They married again beneath the great cottonwood, in the same shade where the first ceremony had bound them under threat, and the likeness ended with the tree. The first wedding had been a shield raised in haste, few witnesses, low voices, a bride veiled to the eyes and a groom who had not yet learned her laugh. The second was a feast the whole valley prepared for a week, and people came down the trails and up from the settlements in numbers that surprised even Nahlin, who had expected half as many and directed that twice the food be made anyway, being a man who understood both hope and appetite.
Willa came to the tree unveiled, as she now went everywhere, her long scar plain along her left jaw in the morning light, and if any guest found it remarkable they kept the remark to themselves, because the valley had decided, collectively and without discussion, that her face was simply her face. At her throat she wore her mother Clara's silver locket, open, the way she had taken to wearing it since the trial, the tiny painted likeness within turned outward to the sun. Jonas wore his father's locket, engraved with its two willow trees, and more than one elder remarked on the pair of them, two lockets, two histories, meeting at last at one tree without anything hidden between them.
Nahlin spoke the words this time not as an ultimatum but as a blessing, and his voice, which had commanded the circle for forty years, trembled once and steadied, and no one present pretended not to have heard the tremor, because joy in an old chief is not a weakness to be politely ignored. Grandmother Saba bound the couple's hands with a cord of new braiding, white wool and red, while she recited the names of the women who had kept the valley's seed corn through the worst years, so that the marriage entered the record of the people in the keeping of its oldest memory. Tobias Renner, seated in a place of honor he plainly felt he had not earned, wept openly into his handkerchief and was handed a second one by a small girl who had appointed herself to the task.
The feast ran from noon until the stars stood thick over Cerro de la Campana. There was roasted meat and corn in its season, bread from the settlements and honey from the valley's own hives, coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in, as Jonas said, and music from two traditions that found, to everyone's satisfaction, that they kept compatible time. Jonas danced once, gravely and badly, and Willa laughed so hard she had to hold onto his arm, which he later maintained had been his entire strategy. Nahlin watched them with the expression of a man whose long account of worries had finally been balanced and closed.
It was at the height of the feast, when the lamps were lit and the dancing had paused for breath, that Nahlin called Tomaso forward. The young man came slowly, as he had learned to come to every gathering since his testimony, braced for the cold shoulder or the turned back, the wages of a man who had once carried Harrow's coin and Harrow's messages into the valley's trust. He had testified when testifying cost him his safety. He had carried mortar at the sealing of the mine. He had asked for nothing. Nahlin spoke his name in full before both peoples and forgave him in the hearing of all, not as a favor but as a judgment, the way a debt is struck from a ledger when it has been paid in the only coin that matters. Then the chief gave him a place of service at the valley's gate, keeper of the road and the guest book, a post of trust, so that every stranger who entered the Valle de las Sombras would first meet the man who had once betrayed it and had chosen, at cost, to betray it no more. Tomaso stood a long moment with his head bowed. When he lifted it, his face was wet and unashamed, and the valley applauded him the way rain applauds nothing, simply by arriving where it is needed.
Later, when the fires had burned to embers and the guests had gone to their blankets, Willa took from her cedar box the black veil she had worn for nine years. She held it up once against the firelight, and Jonas saw it as he had first seen it, a darkness with a woman hidden somewhere behind it, and then she folded it, carefully, corner to corner, the way a flag is folded, or a letter that will be kept but never sent. She laid it in the box and closed the lid. It was not burned. It was not hated. It had carried her safely through dangerous years, and it was finished, and a finished thing, she said, deserves a decent rest. She blew out the lamp, and the cottonwood stood over their lodge all night, moving its leaves in a wind that asked nothing of anyone.
Chapter 29
: Three Years