His name was Dahkeya, a good hunter from a respected family, and when Naya was twenty he courted her properly and patiently, over a whole season β bringing her father venison, bringing her, shyly, a carved wooden comb he had made himself. She had allowed herself, against her own policy, to imagine it: a lodge of her own, his quiet humor at her fire, a life built alongside her healing work. Because she had been raised by Saba, she told him the truth herself, before any pledge was spoken. She would not begin a marriage on a concealment. He had thanked her for her honesty, and meant it.
Two days later his uncle came to Noche with gifts returned and regrets arranged in formal language, like stones set in a row. Dahkeya himself never came. Within a year he married a girl of seventeen from the north camp, and Naya attended the feast and danced. Quiet, it had been β and public enough, in a camp where everyone watched the uncle carry the gifts back and understood.
The second suitor did not even do her the courtesy of hearing it from her own mouth.
Tomas Ruelas was a trader's son from Benson, half Mexican, half Anglo, wholly ambitious, who had met Naya at the trading post where she sold her grandmother's remedies. He courted her with books, of all things β a novel, a volume of poems β having seen her reading while she waited, and Naya had thought: here is a man who sees my mind first. Someone at the post enlightened him. Tomas withdrew by letter. A letter: three courteous sentences about family expectations and the needs of his father's business, delivered by a store clerk who would not meet her eyes. He married the daughter of a Tucson freighter that winter. Naya burned the letter but kept the books, because she refused, on principle, to let his cowardice confiscate good poetry.
Garrett Sloane was the third, and Garrett Sloane was another species entirely.
The Sloanes ran the largest cattle outfit in the valley's north end, and Garrett β twenty-four, handsome in the polished way of men who have never been refused anything that mattered β had decided that marrying the chief's daughter would polish his family's standing and secure grazing goodwill along the river.
He courted loudly: a silver-mounted bridle for Noche, a buggy ride she declined and he recounted as if she hadn't. And then, at a crowded trading-post gathering in the spring, some drinking companion of his, emboldened, asked him outright, laughing, whether he'd heard the chief's daughter was barren as a mule.
Garrett could have walked away. Garrett could have knocked the man down, and Naya, who had stopped breathing by the sacks of flour, would have remembered it forever. Instead Garrett Sloane laughed β she could still summon the exact sound β and raised his cup to the room, and said, clear as a bell and meant to carry:
"Boys, I checked that merchandise before I bought. A man doesn't pay stud prices for a mare that won't foal β and I don't marry one either."
Some men laughed. Some, to their credit, looked at the floor. No one looked at her, standing in the doorway with her basket of remedies, which was perhaps the deepest cut of all: she had been discussed like livestock and then erased in the same breath. She set the basket down gently, because the bottles were glass and other people's healing was in them, and walked out into the sunlight with her back straight, all the way to the river road before her hands began to shake.
The words followed her home ahead of her, as such words do. They were repeated in the camp in whispers that stopped when she entered a lodge. Her father, when he heard, had gone very still and then reached for a rifle, and it had taken Saba and Taza together to talk him out of a ride that would have ended in blood and soldiers. And the valley did judge him, in its slow way β Garrett Sloane was never again offered a seat of honor in Noche's camp β but a judgment murmured is not a shame erased.
That night, by the river, she had made her decision. She was tired β tired of being weighed, tired of auditions disguised as courtship, tired of her father's grief and the camp's pity. She was not broken; she was finished. From that spring forward she threw herself into the work with a completeness that awed even Saba: more patients, longer routes, a garden of medicinal plants behind the healing lodge. If no man chose her, then she would choose herself, daily, with both hands, and make the choosing mean something.
She had kept that vow for three years, and kept it well. She reminded herself of it, standing in the firelight, listening to Micah Donovan ask for time to earn the right to be chosen β and told herself a vow kept well was not threatened by one courteous stranger.
She almost believed it.
Chapter 6
Consent in Small Things
Naya woke before dawn braced for an absence.