She came down the yard the way weather comes down a valley β not fast, but with the sense that nothing standing would change her direction.
Nascha passed Amos without touching him and stopped at the gate, close enough that Ferris's horse shifted and blew at the unfamiliar nearness of her, and the marshal had to tighten his rein and show, for an instant, that the animal was braver about it than he was. She wore no weapon. Her hands were open at her sides. On her wrist, the woven bracelet β horsehair and yucca fiber, turquoise and black, the one red diamond β seemed very bright in the white midday light, and Amos understood that she had put it where it would be seen on purpose, the way a soldier carries colors.
"Doyle Ferris," she said, and her voice carried without shouting, trained by open country. "Look at me and say again that we are property."
Ferris recovered his seat and his sneer together. "I don't parley with β"
"You parleyed at the wash," Nascha said. "You came in the morning, before the fires. You read from a paper you would not let our men touch, and when Taku read the marks and said the paper was not the paper agreed with the agent, you folded it away and gave the signal. Say I lie."
The yard behind her was utterly still. Along the half-moon of gunmen, heads turned, despite discipline, toward the woman at the gate.
"You burned our homes," she said. "Not your company. Not some hand whose name you can lose. You. I watched you put the torch to my cousin's roof yourself, because the wind was wrong for the man you ordered and you were impatient. You seized our husbands. Our sons. Our brothers. You chained them in a wagon like ore and took them to Beck's camp to dig Hollis's earth under Hollis's guns, and when old men asked by what law, you showed them this β" she lifted her chin at the badge "β and called it law enough."
Ferris's face had changed in stages, like a sky going. "You're a runaway making noise to β"
"My brother was seventeen," said Haseya, stepping up beside Nascha, and her voice shook but her place in the line did not. "He carried water for the elders. He had never held a rifle. Your men put a chain on his ankle because he ran toward our mother."
"Our mother is dead at the wash," Kaya said, on Nascha's other side, nineteen years old and speaking to a marshal as if he were a man caught lying at a fire. "She would not leave her house. Ask him if he remembers an old woman who would not leave her house."
Amos did not turn to look at the gunmen. He could hear what the accusation was doing to them β leather creaking, a horse stamping, someone clearing his throat and thinking better of it. Not all of them. But the boy with the sunburned neck had gone the color of ash, and he was staring at Ferris now, not at the women, and that stare was a crack in a wall.
"You want our land," Nascha said, and now she spoke to Ferris alone, low and exact, as if the others had been permitted to listen to a private thing. "Say the whole of it once, here, where the graves can hear you. You want the wash because the wash has water in every season. You want the men in the ground digging and the women gone from the claim, because a claim with no families on it is a claim Hollis can file as abandoned. The paper you read us was a lie before it was ash. Our men are not labor under contract. They are stolen, and the thief wears a star he sold to Garrett Hollis the way other men sell a horse."
Ferris found his voice at last, and it came out too loud, which told its own story. "That's sedition and slander from a β I'll have you in irons for it alone, woman, before I β"
"Before you what, Marshal?" Amos asked quietly. "In front of fourteen witnesses you've brought yourself? She hasn't raised a hand. She's raised a history. If it's slander, the court in Fortuna can weigh it. If it isn't β" he let the sentence stand unfinished in the heat, where it did more work unfinished.
Nascha had not stepped back. She stood at the gate with the sun full on her face and addressed the half-moon now, the men behind the marshal, deliberately, person by person, as if counting them the way their riders had counted her people from the ridge.
"Your sons will ask what you rode to do today," she said. "Be sure you can tell them."
No one answered her. Ferris sat his horse in the wreckage of his errand, and Amos could see the man calculating β not whether the words were true, but what they would cost if they traveled. Words did travel, faster than a horse, and for a moment Amos almost pitied him.