That's the difference between you and him, she said, nodding toward Crane. You know the difference between justice and hunger. He never did. They bound both men before dawn, loading crane and a still protesting Harmon into the back of Harmon's own wagon under Chaitton's watchful if weakened supervision. Chaitton had roused enough during the fighting to insist on sitting up, rifle across his lap, refusing every suggestion that he lie back down until the last of the danger had genuinely passed.
You should be resting, Ayanna scolded, checking his wound again in the gray pre-dawn light. I should be a great many things, Chaitton said, managing something close to his old dry humor, despite the palar still haunting his face. Resting has never been one of my particular skills. You nearly died. Nearly, he agreed.
The word is doing quite a lot of work in that sentence, sister. Ezra, loading the last of their gear onto the horses, caught Ayanna's eye across the camp and found something there that hadn't existed between them two days prior, something steadier, something that had survived gunfire and grief and 11 years of buried history, and come out the other side still standing. They rode for the Apache camp as the sun cleared the eastern rgeline. 200 horses moving ahead of them in a long, exhausted, grateful column, and behind them, a wagon carrying two men whose crimes would finally publicly have to answer for themselves. The camp came into view by late afternoon.
Tucked along a wide river bend, smoke rising from cook fires, hide tents catching the golden light of a day that had, against every fear haunting the last three, actually ended in something like victory. Someone spotted them first from a distance. A shout went up, then more shouts, then running figures, then the entire camp seemed to erupt at once into motion. people pouring toward the herd with tears already streaming down weathered joyful faces. Ezra watched it all with a lump rising thick in his throat. Watched elders lift trembling hands toward the sky.
Watched grown men and women embrace horses like longlost family because in every way that mattered that's exactly what they were. An old man approached slowly through the celebration. staff decorated with eagle feathers marking him clearly as the trib's leader. His face, deeply lined, carried the particular weight of a man who'd led his people through more winters than most men saw in a lifetime. To Ayanna said, dismounting quickly to embrace him. We brought them home, all of them.
Tojo's eyes, sharp despite his age, swept over the returning herd, over Chaitton's bandage side, over Ezra, standing slightly apart, uncertain of his welcome. Not all of you rode out and scathed, Toto said, voice gentle but observant. Chaitton will heal, Ayanna said. The horses are home. That's what matters most.
The trib's healer, a broad-shouldered woman named Suni, who tended wounds through more winters than Tojo himself, took one look at Chaitan and issued orders nobody, not even Chaitan, dared argue with. He was carried to her tent, wound cleaned and packed fresh with herbs and river moss. And for two full days, he slept more than he woke, fever breaking and returning, and breaking again until on the third morning it finally broke for good and stayed that way. Ayanna sat with him through most of it and Ezra sat with her. The two of them trading watches over a man who complained whenever consciousness allowed it, that he was being fussed over like an old woman with a cough instead of a warrior who' bled honorably and intended to prove it by standing up far sooner than anyone wanted him to.
You'll tear the wound open again, Suni warned the second time she caught him trying to sit unassisted. Then I'll bleed sitting instead of lying down. Chaitton said, "Seems a fair trade for my dignity." Sun, unimpressed, pressed him firmly back onto the furs and did not dignify the remark with a response, which Ezra decided, watching from the tent flap, was probably the correct way to handle a river's sibling in general. To's gaze settled fully on Ezra, now studying him with an intensity that made Ezra straighten instinctively under the weight of it. You are the stranger who rode alone from Redstone, Toto said.
Not quite a question. I am. Why? It was the same question the old man in town had never bothered asking and the same question Ayanna herself had asked. That first night, arrow drawn, suspicion sharp in her voice.