He signed his name to the contract at the fire that night, Tazlo across from him and the count slate between them — forty head, six riders — and the chief set his mark below Wade's name as witness to the count. Not as a favor. As a partner.
Tali took the slate from him when the last of it was done and ran the tally in her head the way she did everything, without apparatus and without error. "Forty," she said. "You have counted them four times today."
"A man enjoys his arithmetic when it comes out even."
"A man enjoys anything that comes out even, the fourth time he is told it." She handed the slate back. "The traders' moon is up, Wade Mercer."
"I saw it come."
"And?"
"And the horses are counted, and the paper is signed, and nobody has left the valley." He looked at her in the firelight — the woman the camp had called the returned one, standing in her own valley with her father's mark drying next to his name. "It can go about its business."
"It will," Tali said, "whether we watch it or not. Come and eat. My grandmother says a deadline is no excuse for a cold supper."
Wade put the slate under his arm and followed her toward the fire, and the moon rose over the rim and over the valley entire, and found everything in its place, and passed.
Chapter 27 — The Wedding
They counted the herd together at daylight, because that was her term and she kept her terms the way other people kept promises — exactly, and without being asked twice.
Tali counted from the gate as the horses filed through, and Wade counted from the fence, and at the end the two counts met at forty and neither of them smiled about it, because it was work. But it was the last work of the terms. The spring channel stood mended above the lower spring, its banks set with willow stakes already greening. The household goods stood ready. What she had asked, she had set in order herself, and the camp had watched her do it, and the camp's story about Wade Mercer had changed in the watching: not the white man the law had cornered into the lodge, but the man who had waited to be asked and had done the asking right.
The ceremony was held under the cottonwoods by the spring, where the water came up clear and cold out of the rock and the grass stayed green when the rest of the canyon cured brown. The whole camp stood there. The old ones sat in the shade on blankets. The children had been told to be quiet and were quiet in the manner of children, which is to say for minutes at a time.
Tazlo spoke first, and briefly, the way he did everything that mattered. He spoke of the lodge law and what it had been made for — not to trap a man, but to keep a daughter's name from being a thing the camp could spend. He spoke of the flood, and of a guest fed, and of a question that in the end had been asked twice, as it should be. "I gave this man a hard word at my fire," he said, "because a father growls at the gate so he does not have to weep at it. He answered it better than it deserved. Let the camp remember the answering, and forget the rest."
Then Weshka stood between them with a bowl of the spring water, and her blessing was her own, dry as her humor and twice as deep.
"May your quarrels be about small things," she said, "and end before the meal does. May your water rise sweet every morning of your lives. May each of you be the other's witness — when the camp talks, and when it is silent, and when there is no camp at all." She set the bowl in Tali's hands, and Tali drank, and gave it to Wade, and he drank, and the old woman nodded once, as at a sum that had come out right. "There. It is as done as anything I have ever done, and I have buried two husbands."
The gift-givers came forward then, family by family, as was the custom — blankets, worked leather, a string of horses that would make the new household's start.
Wade's own gift went not to the bride but to the lodge that had taken him in: the finest blanket off the traders' pile, red as a banked coal, which he laid across Weshka's shoulders in front of the whole camp, saying that the house that feeds a drowning man should have the warmest thing in the valley. The old woman bore the honor the way she bore everything, dryly. "It is a good blanket," she said. "You may have a corner of it, grandson, when the nights turn." And near the end of them came Kaslin, leading a gray mare out of his own family's band, a mare with a clean head and a ground-eating walk, and he set the lead rope in Tali's hand and said nothing at all, and stepped back into the crowd. Tali's hand closed on the rope. She said nothing either. Some debts are not paid in words, and some apologies are only true when they arrive on four legs. The camp saw it, and the camp understood it, and the last of the whisper that had followed the returned one went out of the valley that morning like smoke off a drowned fire.
Wade watched his wife — the word stood up in him, new and plain and enormous — receive her people's gifts on her own ground, the spring running behind her and her father's people all around, and he understood that nothing about the day resembled a settlement. No debt was being discharged. A woman was being honored in the place where she had been misjudged, and he was the fortunate witness of it.