The Outcasts of the Canyon

At ten in the morning the blizzard broke, leaving an expanse of glassy blue sky that dazzled the eyes against the Andean glaciers.

Pascual lent her horsehide boots lined with sheep fleece that were a size too large and a surplus army jacket smelling of pipe tobacco. Stepping past the low willow fence, Bianca realized La Horqueta was no isolated hovel lost upon the steppe.

It was an invisible settlement.

A dozen low houses of dry stone and adobe stepped up the canyon wall, camouflaged among the boulders and scrub trees so they could never be spotted from the watch posts along Route 40.

Those who are cast off on the plains tend to build barricades high in the rocks.

Around the communal goat pen, four men and two women were butchering a sheep upon a poplar plank. None of them wore the scarlet armbands of the Véliz clan or the dark mantles of the Loncopán elders. They were clad in patched herder coats, road-crew jackets, and gaucho berets pulled down to their brows.

Seeing her limp beside Pascual, the group froze in place. A heavy hush settled over the dirt yard like a falling sluice gate.

"Is this the stray that led the raid right to the ford?" asked a man of fifty with an old claw scar cutting across his weathered cheek and hands steeped in blood.

"This is Héctor Pezoa's daughter," Pascual replied steadily, chin held high. "And if Nahuel's hounds reached the water, it was only because we crossed with chains clattering on the Falcon's rims."

An elderly woman, gnarled as a mountain root with eyes clouded by cataracts, set down her skinning blade and shuffled toward Bianca through the crusted snow.

She seized Bianca's chin with two calloused fingers, tilting her face into the noon sun.

At the base of Bianca's throat, nestled beneath the left collarbone where her blood pulsed fiercely, sat a dark birthmark shaped like a fractured crescent moon.

The old woman drew in a sharp breath.

"She's no ordinary Pezoa," the elder pronounced, turning toward the men by the pens with a feral gleam in her milky eyes. "She belongs to the line that sang upon the high crags long before the Véliz ever learned to stretch barbed wire. The ancient blood has crossed the river."

In the great stone homestead of the northern estate, the roaring fireplace could not dispel the draft chilling the main study.

Lisandro Véliz tried to button the linen cuff of his sleeve with his left hand, but the fingers of his right arm hung limp at his side, numb and cold as though he had slept with his shoulder pressed against a slab of river ice.

He tried to make a fist. The forearm muscles responded with nothing more than a faint tremor.

"It's no cramp from the draft in the assembly hall, lad," old apothecary Evaristo said, returning his forceps and arnica balms to his worn leather satchel.

"Yesterday I hoisted a hundred-kilo hay bale with that arm," Lisandro snarled through clenched teeth, sweat beading across his brow. "Spare me the midwives' tales."

"Yesterday your fated bond was intact," the old healer countered flatly, eyeing him with that clinical detachment pack physicians reserve for the condemned. "You threw snow over the ritual fire. You repudiated your destined mate before three hundred witnesses to appease the Council elders."

Severing what sustains you is like cutting your own hamstring and expecting to run faster.

Lisandro sank heavily into the oxhide armchair. In the adjoining parlor, the muffled voices of his uncle Don Cipriano argued boundary lines with mining company surveyors.

"A blood bond is no municipal code that can be struck down with a stamped decree, Lisandro," the old man continued. "Your alpha core was bound to that girl's from the day you drew breath. Severing it by force sent her strength south across the river. And yours is bleeding out through the open wound."

The study door banged open.

Nahuel strode in, his leather jacket spattered with frozen mud and boots soaked through with meltwater.

"She slipped through, Lisandro," his cousin panted. "Meliqueo was waiting under the old railroad bridge with the car. They ran the ford under rifle fire."

Lisandro lifted his head slowly. For the first time in twenty-four hours, raw dread flickered in his dark eyes.

"Is she across the Limay?"

"She's with the outcasts, cousin. In free territory."

Lisandro tried to rise, but a sudden wave of dizziness darkened his sight, forcing him to lean heavily on the desk with his one sound arm.

In the silence of the room, the grandfather clock's tick sounded like a countdown nobody in the valley knew how to stop.