The camp made no sound at all.
Tali looked at her father, and then she looked at Wade across the fire, and when she spoke her voice carried the way her voice carried at the spring — plain, exact, and amused at precisely the driest moment, which is how he would know her in the dark for the rest of his life.
"I was carried off once by men who did not ask me," she said. "I came home to men who asked everything of me except what I wanted. It is a new thing in my life to be asked." She let that stand in the firelight until it had done its work. "I will take him. Not because he was under my roof — a roof covers whoever the rain sends, and I do not marry the rain. Not because he stood at the spring and would not sign the paper, though the camp may remember that I noticed. I take him because in three weeks he has not once spoken for me, or over me, or around me — and a woman could build on ground like that." Her mouth moved, the smallest degree. "I have terms. They are not many. He will hear them from me, not from this fire. But the answer is mine, and it is yes."
Chapter 25 — Her Terms
She gave him the terms the next morning, walking, because Tali did her serious talking the way she tracked — on her feet, with her eyes on real things.
They went up the path above the lower spring where the sluice cut still showed pale in the bank — to be filled and healed before anything else was done in the valley — and she talked while she looked at it, as if the work itself were a party to the conversation.
"First," she said. "The spring work is finished before any wedding. The cut is filled, the bank is seeded, the water runs in its own road again. I will not be married over a wounded spring, and I will not have it said the wedding was hurried ahead of the water. The valley waited six days for its life. It can wait a little for a feast."
"It can," Wade said. "My hands are in that work from tomorrow."
"Second. My horses and yours are counted together — the whole herd, yours and the valley's, counted by both of us, on the ground, by brands, before the marriage. Not because I mistrust your counting, trader. Because after we are married, no person in this camp or any other will say I brought nothing, or that you took without reckoning. What we have, we will both know the number of. A marriage that begins with a true count does not fear arithmetic later."
Wade thought of forty Bar M horses, twenty-eight saved by her people's young men, twelve saved by her reading of a trail and Kaslin's knife, and of his whole capital standing on four legs in grass her father guarded, and he understood that the count she was asking for was not about horses at all. It was about the ledger of the thing. "We count at week's end," he said. "Together. By brands, aloud, and Weshka writes it in her memory, which I am told is better than paper."
"It is better than paper," Tali agreed gravely. "Third." She stopped walking, and they had come out above the camp, and below them the lodges stood in their order with the smoke going up straight in the still morning, and Weshka's lodge among them with its door in shadow. "My grandmother put a drowning man under her roof when the camp argued at her door. Everything that has happened came out of that door. When we are married, her lodge is honored — she eats at our fire whenever she wishes, which will be often, and no wife of mine — " she caught herself, and the dry humor moved in her face " — no household of ours will ever be too fine or too busy for her. She is not a burden item in your count, trader. She is the reason there is a count."
"She is the first name in it," Wade said.
"Then you have my terms." Tali looked at him sidelong, the way she looked at weather. "They were not many, as I promised the fire. You look disappointed."
"I was prepared to negotiate," Wade said. "I brought arguments for things you haven't asked."
"Keep them. You will have a whole marriage to lose arguments in."
The camp took the terms the way the camp took everything real — by retelling them, and in the retelling Wade watched something happen that he had not expected. The story that went from fire to fire was not that the trader had been caught by the lodge law and properly netted at last. It was not even that the chief's daughter had chosen, though that was in it, and it changed the air around her name every time it was said — the whisper about the returned one now had to get past the sentence the camp asked her, before the whole fire, and she answered, and a whisper does not survive that sentence long.
The story the camp told was about Wade's respect for the terms. In this camp, where honor was a currency harder than gold, a man who would not take a woman as a settled debt, but stood in the firelight and demanded she be asked, had done a thing the old men approved in their bones. They had seen traders take women as part of a price and call the women lucky. They had not expected the flood's castaway to hand the question back like a cup to its owner. By the second evening, Weshka had been told the story four times by people who had stood in the ring, and she listened each time with the satisfaction of a woman hearing her own judgment confirmed by the whole valley.