That was the shape the morning was supposed to take, she had decided in the thin hours of the night. By first light Micah Donovan would be gone β honorably gone, perhaps, with thanks and a firm handshake for her father, riding out on a horse with a wrapped hoof. Men under pressure made fine speeches. She had Garrett Sloane's collected works on the subject. By noon the valley would know, and the knowing would settle onto her name like one more thin layer of dust, and she would go on with her work.
Alternatively β and she liked this possibility even less β he would stay, and treat her with pity. She could picture that, too, in wearying detail: the gentle, lowered voice men used with invalids and widows; every conversation a small ceremony of his nobility and her deficiency.
She rose, dressed in the dark, bound her hair, and went down to the river for the morning water with her two buckets and her expectations arranged like armor.
The corral stopped her on the way back β or rather, the sound from it did: the rhythmic knock of a mallet, steady as a slow heartbeat, in the gray light before sunrise.
Micah Donovan was at the west fence, exactly where she had told him it was broken. He worked with his sleeves rolled and his hat off, resetting a post set crooked two years ago, and he worked, she noticed despite herself, correctly β gravel tamped at the base, the post plumbed against a line, no waste motion and no show in it.
Micah looked up, mallet stilling. "Morning," he said. "Didn't mean to wake the camp."
"You didn't. The camp wakes before you do." She shifted the buckets; water sloshed. "You started earlier than first light."
"You said the boys were tired of chasing horses at dawn. Figured the fence shouldn't wait on my beauty sleep." He turned back to seat the post β then, to her surprise, set the mallet down and stepped clear of her path entirely, giving her the whole width of the trail and the corral gate. "Mind the loose stone there," he said. "I mean to bury it before breakfast."
She carried the water to the healing lodge. She set about the morning's work β grinding, sorting, checking the feverish child in the lodge's shaded corner, whose breathing, thank God and yarrow, had eased in the night β and an hour later Micah Donovan appeared in the lodge doorway and did something no visitor in her memory had ever done.
He stopped at the threshold. He did not duck under the flap uninvited. He waited, hat in his hands, and said, "May I come in? Taza said you might spare me something for Copper's hoof β but it's your lodge. I can wait out here if you're working."
Naya stared at him a moment longer than courtesy allowed. "You ask," she said, "to enter a healing lodge?"
"I ask to enter anywhere that isn't mine," Micah said. "My mother would come back from her grave to cuff me otherwise." He glanced past her, once, at the sleeping child, and lowered his voice without being asked. "If now's a bad time, say so. The horse's pride hurts worse than his hoof."
"Come in," she said at last. "Mind the hanging bundles. The tall ones are not for touching."
He ducked in carefully and stood where she pointed, and held the bowl while she mixed a poultice of creosote and mashed prickly pear. Afterwards, on the river path, he waited with her second bucket while she filled the first at the bank. "They're heavy," he said. "I'd as soon carry one, if you'll let me. If you'd rather I didn't, I'll walk ahead and move that loose stone like I promised."
"If you'll let me," she repeated, testing it, there on the path with the river talking beside them. "You say that a great deal, Micah Donovan."
"Do I?" "I suppose I do. I scouted for men who took things because they could β water, horses, ground, wives. A thing freely given sits easy. A thing taken sits like a stone in the gut forever." He held out his hand for the bucket, palm up, and waited until she placed the handle in it herself. "There. Now it sits easy."
They walked up together in a silence that was not, she noticed, uncomfortable. At the lodge he set the bucket where she indicated, thanked her for the poultice, and went back to his fence.
It was their first real conversation, that walk of forty paces β no fire, no camp listening. It settled nothing. She trusted him not at all, she told herself, resetting the poultice bowl with unnecessary force.
But when she thought of the morning β the fence at dawn, the threshold respected, the hand held open and waiting β what she felt was not pity received, and not disgust endured. It was something smaller and far more dangerous: the first thin flicker of trust, like the first green shoot after a fire, in ground she had sworn was finished growing anything.
Chapter 7