Nahlin stood, took his arm in the grip of warriors, and Grandmother Saba nodded once. "At dawn," the chief said, "beneath the cottonwood."
Chapter 5
: Beneath the Cottonwood
They married them at dawn, in the blue hour before the sun cleared Bell Mountain, beneath the great cottonwood, where the grass was worn smooth by generations of councils. Jonas had been given a clean shirt and water to wash in, and Grandmother Saba had looked him over like a woman inspecting a horse she had not chosen and announced that he would do β which brought the first laughter Jonas had heard since the crossing, and eased something in his chest.
The whole band gathered in a circle, children hushed at the front, elders at the back, morning fires smoking and the stream bright with first light. Jonas stood beneath the branches, hat in his hands and his father's silver locket against his heart, and thought of another wedding, in a whitewashed church in Kansas: Ruth in her mother's lace, laughing because the minister had mispronounced her name. That memory had been a knife for three years. This morning it was a knife he could hold a little less tightly. Grief, he was learning, did not ask permission to change its shape.
Then the bride came through the crowd on her father's arm, and the valley went quiet as held breath.
She was tall, and carried herself with the grace of a woman aware of being watched and unwilling to be diminished by it. Her dress was dark, worked at the cuffs in deep blue. From a band at her brow hung the black veil, falling past her shoulders, so that of the woman he was to marry Jonas could see nothing: not her face, not her hair, not the color of her eyes. Enemies, her father had told him, had spread a rumor in Cinnabar that the chief's daughter was deformed, cursed, a thing to be hidden. Jonas recognized that slander, and guessed it was not the true reason for the veil. A deeper reason walked beside her, unspoken, and it was not his to demand β not this morning, perhaps not ever, unless she offered it.
She stopped before him, and the chief placed her hand in Jonas's. Her hand was steady and warm, strong as a woman's hand is strong who has worked and ridden and drawn a bow. He would not inventory his wife like livestock in the first minute of their marriage, he told himself, and then very nearly laughed aloud, there in the sacred circle, for the Hale conscience choosing that moment to appear.
Grandmother Saba spoke the rite in Apache and then in English, so both peoples should hear themselves in it. There were no rings, but a cord of woven yucca and horsehair, which Saba bound around their joined wrists while she spoke of two rivers that met without either surrendering its name. Nahlin spoke then of the debt of 1851, so all should know why this white rancher stood in the circle: the son of Amos Hale had come to a family that owed him his life, and the debt would be paid not in horses or silver but in kinship. A murmur went through the crowd like wind through the cottonwood leaves.
Then Saba turned to the bride, and the bride spoke for the first time β to name herself, as the rite required, before the people and the mountain. Her voice was low and clear, her English shaped carefully, like a language carried a long way and kept in good repair. "I am Siyane," she said, "daughter of Nahlin, daughter of this valley. I take this man of my own choosing, and I will keep faith with him as I keep faith with them."
Siyane. It was the only part of her the morning gave him, and Jonas received it as a man receives water in the desert, with both hands and no questions. When his turn came he spoke his vows to a woman he could not see, and found the not-seeing steadied him: no face to read for approval, only the words and the warm, steady hand within his own. "I am Jonas Hale," he said. "I take this woman as my wife, sight unseen and none the worse for it, since plenty have married faces and found strangers. I will stand between her and harm as I'd stand between my own house and fire. I will keep this valley's trust as my brother kept it. And I'll keep faith β that's the whole of the law with me, and the prophets can divide the remainder." A silence followed, one part solemnity and one part, he suspected, the elders deciding whether his irreverence was a defect or a kind of prayer. Grandmother Saba announced that it would do.
The sun cleared Bell Mountain then, and light came down through the cottonwood across their bound wrists, across the black veil, across the children's upturned faces. Siyane's hand tightened once β briefly, deliberately β upon his, a signal meant for him alone. Then the circle broke into celebration and song, and Jonas Hale stood among a people not his own, married to a name and a voice and a hidden face, with a war against a baron already gathering beyond the canyon walls.