-Us…
Calder bowed immediately.
—Okay, Nami. You’re inside now. I’ll take care of it.
Outside, it continued to snow relentlessly for two more days. Calder barely slept. He tended the fire, touched her forehead, moistened her lips, and gave her sips of broth whenever the fever allowed her to open her eyes. He didn’t know where she had come from, who had lost her, or why she had turned up nearly dead in his homeland. He only knew that he couldn’t let her go.
At midday on the second day, when he went out to chop wood, the wind carried a strange sound through the whiteness. It wasn’t an animal. Nor was it the crackling of a branch. It was something more human, more desperate, like someone’s body crawling through the snow to reach a place before collapsing.
Calder looked up.
An Apache woman emerged from the storm.
Tall. Broad-shouldered. Strong even in the midst of exhaustion. Her arms were covered in bruises, whip marks, dry cuts, and old blood plastered to her skin. She walked as if sheer pride kept her upright, because her body could no longer carry her. Her enormous, black eyes held no fear. They held something worse: the kind of desperation that only arises when a mother has searched for her daughter for far too long.
She stopped a few steps away from him and could barely stand.
“You have my little girl,” he said, his voice breaking.
Calder neither advanced nor retreated.
“She’s alive,” he replied, looking straight at her. “She’s inside.”
The woman tried to keep walking, but her legs gave way just as she reached the door. Calder managed to grab her arm before she fell. He felt her as hard as wood, as cold as stone. He helped her inside, and as soon as the woman saw the little girl asleep by the fire, everything she had held back for days silently broke.
He knelt beside her, touched her cheek with a trembling hand, and let out a sob that came from a place so deep inside that it didn’t even seem like a sound, but an open wound.
—Nami… my little Nami…
Calder left a cup of warm water near her.
—Sit down. You’re hurting too.
The woman looked up, still alert, still distrustful, but no longer as alone as when she had arrived.
—My name is Talia.
Calder nodded.
Outside, the storm continued to batter the prairie as if it wanted to swallow the world. The path to the mountains was blocked, and Talia barely had the strength to breathe without pain. Calder added fuel to the fire and said the only thing that made sense at that moment:
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