Which camp? She called out voice tight. Which winter exactly? Tell me plain. A pause.
Then Crane's voice again, almost curious now at the sharpness in hers. Camp two ridges north of here. Different band than yours. Girl, if that's what you're asking. I never rode against your people that season.
Wasn't me who came for your kin. Something almost like honesty crept into it. Cold comfort though it was. That's the truth. For whatever a truth from me is worth to you.
Same winter though, same rotten season that seemed to break every good thing it touched. Maybe that's why I never much minded. Who else it broke along with me? Ayanna's shoulders sagged. Some fraction of relief moving through her even here.
Even now, even with rifles waiting in the dark. Not him. Not the man who took her mother, but close enough in time and in kind that the wound didn't need to share a name to share a shape. You're not owed revenge," Ezra called out, forcing his voice to hold steady, even as everything inside him wanted to shatter. "You're owed consequences.
There's a difference, and you've spent 11 years pretending there isn't." "Pretty words," Crane called back. "Don't change what happens next." which is which is you hand over the herd, hand over the girl and her brother and ride back to Redstone with your life or pause deliberate cruel or you don't and this canyon becomes exactly the kind of grave that town always figured you'd earn. Ezra looked at Ayana, at Chaitton, breathing shallow and ragged in the dark at the herd, restless and unknowing. 200 lives that had already cost too much to lose now. Not happening, Ezra called back, steady as stone.
Your choice, then. The first shot cracked the night wide open. Everything after that came in fragments. Muzzle flashes carving jagged light across canyon walls. Ayanna's bow singing arrow after arrow into the dark with a precision that would have been beautiful under any other circumstance.
Ezra pressed low behind rock revolver bucking in his hand, aiming at shadows and shapes and hoping every single time that his aim held true. A man went down near the canyon mouth. And Ezra didn't have time to feel anything about it because another was already climbing over rock to his left. And Ayanna's voice cut sharp through the chaos. Left, Ezra.
Left, he spun, fired, and the shape crumpled before it ever reached striking distance. Thank you, he gasped. Don't thank me. Reload. Something that might have been laughter wild and adrenaline soaked threatened to bubble up in Ezra's chest even in the middle of gunfire because of course of course this was exactly the moment she'd choose to be dry about it.