“You were never just a kid.” Windchaser said softly. “You coped so well with Maria, with the farm, with your father, with being different…You took care of me when things went wrong with my family.” She closed her eyes as she remembered the day after she’d last seen her mother alive, leaning into his back and crying over the final apparently absolute loss of her mother and sister.
“I felt the same way, always, but you always seemed to be into rich, unsuitable, white girls.” Windchaser forced herself to laugh, remembering how much that had hurt at the time. She had always cleaned up after it, with a smile fixed on her face, but she’d hated it. “I nearly told you after every one of those girls, but I thought you would…distance yourself from me, I knew you’d be gentle about it, but I thought I would lose you.”
Windchaser looked at him as he wondered aloud, she’d thought it so often herself, taunted herself with it. “We might have been together, we might have been happy. I might never have gone back to Texas, but if I hadn’t, the same thing could have happened to me as did to your mother, or we might have died defending each other. We could have not worked and wound up hating each other. It’s not worth thinking about…However much I have.”
Windchaser tried hard not to tilt her face into his hand as he laid it on her shoulder. “You’d have got through fine. You might have been the weird kid, but you were the cool, sexy, weird kid. And you…you gave me a home, made me feel like something other than a disappointment.”
Windchaser smiled as he told her it wasn’t about her, but she’d heard the ‘it’s not you it’s me’ speech before. She watched him take the rosary. Her talisman over the last few years, she had become known for it, in a way. “It’ll keep you safe, if you’re lucky it’ll be recognised as mine… People owe me.” She sighed as he leaned back into the post. “You never left me completely, I carried you with me.”
Windchaser found herself so deeply worried for him, she’d lived outside tribal life, and it had nearly killed her, many times. “If you find a tribe called the Foxes, tell them…That I’m alive.” She tilted her head, thinking, smiling slightly. She stepped closer to him. “Hey Ryder, one for the road?”