It's a practical reason. It's a terrible reason, maybe. He set the bucket down, stood up straight, looked at her. Or maybe I've been in this valley for 3 years because something was waiting to get finished and now it's not finished. These things aren't finished, but they're moving the right direction for the first time.
He paused and leaving when something's moving right seems like bad timing. She looked at him. That look she had, the one that went past the surface of things. The one he'd learned meant she was deciding how much of what she saw to say. You sound like a man making a home, she said.
Maybe I am. That's different from hiding. Yeah, he said. I know. The wind came through, lifted her hair, carried the smell of something from far away.
Rain, maybe. Building over the mountains, the kind that sometimes made it here and sometimes spent itself against the peaks and arrived as just a change in the air. "My father likes you," she said. He looked at her. He said, "He doesn't forgive me.
I know. " He also spent 20 minutes this morning asking Yasuka everything he knew about you. She paused. He likes you. Those two things can coexist. Jack thought about that.
Can they? He said, "In real life," she said. "Yes, people are more than one thing at a time. " "Most of them, anyway," he looked at her. "Most of them. " "You're more than one thing," she said. The man who followed an order he knew was wrong.
And the man who set the rifle down, and the man who cut my ropes without knowing who I was, and the man who, she stopped, looked away. You are all of those at once. Not one cancelling the others. He was quiet. The sun was low.
The valley was going golden rose. The colors had only showed at this hour. The ones you had to be paying attention to catch. So are you, he said. She looked back at him.
You're the chief's daughter and the woman who pressed her hand to the ground and found what was underneath it. And the woman who came back into a canyon in the dark when you didn't have to, he paused. And the person who spall night once when I was running a fever, I didn't tell you about and probably thought I didn't notice. She said nothing for a moment. You noticed, she said.
I noticed things. It's a professional habit. Is that what it was? He looked at her. She looked at him.
The wind, the light, the enormous patience of the desert that had been here before both of them and would be here after and had seen enough of human life to know that these moments were rare. These moments where two people looked at each other honestly and didn't look away. Come back, he said. Not a question, not quite a request, just a thing said because it was true. Saying true things was something he was trying to do more of.
She didn't answer right away. She looked at the cabin, at the valley, at the well with its half-colapsed frame that he was going to fix. At the place 30 ft to the east where there was water, if you were willing to dig for it. When I come back, she said carefully, it won't be as someone who needs to be kept safe. I know it'll be as she chose as myself.
Whatever that looks like when I've done what I need to do, I know you don't know what that will look like. No, he said, but I know what you look like when you're deciding. And I'd rather see you decide than not see you at all. This time it got a little for further became the real thing briefly. Something warm and real moving through her face like light through a crack in rock.
She stood up from the well, stood in front of him, and she reached up to her throat. Her fingers found the cord, the leather thong with the Thunderbird symbol, the double-headed figure her father had carved, the mark of the thing Jack had recognized on a military map two weeks ago, and changed the shape of everything. She lifted it over her head, held it for a moment, then held it out to him. He looked at it. That's yours among my people.
She said, "Giving a symbol means trusting the spirit it carries to the other person. " She paused. "I trust you with it. " He looked at her. "My father gave it to me," she said. "It's mine to give. " Another pause. "And I know what I'm doing. " He took it.
The leather was warm from her skin. The carved figure small in his palm. He looked at it for a moment. Then he went inside, came back with the blue neckerchief. Danny's folded the same way he'd kept it folded for 3 years.
He held it out to her. She looked at it. Jack, it's his, Jack said. Which means it matters. Which means, he paused.
Which means giving it is the most real thing I know how to do right now. She took it, held it in both hands, looked at it, the faded blue cotton, the wear along the fold lines, the history of it. She pressed it once between her palms, then tucked it into the satchel she'd packed. "Some debts," she said quietly, aren't meant to be paid. "They're meant to be lived. " He looked at her.
"My father says that," she said. "He's right. He usually is. " She picked up the satchel. "It's very annoying. " Jack almost laughed. "Almost.
It got close. " She looked at him one more time. That look, the deep one. Safe trail. Jack Marorrow. She said, "Come back, Sia. " She turned, walked toward where the horses were, where Aoti and Yasa and the others were making ready, toward the sound of people who were hers in the old way, the way that predated everything, the way that would be there after everything.
He watched her go, didn't call after her, didn't say anything else. Because some things were complete when they were said, and adding to them only made them less. Morning. Pale and wide and clean the way. Mornings were after something big had moved through.
Jack stood at the window, that old habit. 5 minutes, maybe 10. Except this time he was actually looking at something. The valley, the red earth, the canyon mouth to the west and the ridge to the north, and the enormous sky that was starting to go from gray to blue at the eastern edge. And the ground.