I do not know his name. Only that he wears a badge and that Ascala treats him like a man worth keeping happy." Inaba's eyes met Witt's. Both of them arriving at the same understanding. In the same breath. Cold and certain.
"Brag," Witt said. "You know this man." "I know him well enough to hate him on principle alone," Witt said. Better now, apparently, than I ever gave myself credit for. Because it made a terrible, elegant kind of sense once a person someone saw the whole shape of it laid out plain. A sheriff hungry for land and water both.
A rejected suitor hungry for a council seat that pride alone wouldn't win him. Two men who'd never once needed to like each other to recognize how useful they could be to one another. Bragg feeding Askala rifles and standing. Askala feeding Bragg information which trails ran unguarded, which water rights the tribe would fight hardest to keep, which families could be turned quiet with the right pressure applied in the right order. And somewhere in that arrangement, a rope bought special days ahead of a hanging nobody was supposed to have planned.
Which meant Yanaba hadn't just been convenient. She'd been necessary. A woman too strong, too outspoken, too likely to keep asking hard questions about a cousin's death removed clean, blamed, neat. Two birds and one very well purchased rope. "He needed me gone." Yanaba said quietly, arriving at the same conclusion Wit had.
Her voice gone thin. With the weight of finally understanding the whole shape of her own near death. Not only Askala. Bragg, too. I was watching too closely.
Asking questions neither man wanted answered. "Then we're not just fighting for your name anymore." Wit said. "We're fighting something a whole lot bigger than either one of us started out thinking we were." "There is danger in this, too." Tashi said, his voice low urgent. "If Askala learns I carry his knife, learns I have begun asking questions among the widows and the old hunters who remember more than they say aloud, he will not wait for a council to decide my fate. He will simply arrange for me to disappear the same careless way that young warrior disappeared and call it misfortune when anyone asks." "Then you're in as much danger as I am." Yanaba said, something fierce and protective moving across her face.
"More, perhaps. You have a rancher with a rifle standing beside you. I have only the dark and my own two feet and whatever caution I can manage between one hiding place and the next. Taji's jaw set, stubborn in a way that mirrored his sister's own. I do not regret the risk.
Truth buried this deep does not surface on its own. Someone must be willing to dig. Then dig careful, Inaba said, gripping his shoulder briefly, fierce. I did not survive a rope only to bury my own brother instead. I do not intend to make you choose between those two outcomes, Taji, said something almost gentle beneath the grimness.