“My name is Tomas Vega,” he said. “I trade between settlements. I speak their language.”

Corvin never took his eyes from Naya.

“Then perhaps you can tell me why three hundred armed men are surrounding my breakfast.”

Tomas almost smiled.

“They are not surrounding your breakfast.”

“That comforts me.”

“They are surrounding the well.”

Corvin looked at him.

“What?”

Before Tomas could answer, Naya knelt beside the buffalo hide.

Every warrior on the ridges lowered his head.

Corvin’s uneasiness became something colder.

Naya pulled the hide backward.

Gray hair appeared first.

Then the deeply lined face of an elderly woman.

She was not dead.

Her chest moved faintly beneath several blankets.

She had been carried on a narrow wooden litter.

Corvin stared.

The old woman opened her eyes.

They were dark.

Sharp.

And somehow painfully familiar.

She looked directly at him.

Her lips moved.

“Corvin.”

The world seemed to contract around that single word.

Corvin took one step backward.

“How does she know my name?”

Tomas did not immediately answer.

Naya lowered herself beside the old woman and gently supported her head.

The woman reached beneath the blanket.

Her trembling fingers emerged holding a tiny wooden horse.

One ear had been broken away.

One side was scorched black.

Corvin stopped breathing.

He had seen that horse before.

Not yesterday.

Not last year.

But somewhere far deeper inside himself.

A memory struck him.

A woman singing beside firelight.

A child’s hands pushing a wooden horse across packed earth.

The smell of juniper smoke.

Then a man shouting.

Gunfire.

Corvin pressed his fingers against his temple.

“No.”

The old woman spoke again.

Tomas swallowed.

“She says you used to sleep holding this.”

Corvin’s face drained of color.

“That’s impossible.”

The old woman lifted one shaking hand.

Her fingertips touched Corvin’s cheek.

The instant she did, an image exploded through his memory.

Those same fingers wiping blood from his knee.

A voice telling him not to cry.

A turquoise necklace swinging above him.

Corvin staggered backward.

“My mother died when I was three.”

Naya’s expression hardened.

Tomas translated something she said.

“No,” Tomas replied quietly.

“Your mother did not die.”

Corvin stared at the woman beneath the buffalo hide.

Then at Naya.

Then at the hundreds of silent riders surrounding his ranch.

Tomas spoke the next words slowly.

“Her name is Elena.”

Corvin’s throat tightened.

That was his mother’s name.

The name written inside the family Bible.

Elena Torne.

Died 1856.

Fever.

Buried near Tucson.

He had read those words a hundred times.

“My father buried her.”

Naya answered immediately.

Tomas translated.

“Your father buried an empty coffin.”

Corvin did not remember walking into the house.