Chapter 6
: The Wedding Night
The wedding feast ended as the fires burned low, and the people of the valley withdrew with a discretion Jonas had not expected from any crowd, Apache or white. No ribald songs followed them. Grandmother Saba herself led them to the dwelling prepared at the cottonwood's edge, laid a hand briefly upon each of their shoulders, and left them with a lamp of tallow and a silence so complete that Jonas could hear the river beyond the wall.
Siyane stood just inside the doorway with her veil still drawn, her hands quiet at her sides. She had not lifted it before the whole camp at the ceremony. She did not lift it now.
"You need not be afraid of me," Jonas said.
"I am not afraid of you," she answered. "I am deciding what manner of man my father has given me to."
"Fair enough. He gave me a choice that was not a choice, and I expect you got the same."
That earned something β not a laugh, but the small exhalation that precedes one. She poured water into both cups and seated herself across from him, keeping the lamp between them like a small, honest fire.
"You will want to know why the veil," she said.
"I want to know a great many things. I have learned to wait for most of them."
"Then wait for that one too." She turned her cup in her hands. "Tell me instead of your wife. My father says you do not speak of her, which among our people means the wound is not finished."
Jonas looked into the lamplight a long while before he answered. He had spoken of Ruth perhaps twice in three years, both times to Micah, both times badly.
"Her name was Ruth," he said at last. "She could mend a harness, shame a mule, and read a psalm so it sounded like weather coming. We had a small place north of the river, forty acres and a roof that mostly held. In the spring of seventy-eight, men came in the night. Not raiders after horses β they fired the barn first to draw me out, and when I ran for it, someone was already in the house."
"She fought," he said. "The doctor said she fought, from the state of her hands. I have taken some comfort in that, which tells you what comfort is worth. They were gone before I got back inside. They wanted me dead in the yard and her dead for being there, and when the first of it failed they settled for the second."
"Who sent them?" Siyane asked.
"That is the question I have carried for three years. There was a man buying up every claim and homestead along the river that year, quiet about it, using other names. Ezekiel Harrow. A month before the attack he offered me twice what the place was worth, and I refused him to his face in the assayer's office. A month after the funeral, the offer came again, folded inside a letter of sympathy."
"You believe he ordered it."
"I believe a man who sends sympathy and a price in the same envelope has told you everything about himself except the part a court requires." Jonas turned his own cup, untouched. "I could prove nothing. So I sold the place to a neighbor β not to Harrow β and I have been a drifter since, which is a polite word for a man avoiding his own thoughts."
"You have not avoided them tonight," she said.
She was quiet a moment, and when she spoke again her voice had changed β lowered, deliberate, the voice of a messenger who has carried something heavy a long way.
"Then I will pay you in the same coin. Your brother Micah came to this valley before the end. He traded with us, and my father trusted him, and in his last visit he sat where you are sitting. He said Harrow's men were following him. He said he had found something beneath the mountain that would bring ruin on this valley if it were known, and he said β " She hesitated. "He said there was a voice inside this camp that carried words out of it. An informant. Someone here speaks to Harrow."
Jonas felt the room narrow around the lamp flame.
"He named no one?"
"No one. He said suspicion without proof was a poison he would not leave behind him. Three weeks later he was dead."
Jonas stared at his hands. Micah, dead at the bottom of Harrow's ledger, beside Ruth.
"Then your father did not marry you to me only to hide me," Jonas said slowly.
"No," Siyane said. "He married you to the one person in this valley who will watch your back without being asked, and me to the one man whose grief runs the same road as our danger. Sleep now, husband. The veil stays. But nothing else between us needs to be a lie."