"No," Naya said. "I have shown you one spring. There are others." She let a silence stand long enough to make the admission deliberate. "But yes. I suppose the keys are what they are."
Chapter 12
What the Fever Said
It happened on the spring trail β not on any wild horse, though Micah had been breaking the camp's colts all summer. It happened humbly, on a scree slope above the hidden canyon, in the blue hour before dawn, when a stone the size of a washtub decided the vibration of a laden mule was the final argument it intended to hear.
Naya heard the rattle before she saw it. She shouted. Micah, leading the second mule, got between the falling rock and the animal, and himself took what the slope had meant for both of them. The stone struck him along the ribs and spun him down six feet of shale, where he lay with the particular stillness healers learn to fear more than screaming.
He woke in the healing lodge two days later, which means she got him down the mountain on a travois behind the gentlest mule, work that would have taxed a mule skinner, and arrived with her hands shaking and her voice steady, and did not leave his side, in any way that mattered, for four days.
Two ribs cracked. A gash along his temple, deep but clean. And fever β the fever was the true enemy, riding in on the third day as fevers do, turning the lodge into a small, hot country with its own weather.
Naya fought it with everything her two educations had given her. Willow and feverfew, dosed and charted on a slate in Miss Hale's neat system. Cool cloths. Broth by the spoonful when he could swallow. Her grandmother's song for the sick, low, in the old language, which she had not sung aloud for anyone since she was seventeen and which she sang now without deciding to.
The fever took him traveling. Fevers do. And on the second night of it he began to talk, and Naya β who had refused all her life to hear what was not hers to hear β had no choice but to keep his secrets for him, because leaving would have meant leaving him alone with them.
He talked about the blizzard of '83 at first, and she let that pass, for the camp knew that story. Then the fever took him further back, to the cavalry, to a winter campaign he had never once mentioned in two months of evenings by Tomaso's fire, and his voice changed into something younger and rawer, and she understood that she was hearing the thing that had made him a drifter, the weight under all his stillness.
He had scouted for a column that found a village in a snowstorm. He had read the signs wrong β or reported them truly to men who heard only what they came to hear; the fever muddled the telling, but not the guilt. There had been a fire. People running in the snow in their blankets. His officer had written it up clean, and Micah had signed the report with the rest, then ridden away from the Army one spring morning and never, in twelve years, stopped riding β until a chief's daughter in the Blizzard of '83 had bandaged his frostbit hands and asked his name like he was a person, and even that had taken him two years of circling back to answer.
"I signed it," he told the roof beams, weeping without waking. "That's the part I can't put down. I knew what the words were covering and I signed it anyway."
Naya wrung out a cloth and laid it cold across his forehead, and neither her hands nor her heart flinched. She had spent nine years being judged forever by the worst page of a life, for something her body had decided in a fever at seventeen. She also knew β the way she knew herbs, in the hands first β the difference between a man hiding from his deed and a man carrying it.
"You carried it here," she said quietly, to a man who could not hear her. "Men who sign such things and sleep well don't ride twelve years looking for a way to be worth something, Micah Donovan. Sleep. We'll argue about the rest when you're yourself."
The fever broke at dawn on the fourth day, and he woke clear-eyed to a world rearranged β Naya asleep in the chair beside his pallet, her hand resting open on the blanket near his wrist, his slate of doses in her lap.
He did not wake her. He lay and looked at her β the strong, tired face, the loosened braid, the hands that had drawn poison out of his horse and fever out of strangers β and understood that something had changed between them that no permission he could ask would ever quite cover, because she had now held the worst of him, uninvited by either of them, and stayed.
When she woke, she checked his forehead first, out of habit, before she was even fully conscious β and then met his eyes, clear and watching her, and neither of them looked away.