowest approach. The only place where the grade is workable.
He looked at the line her finger had drawn. He thought about apprentice, about the offer, about the number on that paper, generous enough to be suspicious. The kind of number that only made sense if what was underneath the land was worth considerably more than the land itself. He didn't buy it. Gideon said, "No.
" So, he has to clear it. Everything in the path, Hama said, "Every claim, every person withstanding to object a beat, including two women who could put his name to specific acts. in a territory court. The fire, the wind, Desa standing near the doorway, arms crossed, not looking at Gideon, looking at her sister, and Gideon understanding, arriving at it the way he arrived at most things, not quickly, but completely, that this changed everything about the shape of the problem. He had thought he was sheltering two women from a violent man.
He was sheltering two women who were the difference between a violent man facing consequences and that same man building an empire from cleared ground and compliant silence. He set down his coffee cup, the removal order, he said. Is there anything else? Amma looked at Desa, that quick, dense conversation without language. Then she reached into the folded blanket beside her and withdrew something small.
A piece of folded leather, soft and dark with handling. She opened it on the table. Papers, several different hands, different dates, letters, Desa said between apprentice and the railroad surveyor. Our elder gathered them over two years. Evidence of what was planned.
What was already arranged before the removal order was even signed. Gideon looked at the papers, at the dates, at the names. He was not a lawyer, not formally educated in any way that would matter in a courtroom, but he had read enough in seven solitary Wyoming winters to understand what he was looking at. This was not the record of one man's excess. This was the paper trail of a scheme that went beyond apprentice, beyond Wyoming territory.
He folded the leather back over them carefully. These need to reach a federal judge, he said. Not county. We know that, Desa said. Cheyenne, we know that, too.
It's a long way in this weather with your sister. Not I know what my sister is, Desa said. Flat, precise, not unkind, absolute. You don't need to finish that sentence. He looked at her.
She looked back. And this this was the thing he had not been prepared for because you could prepare for threats, for cold, for difficult decisions, for danger with visible shape. You could not prepare for a woman who looked at you like that, like she was reading something beneath the words, like she had already seen through to the part you hadn't said yet, like she was completely unimpressed by the performance of competence. While simultaneously, and this was the part that actually got to him, paying attention to the man underneath the performance, he cleared his throat. We'll figure out, shine, he said, when it's time.
And until then, until then, Gideon said, we make this place harder to take apart than it currently is. That afternoon, splitting wood behind the cabin, not because they were short on wood, because it was the kind of work that, let him think without thinking about the thinking, Desa appeared at the corner of the barn. She was wearing his spare coat over her buckskin dress. He had offered it two days ago without ceremony. She'd accepted it the same way.