cost. A child who loves and misses you. She asked me to give you this.”
Lana rose, laid a letter on the table by the chair.
“Thank you for seeing me,” she said, and left the woman with a choice to make.
* * *
Fallon spent ten days in the West. Despite the purpose, she found time for amusement watching Meda flick Travis away like an overeager puppy. She enjoyed watching Taibhse glide through western skies, over land that offered mile after mile of open. They often slept in that open, under stars so brilliant it made her throat ache, drifted off to the music of coyote and wolf.
She found the potential for a base in Sedona, a place she hoped to revisit, with the staggering beauty of the red mountains, the magicks that whispered in the air.
In the canyons, by boiling rivers, Faol Ban raced and hunted. Near crystal lakes that reflected the spearing mountains, hawks cried and circled overhead, deer roamed thick through forests, leaped through high grass with white tails bobbing. Elk bugled at dawn and swarmed like an army over grasslands with no fences left to block their path.
Bear larger than she’d ever seen fished in streams while cougar and lynx hunted over rocky slopes.
She watched the majestic flight of an eagle, the stunning dive of a peregrine, and understood the wonder Duncan had felt during his time in the West.
In settlements and camps, she spoke to leaders, conversed when it suited in Arapaho, in Sioux, and once, to an old woman’s delight, in Dutch.
They roamed through ruined cities, empty towns where ghosts roamed as thick as the deer and elk. It amazed her how many useful supplies had been abandoned, like the cars and trucks, the ranch houses, the cabins, even the weapons inside them.
Wild horses ran the plains in living rivers of speed and grace. Buffalo, hides thick with winter, cropped the swaying grasses.
“Generations ago, this land was taken from my people.” Meda scanned the land, the mountains, from the saddle. “We’ll have it back. It won’t be taken from us again.”
“Do you think that’s what I want? To take?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t fight beside you. But like the North Queen wants what she sees as hers, me and mine want what is ours. There won’t be reservations. We won’t be driven off again. This is home.”
“And for those, not of your tribe, who see this and believe it is or could be home?”
“There’s room.” Meda shrugged. “There’s room for those who respect our sacred places, who work the land with respect, or leave it as they find it. I’ve already given you my allegiance. This isn’t bargaining. It’s truth.”
“I’ve already given you my allegiance,” Fallon returned. “This isn’t bargaining, but another truth. The land here, or in the east, over the oceans, the oceans themselves, isn’t mine to give. But it will be held in the light by your people, and all people.”
“I pray for the day we see that truth. But we have a war to win first.”
As she rode on, Travis let out a long sigh. “She just gets hotter.”
Fallon rolled her eyes, and nudged Laoch into a trot.
Later, as the sun dipped, sent its first roses to bloom over the peaks in the west, she spotted a settlement tucked into the basin near the foothills of what her map told her was the Sierra Nevada.
“Should be good farming land,” Travis commented. “Good pasture.”
“Whatever’s left of Reno’s to the northwest. And Lake Tahoe. It could be a good spot for a base.” Fallon scanned the houses, the farmland—probably ranch land out here, she corrected. “Let’s see if we can convince them to join up, maybe we can spend the night here before we head north.”
“I don’t see much security.” Meda continued on in an easy walk.
“We’re still, what, a mile away?” Scanning, Fallon looked for any sign they’d be met with hostility. “They’ve got cook fires going. I can smell them. Meat cooking. No electric power. I can see solar on a few roofs, and somebody built a couple windmills. We’ll ride in slow, so they have time to look us over.”
And the crows came.
With their first shriek, an alarm sounded with the manic clanging of bells. Even as Laoch leaped into a gallop, riders on horseback poured out of the trees, headed for the settlement. The air rang with gunfire, tore with screams. Fallon saw a flash of fire streak from one of the houses, take out a rider.