West wall's next if we don't. Go. Yanaba was already at the door. I will hold them from the yard. You save what can still be saved.
I'm not leaving you out there alone. You are not leaving me. You are trusting me to do what I have done my whole life. Her eyes met his, fierce certain. Something underneath the fierceness that hadn't been there three weeks back.
Something that looked unmistakably like she was afraid of losing him now too and hated herself a little for the fear. Go, Whit called her. I will still be standing when this is finished. I promise you that. He believed her.
Had to. There wasn't time left to do anything else. She burst through the door into the chaos of the yard, axe raised. A shape half lot in firelight and smoke that looked for one strange suspended second like something out of the oldest stories his own grandmother used to tell him as a boy. A figure too large for ordinary danger to touch.
Too certain to be turned back by anything short of the world itself ending. The fighting that followed blurred into pieces Whit would only fully assemble later replaying it afterward in the quiet in the quiet hours he couldn't sleep. Voss mounted firing wild into the smoke more panic in the shots than aim. A rider Whit didn't recognize one of Ascalah's. He'd learn later going down hard when Yanaba's axe caught the shaft of his upraised rifle and sent both weapon and rider sprawling into the dirt.
Witt himself beating flame from the west wall with a soaked blanket until his arms screamed and his lungs burned worse than the fire itself, firing his his Winchester between beats whenever a shape got too close for comfort. Somewhere in the fighting, Witt caught sight of Pruitt, the nervous old nail seller from the mercantile counter, mounted awkward and clearly out of his depth among riders half his age. The man hadn't lit a torch, hadn't drawn a weapon either, near as Witt could tell. Just sat his horse at the yard's edge, looking sick with every fresh scream and gunshot around him. "Pruitt!" Witt shouted, past caring how it looked, past caring about anything but the wall behind him, still catching flame.
"This what you signed on for? Burning a woman alive in her own yard?" The old man's face, lit orange by firelight, twisted with something that looked, for one raw, unguarded second, like shame catching up to him far too late in the night to do much good. He wheeled his horse without a word and rode hard for the road, alone leaving the fight behind him entirely. One man, not enough to turn the tide. But Witt filed it away anyway, same as every other crack of doubt he'd caught crossing Wolf Creek's collective conscience these past past weeks, proof, small as it was, that the lie holding this whole assault together had cracks running through it already, cracks that might, given enough time and enough truth pressed hard against them, finally split the whole thing wide open.
Somewhere in the smoke, a shout went up that wasn't Voss's voice. "She fights for the white man now. You see this with your own eyes. A traitor to her own blood." Witt caught a glimpse of the man shouting at Young, hard-faced, mounted separate from Voss's crew, clearly one of A'scalla's own. The words weren't meant for the yard at all.