The sun blazed down like it was burning through the soul. In the middle of that dusty wasteland, Nihoni, an Apache warrior woman standing nearly 6 ft and 7 in tall, or about 2 m, moved slowly through the dead land. Sweat traced a path down her strong back, her bronze skin glowing like heated metal.
She heard a faint groan lost in the wind by a cracked stone well. A man lay motionless—a skinny white man, his body covered in blood and red dust, his lips dry and turning purple. His horse had run off; his canteen lay upside down in the sand.
Nahon knelt. Her eyes were cold and deep like mountain rock.
"Water," he whispered, his voice dry and brittle like ash.
She did not ask his name. She did not hesitate. She scooped up three ladles of cold water and lifted his head with her scarred hands. Every drop that slid down his throat felt like it was giving breath back to the earth. He opened his eyes and met her dark, bottomless gaze. There was no hatred, no fear, only a quiet look, like two souls recognizing each other in a place where no laws remained but survival.
She stood up and walked away without a word, leaving behind bare footprints in the sand.
All that remained was Corbin lying there with a faint heartbeat, the image of that woman echoing in his mind: tall, powerful, and not of his world. By evening, the sandstorm rolled in, but the well was still full, and that man had been saved by the hands of someone once called an enemy.
When Corbin woke up, night had fallen. The air was thick with the smell of smoke and herbs. He was lying on a deerhide, his wounds bandaged with rough cloth and tree resin. Outside, a fire blazed within a ring of stones in an Apache camp hidden deep within the mountain pass.
Nahon sat a few steps away, her back turned to him. Her broad, bare shoulders glowed in the firelight, and her long black hair fell down her back like a dark river. She was sharpening her blade, slow and steady, like someone who had lived her whole life between life and death.
Corbin tried to move, but pain shot through his leg, and he collapsed.