I.
The light came down the valley at the end of the day the way water comes down a dry wash, all at once and gold, filling every crack. It turned the adobe walls of Ojo Prieto the color of bread crust.
It caught in the canvas tops of the eleven wagons drawn up along the south wall and made them glow like paper lanterns. It found the scrub brush and the creosote and the long blue shoulders of the mountains to the east, and it found Iona MacRae on an upturned water bucket with a slate on her knee and six children sitting around her in the dust.
"Again," she said. "The word is river."
"We haven't seen a river in nine days," said Tobias Stroud, who was nine years old and had opinions.
"Which is why we spell it. So we remember what we're walking toward."
Tobias spelled it with two r's in the middle. His sister corrected him. Iona let them argue, because arguing over letters was a kind of learning too, and because she was tired, and because the light was beautiful and she wanted for one minute simply to look at it.
That was the minute the horse came in.
She heard it before she saw it: hooves hitting hard ground at a full run, the wrong sound for evening, when every animal in camp had been watered and picketed and everyone moved slow. Then the horse came around the east corner of the wall, a brown gelding lathered white at the chest, stirrups flying, and the rider was already coming off it. He did not dismount. He fell. He hit the dirt on his shoulder and rolled, and the dust went up around him in a gold cloud, and for a moment Iona could not tell whether he was alive.
Then he was on his knees.
He was a young man with long black braids, in a tan buckskin shirt fringed at the seams and trousers to match, his cheeks dark with paint or dirt or both. He held his left arm against his chest with his right hand cupped under it, as if he were carrying something that might spill, and what was spilling was blood. It ran from his forearm over his wrist and through his fingers and darkened the fringe and fell in the dust in heavy drops that the dust drank at once.
He shouted. The first words were in a language Iona did not know, sharp and urgent and full of breath. Then English, raw:
"Not the canyon! You hear me? Not Quemado. They are waiting in the canyon—"