Not comfortable, but enough. Seiya found an overhang 20 ft deeper into the canyon that caught the cold air coming down from the upper ridge and turned it into something almost pleasant by comparison to the nighttime desert floor. She showed it to him without comment, just led him there. They sat with their backs against the cool rock, not tired enough to sleep, not rested enough to plan. "Tell me about him," Seiya said.
Quiet into the dark. He didn't ask who Danny was. He thought things were funny. Most things, not in a foolish way. In a way that said he'd looked at the thing properly and seen the part of it that was absurd.
Jack paused. He could ride better than me. I'd never tell him that when he was alive. Why not? Because he would have made a thing of it.
He almost smiled. He made a thing of everything. She said nothing. Let him have the space to keep going or not. He kept going.
He wanted to go east when the service was done. Open a bookshop. He said the word carefully, like it still surprised him a little. A bookshop out here. Man who had spent 4 years in the desert wanted to open a bookshop in Richmond or Baltimore.
Somewhere with rain. That sounds right. Saiia said, "How would you know? " "Because men who notice things usually want to be somewhere they can sit down with all the things they've noticed and make sense of them. " She paused. "A bookshop is just a place where someone organized other people's noticing. " Jack looked at her in the dark. "He would have liked that," he said finally.
"That description, I know. " She said it so simply. Not I think or I imagine, just I know he didn't push. Some things you let be what they were. Three days in the canyon, three days of waiting, of watching the canyon entrance for movement, of listening to the valley outside go about its own business. Wind, birds, the far off rumble, of a summerstorm building over the mountains to the south.
On the morning of the third day, Seiya went still. Jack noticed immediately. She'd been sitting at the canyon entrance in the shadow, out of sight from outside, watching the approach. Then she went very still. He moved beside her.
Looked three riders coming from the west, not cavalry blue, dark blankets, the kind that moved differently from military issue, riding slower than soldiers rode, with a different quality of intention. One of them was old. You could tell even from a distance. The way he sat the horse, stable, deep, completely at ease, the way only very old riders or very young riders who'd never been told to be afraid, sayya exhaled. The tiniest sound, "Yka," she said.
Not a question, just a word. And the word had 30 things in it. Relief and disbelief, and something that looked like it was trying very hard not to be hope in case hope was wrong. They moved out of the canyon. The writers saw them and the old man at the front raised one hand.
Not a wave, a recognition, a slow palm open gesture that said, "I see you. I know you. We are not enemies. " He dismounted when they were 20 ft out. He was old was the wrong word. Ancient was too dramatic.
He was the kind of man who'd moved past age into something else. Long gray braids hanging past his shoulders. A face that had been carved by weather and time and decision into something that was very far past handsome or plain, just real, the way very few faces got to be. He looked at Sia. She crossed the distance between them and he put both hands on her shoulders and looked at her the way someone looked when they were confirming.
Something they'd feared wasn't true. He spoke to her. Apache low and deliberate, she answered. Two words, then more. Jack stood back.
Let them have it. After a minute, the old man looked at Jack. His eyes were he'd expected weariness or that particular blankness that was polite distance. Instead, he got something more direct than that. The look of a man who'd already heard a great deal about you and was deciding how much of it matched what he was seeing.
"You cut her bonds," Yasa said. His English was careful, not halting. Careful like a language he knew but treated with respect. Yes, you kept her safe. Tried to.
Yasa was quiet for a moment. Among us, he said, "When you save a life, you take on a piece of it. " "It cannot be given back," Jack said. Nothing. "I don't say this as a burden," the old man said. He almost smiled.
"Not quite close. I say it so. You know what you've agreed to. Whether you knew it or not," Jack looked at him. "What does Aoti know? " Yoska's expression changed.
Not much. He knows she was taken. He knows she is alive. He has been a pause choosing words, managing himself to wait rather than act. Someone needs to tell him not to act.
Jack said they want him to come for her with force. They're counting on it. I know this, Yasa said. Can you get word to him? The old man studied him for a moment long, unhurried.
Why would you want me to do that, Jack Marorrow? If a hodi is kept away from the valley, the pressure on you stays. You could walk away. Take the horse. Go someone has arranged anything around you.
Jack looked at him then at Seiya. She was watching him with an expression he couldn't entirely read. Not waiting for an answer. She already knew the answer. She was watching him give it because someone has to end this.
Jack said not just for now all the way. The land order. What Voss has built, what Fitch is covering. He paused and because I made a promise to someone three years ago, not out loud, but I made it. Yosa looked at him a while longer, then nodded once, slow and definitive.
Then we have things to discuss, he said. They talked for 2 hours at the edge of the canyon. All four of them, Yoska, his two writers, Jack and Saiia, in a mix of English and what Yoska translated between languages, a slow layered conversation with gaps where words couldn't cross perfectly. What Jack learned, Voss had been working the land arrangement for four years, a grant federal level requiring the current occupants of the southern Churikawa terra to be either relocated, contained, or in the language of official documents, pacified, which meant different things depending on who was doing the pacifying and what they thought that word permitted. Fitch had been tasked with the military component.