“At a life beyond what others have decided for her.”
Maverick followed his gaze.
“Can I meet her?”
“No.”
The answer came so quickly that Maverick frowned.
“Why not?”
“She does not show her face to strangers.”
“Why?”
Lobo Negro’s expression changed.
Something colder entered his eyes.
Then he spoke the words Maverick would remember for the rest of his life.
“Because she is ugly.”
Silence spread through the camp.
A warrior nearby looked toward the ground.
An elderly woman froze with beadwork resting in her hands.
Another woman turned her face away.
Maverick glanced between them.
“The ugliest woman in the tribe,” Lobo Negro continued. “No man wants her.”
Maverick’s discomfort grew.
The words did not sound natural.
They sounded rehearsed.
Repeated.
Built into a wall.
“With respect,” Maverick said, “calling your own daughter ugly before a stranger seems a poor way to arrange a marriage.”
Something almost like approval flickered in the chief’s gaze.
Then vanished.
“She has been judged by men before.”
“Men who saw her?”
“Some.”
“And they refused her?”
“Yes.”
Maverick looked toward the tents again.
He imagined a woman listening somewhere.
A woman hearing herself discussed as though she were livestock with a bad leg.
It angered him more than he expected.
“I didn’t come here looking for a wife.”
“Then leave.”
Three warriors standing beyond Lobo Negro shifted.
They made no threatening movement.
They did not need to.
Maverick turned toward the river.
His river, some stubborn part of him whispered.
Except it was not his.
He had known that from the moment he entered the camp.
He saw children laughing near the water.
Women carrying baskets.
Men repairing tack.
People who had built lives here long before some clerk in Tucson stamped a document.
He turned back.
“Why me?”
For the first time, Lobo Negro’s stern face softened.
“You helped a boy two days east of here.”
Maverick’s eyebrows rose.
“A boy?”
“Near Red Stone Wash.”
Memory returned.
A child thrown from a frightened pony.
Maverick had found him limping beside the trail and spent nearly an hour repairing the pony’s broken reins before sending him toward a distant camp.
“That was your boy?”
“My grandson.”
Maverick stared.
“You were watching me?”
“Others were.”
The chief stepped closer.
“You could have taken his horse. His knife. His silver bracelet. Instead you gave him water.”
Maverick shrugged.
“He was a child.”
“Many men need more reason than that.”
Maverick looked away.
He did not enjoy being measured.
Especially when he suspected he was being measured accurately.
Lobo Negro continued.
“You entered our camp without hatred. You did not reach for your gun. You admitted you wanted the land rather than pretending otherwise.”
“That qualifies me for marriage?”
“No.”
“Then what does?”
The old chief’s gaze hardened again.
“Nothing. Ayasha decides.”
The name caught Maverick.
“Ayasha?”
“My daughter.”
Somehow hearing her name changed something.
She was no longer an invisible condition attached to acreage.
Ayasha.
Maverick repeated it silently.
“What if she refuses me?”
“You leave.”
“And if I refuse her?”
“You leave.”
“So the valley belongs to her decision.”
A strange expression moved across Lobo Negro’s face.
“Yes.”
Maverick looked toward the glittering river.
Five years of wandering rose before him.
Snow in Colorado.
Rain in Kansas.
A bunkhouse in New Mexico where six men snored and one stole his boots.
The grave of his mother in Texas.
His father disappearing when Maverick was twelve, leaving nothing except unanswered questions and a battered brass compass Maverick still carried.
Maverick had spent twenty years leaving.
Perhaps every road eventually demanded that a man choose somewhere to stop.
“When is the ceremony?” he asked.
A murmur moved through the camp.
Lobo Negro’s eyes narrowed.
“You have not seen her.”
“I know.”
“You may regret your answer.”
“I’ve regretted half the things I’ve done.”
The chief almost smiled.
“Three days.”
Maverick replaced his hat.
“Then I accept.”
Three evenings later, the river turned gold.
Maverick stood along the bank wearing the cleanest shirt he owned and feeling more terrified than he had during gunfights.
The entire camp gathered around him.
He had spent three days helping repair irrigation trenches, carrying timber, eating with Lobo Negro’s family, and attempting to learn anything about the woman he had agreed to marry.
No one told him much.
Ayasha was twenty-five.
She spoke English, Spanish, and Apache.
She knew horses.
She could read.
She had once broken a man’s nose.
That last fact came from a twelve-year-old girl who immediately fled laughing.
Maverick had still never seen her face.
He had glimpsed a veiled woman twice.
Once carrying medicine into an elderly man’s shelter.
Once standing beneath cottonwoods at dusk.
Both times she disappeared before he could speak.
Now drums sounded softly beside the river.
The gathered people separated.
A woman walked toward him.
Maverick forgot the drums.
Ayasha wore a pale dress trimmed with blue beadwork. A long white veil fell over her face, tiny blue beads catching the sunlight.
Her hands were clasped tightly.
Maverick saw one thumb pressing nervously against the other.
She stopped before him.
Lobo Negro stepped between them.
“Once the veil rises,” he said, “there is no turning back.”
Maverick almost answered that he had crossed three days of desert, agreed to marry a stranger, and slept beside a river guarded by warriors who still considered him suspicious.
Turning back seemed unlikely.
Instead he looked at Ayasha.