“We’re going back,” he corrected.
“What if I want to be alone?” Nena’s tone was arch. Her moment of softness was retreating behind hard walls, too quickly for him to catch. Like smoke passing through his fingertips. She had not said she believed him, nor forgave him—perhaps she would not. He buried the thought as quickly as he could, before it could burn him.
He focused on the immediate danger: Nena could not travel alone. Not in a world where the gray forms that stalked his nightmares appeared on the battlefield. A visceral fear uncurled at the base of his skull at the memory of them among the bodies. They were not a mirage, not a shard of terror that slipped from unconscious memory into daylight among the horror of the battlefield.
They were real.
The sun was dull on their leathery gray backs, their sightless faces streaked with dark liquid. Curled over corpses already bloating and reeking from the heat, their ribs pulsing with each greedy draft.
“Then I’ll follow at a respectful distance,” he said.
“Like a dog?”
“A loyal one,” he offered.
She scoffed softly. “Bold words from someone who left.”
This dug into the softness beneath his ribs like a dagger, catching him off guard.
“I . . .” he began.
“Are you going to defend yourself?” Nena asked.
“Yes,” he said, speaking so quickly he tripped over the word.
“Then go ahead. Talk.” She was brusque. Impatient. Her face was turned away from him, its expression shuttered—she had no interest in anything he had to say. She might never. “We have nothing better to do.”
For a long moment, silence hung between them. He could hear the breeze in the leaves above them, the distant sounds of the river. His own pulse beneath his jaw. The creak of his fate, bending and shifting.
“I couldn’t come back,” he said.
Even her scowl was lovely. He looked up at the sound of skirts shifting. She was rearranging the muddy fabric around her knees, making to stand.
Embarrassed heat crept up his neck. He had envisioned many reconciliations with her, sleepless night after night. None of them had featured him so tongue-tied.
But here he was. And here she was—not ten feet away, distant and unapproachable as a saint in a chapel. Not snapping at him to not call her Nena, or worse, insisting that he not speak to her at all. Had she not been in his arms just moments ago, warm and real and clinging to him as if he were the one thing keeping the ground beneath their feet and the sky overhead?
She was with him. It was all he wanted to do to keep her there with him.
“This whole time, if I had come back . . .” He would have seen what a fool he was. What a coward he had been.
Every sleepless night spent composing speeches to her lifted its wings and rose, flying from his mind with the synchronized grace of a dozen herons. Every clever, passionate word he had committed to memory as he rode behind her and Don Feliciano melted away. He had nothing. He was empty-handed.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
It was all he had. That and his shame.
A cannon boomed. Its closeness sent them startling upright in the same movement, elbows and knees bumping into one another as they scrambled for balance.
But it was not a cannon. The crack was followed by a throaty rumble sounding high overhead. Néstor lifted his chin to the skies: in the east, dark clouds mingled with the smoke over Matamoros. Within hours, it would rain.
“We should go,” Nena said softly.
They should. The echo of thunder jolted him into reality like a bucket of cold water to the face: aside from what he carried in his saddle, they had no supplies, no money, no shelter. A nightmare at their back. How were they going to get to Los Ojuelos?
He did not have answers. Instead of planning, he had been sitting beneath a tree, trying and failing to speak. Like a weakling. Shame unfurled in his chest. He could not be weak anymore. He cleared his throat.
“When we were riding to Matamoros, I noticed a few abandoned jacales,” he said. “There was one probably a few hours’ ride northwest of here. I think it would make a safe enough place to spend the night. In case, God forbid . . .”
He let the sentence trail off. God had nothing to do with it. Any belief in God that hid in Néstor’s breast was a fragile, translucent thing, a cloth so worn and weak that if you held it up to the sun, light would shine through it. The events of the day had all but shredded it. In case we have company was what he meant, but saying it aloud felt unlucky on his tongue at best. At worst, it tasted like a prophecy.
“In case of the worst,” Nena said, her eyes fixed on the skies—perhaps searching them, as Abuela often did, for hints of what the future’s weather held in store. “And because the rain will follow us.”
“Then let’s hurry,” Néstor said. The sooner they put more distance between them and what stalked the battlefield the better. He could think on the road. There would be settlements, small ranchos where he could offer to work and win them shelter and sustenance in return. He had done it before and would do it again, if it got Nena home safely. If they rode hard, and if Nena could ride hard, they could make the return journey in less than half the time the squadron took to reach Matamoros. “How fast can you ride?”
“As fast as you,” Nena said, tone sharpened by defensiveness. “But I . . .” She looked down at her muddy skirts, still wet from crossing the resaca. “Not like this. The saddle sores alone . . .” She shook her head.
“Do you have . . .” Néstor let the phrase trail off, biting his lip when he realized how stupid the question was. Of course Nena did not have a change of clothes better suited to riding. All of her belongings were back at camp. And there was no turning back to get anything—it was too dangerous.
“Do you have anything I could wear?” Nena echoed his question pointedly. “Vaqueros travel with their lives in their saddle, don’t they?”
They did. He had a shirt, at least. No chivarras other than those he wore, but he had a spare pair of trousers. He crossed the space between them and the horses. Luna’s ears pricked at his approach, and he rubbed her neck with an absentminded hand before reaching for his saddlebags and his clothes.
His fingers brushed over something hard.
He frowned, fingers searching. He withdrew a small bottle, its glass dark and warped, its front etched with a rustic cross. It looked like one of Abuela’s bottles for holy water, but was filled with something white. He removed its small stopper and peered inside.
Salt.
The bottle was filled with salt.
The night before he left Los Ojuelos with the squadron, he remembered seeing Abuela near the saddles that the Duarte men left perched on the railing of the porch. Had she snuck this into his saddle?
Why salt?
He slipped it back into the saddlebag and took out his spare clothes instead.
Nena was just behind him when he turned. He hadn’t heard her approach. It made him uneasy—in a good way, a way that sent his heart to his throat—to be so close to her.
“You won’t have chivarras, but it should be better than nothing,” he said, holding out the clothes to her.
She took them, her bloodstained hands brushing his. “Thank you.”
A long silence filled the space between them. Nena gave him a chastising look.
“Oh.” He cleared his throat. “I . . . I’ll turn around, of course.” He did this immediately, the heels of his boots carving divots in the dirt, he turned so sharply. He focused on Luna’s saddle. He occupied himself with tightening her girth, rubbing river silt from the stirrups. The smell of wet leather made him dread the discomfort of the ride ahead. He would have to scrub the whole saddle clean during their next siesta.
Despite how he tried to remain focused on anything else, he heard a shift of fabric behind him, followed by the undeniable deflated sigh of skirts hitting the ground around ankles.