The thinness in their faces and the hollow sound of their breathing made that plain. He rose, crossed to a shelf, and pulled down a small sack of beans and a strip of salt pork. He dropped them onto the table with a dull thud, then pointed toward the pot hanging on the hook over the fire. "Food," he said simply. The middle sister moved immediately, stepping forward without hesitation.
She lifted the pot, poured in water from a jug, and set to work. Her movements were quick, careful, like someone used to making do with little. Rowan watched her stir the beans in silence. The smell of the pork beginning to seep into the air. He took a moment then to study them with more care.
Questions pressed into his mind, the same ones any man would have asked if he'd seen three Apache women alone on a winter road. Why were they here? Where had they come from? What had happened to the men who were supposed to protect them? Rowan didn't speak the questions out loud, but he thought them, and he guessed others would too if they ever saw these women at his side.
The eldest caught his eyes once, then again, and after a long pause she said quietly, "We walked for many days. Our people gone." She didn't explain whether gone meant dead, scattered, or pushed away. Her English was broken, but clear enough. No place. We came here.
Rowan let her words hang. He didn't push for more. He knew enough of the wars between settlers and tribes to understand what gone could mean. And he wasn't a man who liked to hear details that couldn't be undone. He looked at their feet.
Raw. Red from the cold. No boots. Not even moccasins. That told him enough about what they'd endured.
When the beans began to soften, the middle sister filled four bowls. Rowan noticed how they split theirs between the three of them, leaving the largest portion untouched, sliding it closer to him. He frowned, pushed it back, and said, "Yours." His tone was flat, but it carried weight. The youngest looked up at him then, wide-eyed, as if surprised a man would turn food away. She hesitated before eating, then bent her head and took the bowl in both hands, sipping from it like it was more precious than anything she'd held in days.
Rowan felt something shift in his chest. Not pity, but a steady pressure, like responsibility pressing down whether he had chosen it or not. Later, when the bowls were empty, Rowan reached for a blanket folded on a shelf and tossed it toward the floor by the hearth. The sisters laid it out, curling together on the boards close to the fire. Rowan sat back at the table, staring into the flames, his thoughts circling.