We leave you for the coyotes. No offense, none taken. They sat through what remained of the night in something that wasn't quite comfort, but wasn't hostility either. A truce still finding its shape. Ayanna banked the fire low, insisted on taking first watch, though Ezra offered twice.
Chaitton slept sitting upright the way men do when sleep is a tool and not a luxury. Ezra lay back against the rock and stared up at a sky thick with more stars than redstone ever let him see. Town lamps always washing out the dark out here. There was nothing between him and the whole endless spread of it. He thought about his father's voice, about the boy who' hidden behind a water trough and waited.
That boy wasn't riding tonight. Not anymore. Somewhere out past the ridges. 10 men slept easy around campfires. certain nobody was coming for them. Certain the world worked the way it always had, that the strong took and the weak lost, and nobody rode three days into raider country over horses that weren't theirs.
They didn't know yet they would. Morning came hard and orange over the eastern ridge line. By the time the sun cleared the rocks, the three of them were already moving, following a trail only Chaitton and Ayanna seemed able to read it all. broken brush, a displaced stone, marks and packed earth that meant nothing to Ezra and everything to them. 10 men, Chaitton said, crouched low over a patch of disturbed ground. Confirmed.
Maybe 11. The horses move slow in this terrain. A large herd cannot travel fast through canyon country. How far ahead? Ezra asked.
Two days, perhaps less, if they push the animals hard. Ayana was already scanning the horizon. Eyes narrowed against the glare. They're heading deeper into Red Mountain. The terrain gets worse from here.
Fewer trails. More places to die. You've been through there before. Once something closed over her face, brief and sharp, gone before he could read it fully. It did not go well for the men who took me there.
She didn't explain further. Ezra didn't ask. Some doors you learn to leave shut until someone's ready to open them from the other side. They rode through the morning in near silence, the kind of silence that comes from people saving their breath for the trail instead of conversation. The land grew stranger as they climbed.
Red rock rising on either side like something ancient and half buried, canyons opening in the earth like old wounds that had never quite closed. By mid-afternoon, Chaitton raised a hand, signaling a stop. "Smoke," he said, pointing toward a notch between two distant peaks. "Faint, maybe 2 hours ride from here if the wind is honest about the distance." Ezra squinted. A thin gray thread rose against the pale sky.