Two winters ago, she said, the raiders came at the moon when the band was scattered for the hunt — men from the north, horse-takers, the kind that sell what they steal to other thieves. They killed her mother at the lower spring, where the women were cutting willow. They took horses, and they took Tali, who had run to the spring at the first shouting with a knife in her hand and more courage than arithmetic. She was gone a season. How she came back she did not tell him, then or ever — only that she came back on foot, in the first snow, leading two of the stolen horses, and that the camp had fed her and warmed her and then, slowly, the way a fire finds a crack, begun to whisper.
"A captive," Weshka said from the shadows, in the English she pretended not to have, "is a pot that has been in another man's fire. That is what the grandmothers of certain families say, when their sons come asking. Certain families," she repeated, tasting it, "whose pottery was never worth the firing."
There had been two betrothals. The first, to a young man of a good family, arranged by the fathers before her return was a year old — broken by his family, with gifts returned and words said about omens. The second, to Kaslin, a warrior of standing — broken again, by his family, though Kaslin himself had not spoken the breaking. The camp called her, when it thought she could not hear, the returned one — as if the name of what was done to her were the name of what she was.
"And yet," Wade said, because he had spent three days in this lodge and had eyes, "they bring their sick to your door."
The child's fever two lodges down, that he had heard in the night. The old man with the crushed hand, brought at dawn. The girl lost in the side canyon last winter, whose finding the camp still talked about — Tali had read a trail in snow three days cold and brought her home on this same horse.
"They bring them," Tali agreed, "the way you bring a good knife to the stone. A knife is not less a knife for having been lost." Her hands never stopped on the rope. "I am the best tracker in this valley. I am my father's daughter. I know where the water hides in August and which canyon throat the weather comes through. None of that is what a groom's family counts." She tied off the plait with her teeth. "They count the season I was gone, as if I had spent it. As if it were a price I paid for something."
Wade thought of his own ledgers — debts counted against him in Texas by men who had never seen his face, a name in a book with a figure against it. He thought of the water taking his money belt, his papers, his name, and leaving him only the man. He said none of it. What he said was, "Then they count wrong."
"It is not yours to say," Tali said, but not unkindly. "Eat. Tomorrow the counting of your horses, and after that my father will want his talk with you. He has been patient three days, which for him is a kind of record. He does not like what my roof means as much as some do, and he likes what some would do about it less. You will hear it from him."
Weshka stirred the fire and said something dry and final to the coals, and Tali, translating, allowed herself the edge of a smile: "She says the camp has grown small around me because I grew too large for it while I was gone. She says a valley that cannot hold its own daughter will hold no one long. My grandmother," she added, "is permitted to say such things. She has buried three husbands and all of her manners."
While she talked, a woman came to the lodge door, a baby wrapped against her shoulder, and spoke low and fast, and Tali rose at once and went out with a bundle of herbs from the lodge wall, unhurried — gone ten minutes by the fire's measure, and back with the baby quiet. She resumed her seat and her rope as if she had stepped out to look at the sky.
"That is how it is," Weshka said, in her dry, accented English, watching him watch. "At the door they are proud, her father’s people. In the night, when the child burns, they come to this lodge, and they do not whisper." She poked the fire with unnecessary force. "A camp is a herd. It follows the loud ones until the water rises. Then it remembers who can swim."
Wade said, "And the young men? The ones who broke—" and stopped, because Tali's hands had gone still on the rope.
"The young men are not asked," Tali said. "Their families count for them, as yours count money for you in Texas. It is the same arithmetic with different figures. Kaslin has never said a word against me in my hearing. That is its own kind of word." She resumed the plaiting. "Do not make a story of me, Wade Mercer. I am not a story. I am a woman with work in the morning."
Outside, beyond the spring, the valley herd was coming in for the night, and among the band's horses, Wade knew, stood what the flood had left him. Tomorrow he would count. Tonight he sat in the lodge of the returned one and was, for the first time since the water, entirely and soberly awake to where he was.
Chapter 5 — What the Water Took