Later, when the trail narrowed and the men had to string out between two shoulders of rock, Nalté let his horse fall back until he was beside Iona.
"The word you were teaching," he said. "When I came in. You had the board."
"River."
"Yes. You have one word. My grandmother had six or seven, for different kinds. Water that runs all year. Water that runs after rain. Water that runs underneath and comes up where the reeds tell you." He nodded ahead, into the dark. "Where your brother is, there is the third kind."
"Will you teach me them?"
He considered it. "Some. Not all. Some words belong to the people who kept them." He rode on a few steps. "You can teach me why you put two of the same letter in the middle of some words and not in others. Callum tried. He was a poor teacher."
"He was," said Iona, and found to her surprise that she could laugh.
VI.
They came to the seep an hour before dawn, when the sky in the east was the gray of old pewter and the cold had settled into the rocks. Nalté stopped them three hundred yards out and went ahead on foot, alone, his good hand loose at his side. Asa let him go. Iona sat the gray mare and held her own breath until the scout's shape stood up against the paler rock and lifted his arm once.
They found Callum MacRae lying in a hollow under a broken ledge where a trickle of water came out of the stone and ran a few yards through a green tangle of reeds and vanished again into the sand. He was gray-faced and stubbled and his eyes were too bright, and when Iona dropped to her knees beside him he looked up at her and said, perfectly clearly, "You never could stay home."
"You asked me to come west."
"I asked you to come to Tucson. This is not Tucson." He coughed, and winced, and his hand found hers. It was hot and dry. "Nalté made it."
"He made it."
"They believe him?"