Naya had learned early that hands remember what the heart would rather set down. Her hands knew the cool weight of river stones, the give of willow bark under a knife, the exact heat of a forehead that meant the fever was turning. They knew because her grandmother had taught them, patiently, season upon season.
She was born in a winter camp above the San Pedro, the only child of Noche's second marriage, and her mother β dead of a coughing sickness when Naya was nine β had named her for the word their old people used for the rain that comes gently, the kind that soaks in instead of running off. She grew up wild in the way of valley children: swimming the river reaches her grandmother permitted, learning which plants fed and which killed.
At eleven, because Noche believed a daughter of his should know the white world as thoroughly as a scout knows a trail β its tools as well as its dangers β she was sent to the mission school at San Xavier. She wept the first night for the river. By the first month she had discovered letters.
Letters were a revelation no one had warned her about. The mission sisters, severe and kind in bewildering alternation, taught her English and reading, and Naya devoured both the way a thirsty traveler drinks. She learned to write her name, then her father's, then whole pages. She learned, too, the other curriculum: how the sisters pitied her people in the same breath as they fed them.
She came home each summer to her grandmother, and her true education resumed.
Grandmother Saba was keeper of the hidden spring routes β the old woman who carried in memory every seep and secret water between the San Pedro and the border hills. She taught Naya the routes the old way, walking them, singing them, testing her until the girl could recite the springs in order with her eyes closed. And she taught her healing: yarrow for bleeding, creosote for infection, the bark preparations for fever, the laying-on of calm hands and a calm voice, which Saba insisted was itself a medicine. "Fear makes the blood stupid," the old woman said. "A healer's first work is to un-frighten the room."
"You have the gift," Saba told her when she was fifteen, watching her splint a cousin's wrist with more steadiness than the boy himself showed. "Steadier than mine. The valley will need your hands, Naya. Remember that when the world tries to tell you what you are for."
Two years later the world tried.
The fever came in the late summer of her seventeenth year, riding the river camps from a trading party out of Tucson β a burning, shaking sickness that took three elders and a baby and very nearly took her. For nine days she lay in the healing lodge while her grandmother and the camp's old medicine woman worked over her in shifts, and the fever, when it finally broke, left her thin as a reed.
It was Grandmother Saba herself who told her, months later, when she was certain. Saba took her hands and held them hard, and did not look away, and did not dress the truth in anything soft.
"The fever burned something in you, child. You will heal others all your life. You will not bear a child of your body. I am old, and I will not lie to you and call cruelty kindness."
Naya had walked down to the river alone and stood in the cold current until her legs numbed, and grieved β not theatrically, not for anyone's witness, but the way one grieves a country one will never see. She grieved the children she had vaguely assumed, the way one assumes weather. Then, being her grandmother's student to the marrow, she had dried her feet, gone back up the bank, and asked what work the camp needed done that day.
She was twenty-six now, and the verdict had had nine years to do its slow work in the world's mouth β in suitors' calculations, in traders' gossip. But in her own hands the truth sat differently. Her hands had delivered other women's babies, more than she could count on both of them together. Her hands had set bones, drawn out infection, cooled the very fevers that had burned her. If the world insisted her worth was a sum that came out short, then the world, Naya had decided, could not do arithmetic.
"Your hands know," Saba, very old now and mostly blind, still told her when she visited. "Let the talkers talk. You keep the routes, and you keep the sick alive, and let no one β no one, child β tell you the sum of you."
Naya kept the routes. She kept the sick alive. And on the night her father growled his ultimatum across the fire, she stood with her healer's bundle at her hip and listened to a stranger refuse to be handed her like a sum β and something in her, some room she had kept swept and shut for nine years, stirred in its sleep.
Chapter 5
Three Men Who Walked Away
The first suitor had been kind, which somehow made it worse to remember.