They came home to the Valle de las Sombras at midmorning, down the slot canyon with the river still in their ears, and the valley received them the way it received all its returning riders: children running out along the creek path, Chief Nahlin waiting where the trail widened, grave and unhurried, taking in at a glance the strange old man on Willa's mare, the sling, the grain sack, and the look on his daughter's face. Renner was given Saba's own broth and a bed of blankets in the shade, and the papers were carried to Nahlin's house and laid out on the great table stone by stone. It should have been a morning of nothing but victory. It lasted as one until the noon meal, when Tomaso came in with the horses from the upper pasture and the light caught the thing at his throat.
It was a silver token no bigger than a thumbnail, stamped with the letter H inside a ring of rope, and it hung on a cord under his shirt where it had slipped free as he bent to the water trough. Jonas had seen its brothers that very night, in the strongroom drawer: tokens of Harrow Consolidated, given to men on the company's errands so that guards would pass them without questions. He did not speak. He did not need to. Willa had seen it too, and her cousin Tomaso, twenty-two years old, the best young rider of the valley after Willa herself, looked from her face to Jonas's and understood that the moment he had dreaded for months had come for him. His hand went to the token, not to hide it, because there was no use in that, but the way a man touches a wound to confirm it is his own.
"He gave it to me in San Tomas," Tomaso said, when Nahlin had closed the door and the family stood in the dim house with the papers on the table between them like witnesses. "In the spring, when I drove the horses to sell. He knew my name, and my mother's, and he said the company would remember how I answered when it came time to deal with the valley. He gave me silver, ten dollars a month, for word of who came and went by the canyon, and whether soldiers passed, and where the herds were gathered. I told myself it was nothing. Smoke-sign things. Things any traveler could see from the ridge." He looked at his uncle then, and at last the steadiness failed him. "And when I would have stopped, in the summer, his man showed me my mother's name written in a book, with her village and her kin beside it, and said a woman alone on the company's land could be moved off it any winter night they chose, for her own safety. So I did not stop. Silver and a leash, Uncle. I took both, and I have worn them both ever since, and I am sick with the wearing."
Nahlin stood a long time without speaking, an old chief with his hands flat on the table among the ledgers of his enemy, and what was in his face was not rage. "You have sold the eyes of this valley," he said at last, quietly. "Not its heart. I will believe that, because I have watched you since you were small enough to sleep in a basket, and a heart does not change its nature in one spring. But a name is a thing a man carries for other people, Tomaso, and yours is broken now in the carrying. You will earn it back the way it was lost: in small payments, over time, witnessed. You will ride no message alone. You will keep no counsel that is not spoken in this house. And when the trouble comes that your silver has helped to buy, you will stand where it is thickest, and the valley will watch you stand there." Tomaso bowed his head and accepted it the way a man accepts a sentence he has written himself. Then he raised his face, and what was in it made Willa take one step toward him, because it was worse than shame. It was the shame's unfinished business.
"There is more," he said. "Two nights past, his man came to the ridge for my report, and I told him the thing I had sworn to myself in the spring I would keep back, because I was afraid, and my fear has always been quicker than my honor." He turned to Willa, and spoke to her directly, as the wrong's true owner. "I told him the entrance sign, Siyane. The split stone and the dead juniper that mark the slot canyon's mouth, and how the trail turns twice against the rock so a man must know the turning or ride past it forever. He wrote it in his book under my mother's name. Harrow knows the door of this valley now. He has known it for two days, and whatever is coming was already coming before you ever went to the fort."
Chapter 20
: Forty Rifles Coming