Though the change moving across their faces was plain enough to read, astonishment first and close behind it. Something that looked almost like respect. Only once every bow was fully lowered did Diani turn back to him. That same tired half smile returning. Her breath was still ragged.
I am the niece of Chief Taji. These are my uncle's own men. They came looking for me the moment my horse ran back to camp without me on it. She studied him a long moment, the unhurried way a person studies someone who has just spent 2 hours of his own strength on a total stranger, expecting nothing in exchange for it. My uncle will want to thank you.
Will you come? Levi rode behind the escort toward camp, turning the whole strange hour over in his mind, boots still damped from the ravine, palms stinging raw beneath his gloves. 31 years in this territory, and he had never once heard so much as a rumor of a village tucked into these particular folds of stone. The trail Diani's uncle's men took him along, wound through a stretch of canyon country that looked from the outside like nothing but rock and creosote and hard climbing. No smoke, no dust, no glint of metal to betray a living soul anywhere near it, which he understood by the time they crested the last rise was very much the point.
A people who had survived, soldiers and settlers alike for generations, did not build their homes. where a stranger's careless glance might find them by accident. The Apache camp sat in a wide well-watered bend of a canyon. Levi had ridden past a hundred times in his life without once suspecting anyone lived within 5 miles of it. And that alone made plain just how little the maps he'd grown up trusting actually knew about this country. Wickiups stood in loose unhurried rows beneath a stand of sycamores, Russian high domes catching the late sun in warm gold streaks.
Cook fires threading smoke straight up into an evening gone perfectly still. Children stopped a game of chase to stare at the tall stranger leading his string of horses in behind Diani's escort. Dogs circled him twice before deciding on their own authority that he wasn't worth barking at further. Chief Taji came to meet them at the edge of camp himself rather than sending for Levi to be brought before him a broad deliberate man with silver threading his black hair eyes that missed nothing as they took Levi's measure from boots to hat. When Diani finished the story of the ravine, gesturing once toward the raw torn blisters already rising across Levi's palms, the chief crossed the last few feet between them and gripped his forearm in both hands.