Diani watched the last light fade gold and then rose across the canyon wall above them. You've spent your whole life fighting this land. We've spent generations learning from it instead. Levi laughed low and honest. Reckon I've still got plenty left to learn then.
Diani looked at him a long moment in the fading light, weighing something behind her dark eyes. Levi couldn't quite name yet. You need a woman like me. Heat climbed straight up Levi's neck into his face before he could stop it. To keep me out of trouble, she laughed outright, the sound of it carrying warm off the canyon walls. to remind you that strength was never only about carrying a rifle.
It's knowing when to trust something you can't fully explain yet. She meant it. Plain without a trace of flirtation, dressing it up. And somehow that plainness landed on Levi harder than any coy remark ever could have managed. He walked back down to camp beside her in a silence that felt for the first time in his life, like it was saying something rather than simply filling the space where words belonged.
On the sixth day, with rain threatening low over the mountains and the whole camp's usual outdoor work moved undercover, Diani sat him down beside her at a half-finish burden basket and tried with visibly strained patience to teach him the coil and stitch technique her own hands had known since before she could properly walk. His first attempt came out lopsided and loose enough to leak grain through its own seams. His second wasn't much better. Diani laughed at him more than once, unguarded and genuine, and made him start over a third time from the base, rather than let him patch the mistake, insisting a basket built on a crooked foundation would only ever disappoint whoever trusted it to hold something precious. Levi thought, working the willow strip slow and clumsy under her correcting hands, that she might have been talking about more than baskets, and found he didn't mind the lesson one bit either way.
He left on the morning of the seventh day with the string of horses he'd nearly forgotten he was driving toward Cottonwood bend. Chief Taji's parting handshake, firm and warm, closed nod from across the camp a fraction less guarded than it had been a week before. And Diani walking beside his horse all the way to the canyon mouth, without either of them quite managing to say the things sitting unspoken in the space between them. Come back, she offered simply when the trail forked, and there was no more excuse left for walking together. If you want to learn more than tracking and yucca root, Levi looked down at her from the saddle a long moment.