They hit our camp in the worst part of winter when the horses were weak and the men were out hunting what little game the season left us. Ezra went very still. understood somehow that stillness was the only right response to what was coming. My mother hid me and my brother in a dry creek bed, told us not to make a sound no matter what we heard. Ayanna's voice had gone flat. The particular flatness of someone reciting a memory they'd worn smooth from replaying it too many times alone.
We heard everything, every single thing. And we didn't make a sound because that's what she told us to do. And we were good children. And good children listen to their mothers. Even when listening is the crulest thing anyone has ever asked of them.
Ayana, she didn't come back for us. The words came faster now. Like once the dam cracked, there was no slowing what poured through it. Chaitton found her. Not me.
He wouldn't let me see. I was nine and he was 13. And he decided right then that some things a sister shouldn't carry. even if carrying it herself might have been easier than wondering forever what he wasn't telling her. Silence, heavy and complete, settled over the fire. "I learned the bow that winter," she said.
"And now there was iron back in her voice. Iron that had clearly been forged specifically to replace whatever had broken." "The elders said it wasn't a woman's place." Said, "Grief makes people foolish. Makes them reach for things that won't actually fix what's broken. her jaw tightened. They were wrong about the bow. They were right about the grief part.
I have never once in 16 years stopped being furious about a thing no amount of arrows can undo. Ezra sat with that a long moment before he spoke. Chose his words the way a man chooses footing on unstable rock. I never told anyone the whole of what happened to my family, he said. Not really.
People in town know the shape of it. Ranch burned, parents gone, boy left alone. They don't know I was 17 and hiding behind a water trough the whole time it happened. Watching, not moving. Her eyes came up to his sharp with sudden recognition.
The particular recognition of two people realizing all at once that they'd been carrying versions of the exact same weight without knowing the other one existed. "You didn't fight," she said. Not an accusation, just a fact. Laid gently on the ground between them. I froze.
The word cost him something to say out loud. Something it had cost him nothing to hide for 11 years. My father went down trying to stop them. And I had a rifle in my hands and I froze. And by the time my legs remembered how to move, it was already finished.