"Maybe," Micah said. "But tonight he doesn't own this valley." He stepped back, rifle steady, as Noche picked up the sodden paper from the mud with two fingers, like something dead, and the wind took the shack roof in a roar of sparks behind them.
Chapter 27
Those She Had Healed
The sparks rose, and for one held moment Naya thought they would lose the house after all. Then, through the rain and the river road, she heard the sound she would remember all her life: hooves, many hooves, and voices calling in two languages.
They came the way help came in that valley β all at once and from everywhere. Apache warriors from her father's camp rode in through the storm with blankets over their rifles, her cousins among them, fanning out without orders to the corral and the ridge. Behind them, impossibly, came Cedar Flats: the blacksmith with his wagon and barrels of water, the schoolteacher's husband driving, storekeepers and ranch wives in oilskins with buckets, the preacher's widow hauling a pump. People Naya had sat up with through fevers. People whose babies she had eased into the world, whose fathers she had kept breathing through the long nights. They had seen the fire-glow against the storm clouds from town, and they had come.
"She pulled my boy through the croup in February," the blacksmith roared, sloshing past with a barrel. "Like hell I'll watch her house burn from my porch."
The water brigade doubled, then tripled. Wet blankets went up on the roof in a chain of hands. Men beat out spot fires in the garden and the corral fence while the rain, at last, began to win its own argument, hissing on the shingles in steam. The main house shuddered and held. Women from the camp carried the youngest children of the neighbors up the hill to safety and came back for buckets. Old men too lame to ride stood in the shallows of the river filling skins. No one asked whose house it was. By that hour it belonged to everyone who had ever been healed under its roof. Its east wall was scorched black and its roof would need a week's work, but it stood, and the smell that rose from it was wet ash, not ruin.
At the corral, Sloane's moment had passed and he knew it. Outnumbered and ringed by armed men who did not look storm-tossed but storm-hardened, his hired hands began the arithmetic of surrender. Most laid down their guns in the mud when Noche's warriors stepped close. One did not get the chance. He was found crouched behind the burning shack with a kerosene tin still in his hand, dragged out coughing by two townsmen and held, dripping and shaking, in the lantern light.
His name was Pike, and he was young under the soot, and terror had loosened something in him that loyalty could not hold. "I didn't sign on for children in the house," he said, to no one, to everyone. "Sloane said the place would be empty. He said burn the shack, scare the old man, get the mark, done. Nobody said children."
"Whose orders?" Micah asked, not unkindly.
"Brandt's. All Brandt's." The words came faster now, the way water comes through a cracked dam. "The papers, too. The abandonment deed, the sale paper β there's a man in Tucson does the writing, matches old hands, copies marks off the mission books Brandt got copied years back. Sloane carried them. I heard them laughing about the chief's mark being better made than the chief could make it himself. And tonight β tonight's paper was drawn up new, fresh ink, because Sloane said if the judge went sour they'd need a mark the court hadn't seen." He looked at the sodden sheet still in Noche's fingers and started to cry, from smoke or shame, standing in the rain.
Noche handed the paper to Micah as a man hands over evidence. Around them the yard was full of witnesses β not Brandt's choosing, but the valley's: warriors, townsfolk, neighbors who had heard every word.
Sloane had used the confusion of Pike's collapse to edge toward his horse, and he nearly made it. He got one foot in the stirrup before the schoolteacher's husband β a quiet man who taught sums and kept a shotgun for quail β leveled that shotgun across his saddle and said, "Son, the court is going to want you rested." They bound Sloane's hands with his own belt and set him under guard in the smith's wagon, wet, furious, and silent for the first time in Naya's memory of him.
Near dawn the rain thinned to drizzle. Naya opened the cellar door herself and found Tomas standing guard with a bean sack over Elena like a roof, Luz asleep against his shoulder with her mended doll. "Is it over?" he asked, in the voice of a boy working hard not to shake.
"It is over," she said, gathering all three of them close, breathing in their unburned, ordinary smell. "Nobody is hurt. The house is still ours."
"Even Verdict?" Elena asked, sleepy, meaning everything.