"Then they will hear me anyway," Naya said, "until hearing is all that is left to them. Father β I am asking to go myself."
Noche studied her a long moment, and the fire cracked, and down by the river a horse stamped in the dark. "You will go," he said at last. "And the law will learn what my daughter's voice sounds like."
Chapter 20
What the Stone Wall Kept
They rode out before the heat, when the San Pedro still held the night's coolness and the cottonwoods dripped shadow instead of light. Naya rode her bay mare with Luz's small woven blanket rolled behind her saddle β Luz stayed in camp with her mother's sister, but Naya had packed in a hurry of the heart, and her hands had reached for what mattered. She did not send it back.
The old mission stood two days' ride northwest, where the adobe church kept its long argument with the sun. Micah had ridden this country as a scout and knew the water holes, and he showed her each one quietly, only when needed, never riding ahead to wait at the top of a rise. He rode where she set the pace. On the second morning she finally said what she had been carrying since the council fire.
"The register matters because it is their own hand," she said. "Not ours. Sister Agnes wrote my name the winter I turned thirteen β witness, interpreter, for the survey party that ran the valley lines. If the book still exists, Brandt cannot say I invented myself last week."
"And the survey notes?" Micah asked.
"The chief surveyor was a careful man. Sister said he left a copy of his field notes with the mission, because the territorial office had already lost one set to a fire nobody could explain." She glanced sideways at him. "Paper burns conveniently in this country. Stone does not."
They talked more on that ride than in all the careful months of his courting β because that was what it was, and both knew it, and neither had yet said the word. She told him about the mission school, about learning her letters from a primer meant for children half her age and then reading ahead of it, into the botany book Sister Agnes kept locked against mice and curiosity. Her knowledge of plants came half from her grandmother and half from that book, and the two halves had argued in her head for years before they made peace.
Micah told her about the house β not the courtship version, which she already knew, but the other one. He had framed the walls with a second room sized for no one he had a right to name yet, and some evenings he stood in the doorway feeling less like a man building a house than a man building an argument he hoped the future would agree with.
"That is a dangerous kind of building," Naya said, but gently.
"I know it. It's why I don't speak of it. A man doesn't get to build another person's life into his walls and call it courtship. The room's just a room, Naya. It'll keep whoever needs keeping, or it'll hold flour sacks. It doesn't make a claim."
She rode a while without answering. "You are learning," she said at last, and he laughed, once, surprised, and she liked the sound more than was prudent.
Sister Agnes received them in the courtyard, ninety years arranged in a black habit and a spine like a fence post. She embraced Naya with arms that trembled only at the end of the motion. "You read the register in my hand before you were tall enough to shelve it," she said. "Come and read it again. It has waited for you better than I have."
The register was there, in the cedar chest in the sacristy, bound in leather gone the color of weak tea. And there, in Sister Agnes's upright hand, winter of 1872: Naya, daughter of Chief Noche, witness and interpreter to the government survey of Red Willow Valley, her name spelled exactly as she spelled it herself, which the old nun noted had taken the survey clerk three attempts.
The survey notes took longer, because Sister Agnes, who trusted governments even less than mice, made them work from memory and prayer before she took them behind the altar, to the loose stone in the wall three generations of sisters had used for whatever the world could not be trusted to keep. The oilcloth packet came out smelling of dust and candle wax: field notes, bearings, the spring lines marked and named, the valley's boundaries walked and witnessed.
On the ride home, with the packet sewn inside Naya's saddlebag, Micah asked plainly, at a water stop, holding both horses so she could drink first.
"When we reach Cedar Flats," he said, "I want to stand in that courtroom as your witness. To your father's mark, to Sloane's threats β I heard those with my own ears. But I won't ride beside you as anything more than that unless you say so. Not your spokesman. Never that. Your witness, if you'll have me."