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straight into her. She’s huddled with Isi and Nishwa.
    Her dark head snaps toward mine. “We need to go.”
    â€œNow?”
    â€œAs soon as we can get packed.” She looks to her round-faced brother, Nishwa. “Can you ready the horses?”
    He nods.
    She speaks in her own tongue to Isi, who claps Nishwa on the shoulder. He seems relieved. They head off in opposite directions. I look at Matisa, bewildered.
    â€œLet’s get our things,” she says, beckoning to me as she sets off for the east quarter.
    â€œAll right,” I say, feeling like I’m not truly in the conversation and not understanding why. I hurry after her. “But I need to tell Kane.”
    â€œI’ve sent Isi to get him,” Matisa says, pulling open thedoor to our kitchen. She crosses the space and begins sorting through the dry goods we have stacked on the kitchen table.
    â€œKane said he can be ready in a heartbeat,” I say, still feeling at a loss, and shoving down a niggle of unease at the thought of him telling his ma.
    â€œGood.” Her hands sort through packets of bulb flour and dried berries. She’s rattled, and it’s skittering me.
    I grab her saddle-pack from the cloak hooks beside the door and bring it to the table. “This is about what that Henderson said,” I venture.
    She nods, stuffing the dry goods in the pack. Her eyes are elsewhere, like she’s thinking hard.
    â€œMatisa,” I say, putting my hand on her busy arm. “He was enjoying the telling, but he might not be so sure on the knowing.”
    â€œOh, I know that,” she says. “He knows very little.” She abandons the dry goods and heads for the sleeping quarters. I follow her into Pa’s old bedroom, where she begins pushing clothes into a pack she grabs from under the bed.
    â€œThen what—I mean, why are you . . . so skittered?”
    She doesn’t pause. “It is not what he knows; it is what he brings.”
    â€œAnd what is that?”
    She stops.
    â€œMatisa?”
    She looks up, her eyes shifting to the door, back to me—they’re troubled, like the rushing river. “I need to tell you something,” she says. “It is about the sickness that took your people when they first arrived.”
    â€œAll right,” I say.
    â€œI tell this to you alone,” she cautions.
    I frown. She’s always spoken plain around us—Tom, Kane, her cousin and brother, me.
    â€œEm?”
    â€œCourse,” I answer.
    She sinks to the edge of my mattress. “I told you that we left this area when the sickness came. I told you that our people dreamt more death was coming and that we knew this meant people. Newcomers.”
    I nod. Matisa’s people moved into the mountains, away from the plains, after these dreams. They made peace with other groups of First Peoples to the south so they might be a unified front against an oncoming threat: settlers. Us.
    â€œWhat I have not told you is that by the time we left this area, we had long been living with the sickness.” She twists her hands together. “For years our people and the animals around us died in ways we could not explain. It was not like the sicknesses in the east we’d heard about. This sickness was not passed from one person to another, and it appeared and disappeared with no obvious cause.” She hesitates. “Eventually we realized it was in the little waters.”
    â€œThe little waters?”
    â€œCreeks, small rivers. Your people survived all those years ago because they moved out of the woods, away from it.”
    I think about the remnants of those first settlements I found last fall; the crumbled cabins out in the woods, next to dried-up creek beds. Our stories tell us the settlers who survived banded together and built our fortification next to the big river, hiding away from the “evil in the woods” that had taken their kin. My eyes widen in