Low certain not the voice of someone bluffing. I'm not your enemy, Ezra said. You're a stranger riding toward Red Mountain 3 days after 200 horses went missing. That makes you exactly my enemy until you prove different. I'm trying to get those horses back.
So says every scout Crane's men ever send ahead to check the ground before an attack. Ezra's stomach dropped. You know Crane's name. I know a lot of things, white man. I know your fire is too big for someone who understands what's hunting these hills at night.
I know you ride alone, which means either you're a fool or your bait. I know I have exactly one more arrow before I need to decide which. He raised his free hand slow. Let the revolver hang loose at his side, pointed at the ground. Ezra Colton, he said, "Redstone.
My family had a ranch once. Raiders burned it 11 years back. Man with a brand like a broken snake did the burning. I heard that same brand hit your people's camp three nights ago. I'm not here to finish what he started.
I'm here to end it. Silence stretched long enough that he started to wonder if he'd said the wrong thing. Then the shape on the ridge shifted. Lowered the bow, though not all the way. Prove it, she said.
Name the mark. circle, broken line through the middle, like something cut in half and never healed. Right. Another pause, longer this time. That's the mark, she said quietly, almost to herself. She came down off the ridge slow, bow still in hand, though the arrow was gone from the string.
Fire light found her face a piece at a time. dark eyes that didn't blink much, a scar along her jaw, old and pale, the kind that told a story she clearly wasn't offering tonight. She moved like someone who'd spent a lifetime being underestimated and had stopped waiting for anyone to catch up. "Ayanna," she said, just the one word, like a name was a weapon she wasn't ready to hand him fully loaded. "You're from the camp that lost the horses. I am the camp that lost the horses. something hard in her voice now.
My people, my tribe, not some story you heard in a saloon before you decided to play hero. I'm not playing anything. Then why are you alone? Ezra didn't have a good answer for that. So he told the true one instead.
Because nobody in that town was willing to come. I asked. They laughed. He shrugged, though the memory still stung. So it's just me.