Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  Over her shoulder, Willa was smiling. Not at him, Neil knew, but the effect was the same. In the dimness of the cabin, he had thought her striking, if a bit intimidating. Now, with her stern features softened by joy, she radiated a beauty that stole his breath.

  “Anni,” she said through that dazzling smile, “my heart is glad to see you, but you are breaking my ribs.”

  “Oh!” The woman released Willa, her face going pink. “Don’t know my own strength, Charles says. But, you! Who’d have thought you’d shoot up like a cornstalk? Makes me feel positively dumpy. But never mind … I didn’t know what to make of it when Francis showed up at our cabin this morning saying he’d seen you here—always lurking, our Francis—but he said nothing about …”

  She turned abruptly, as if recalling Neil. “Willa, is this Scotsman with the bonny blue eyes your husband?”

  Willa’s radiance dimmed, taking the softness with it. “I have no husband. He … I …”

  Neil took the matter in hand, coming forward to bow awkwardly with his pinioned arm. “Neil MacGregor, ma’am. I took a fall yesterday morn, and my horse, giving me up for dead, absconded with nigh all my earthly goods. Miss Obenchain brought me along here with her, like the stray that I am. Me and …” But the other member of his expedition had yet to reappear.

  Willa pointed toward the ridgeline. “Chasing breakfast. Squirrel, I think.”

  “Ach, well. And you, ma’am?” Neil inquired of the blond woman. “A friend of Miss Obenchain’s, are ye?”

  “I am,” the woman said, and dropped into a curtsy. “Anni—Annaliese Waring Keppler.”

  “Keppler?” Willa echoed.

  Anni’s smile brightened. “You remember Charles. His father ran the mill—Charles has it now. He asked the Colonel for my hand six years ago, and now we’ve Samuel and Samantha. Twins—heaven help me.”

  A shadow passed across Willa’s eyes, though her mouth pulled into another smile. “I am happy for you, Anni.” She raised a hand to brush back the hair escaped from her braid.

  Her palm was blistered raw.

  “What’ve you been about, Willa?” Neil reached for her hand.

  She raised the spade as if to ward him off. “I found this—near the upper field. I am using it to break ground for planting.”

  It was a wide blade, solid and sharp. No cast-off tool left to rust. “You found it there? Abandoned? By whom, I wonder?”

  “I do not know.”

  “I might.” Anni Keppler had an unguarded face—soft and round cheeked. Now her expression shifted from wry amusement to discomfort. “And, Willa, I hate to have to say this so soon, but someone has to give you fair warning.”

  Bewilderment stared from Willa’s eyes. “Warning?”

  It was then Neil caught a drumming sound, faint in the distance, and glanced toward the track. It sounded like a horse’s hooves, but he saw nothing.

  “We never supposed you would come back,” Anni was saying, distracting him from the noise. “Not that I’m not over the moon that you have … but after all these years, and since your parents—”

  “Where are my parents, Anni?” Willa broke in. “Where is Oma?”

  Anni’s expression twisted with sympathy and deepening unease. “I’m sorry, Willa. Your parents were suspected Tories—Loyalists to the British. Richard was certain of it before the end, and you know he—”

  The approach of hoofbeats, unmistakable now, silenced Anni.

  At last Neil glimpsed a horse through the trees bordering the yard. A large bay, raw boned and white blazed, brought its rider into view, a man in a good blue coat, wide shouldered and very tall in the saddle. His clothing and bearing were that of a gentleman, but he was hatless. Fair hair unbound on his shoulders lent him a disconcertingly wild appearance. His face bore a coarser echo of Anni Keppler’s features, only there was no softness there.

  The man pulled the bay up short in front of them, yanking it in a series of tight turns, making it snort and prance. Ignoring Neil and Anni, the man’s pale eyes blazed at Willa Obenchain, whose face drained of color as she mouthed a name. Richard.

  Anni stepped between them, reaching for the horse’s bridle. The man shifted his searing gaze to her. “I caught Francis skulking in the woods west of town. He left the twins on their own.”

  Anni held her ground. “Who minds them now?”

  “Goodenough came into town with me. I sent her to mind them. As you ought to have done.”

  “And Francis?”

  “Locked in the smokehouse with the rest of the game.”

  Anni grimaced. “Richard, Francis isn’t an animal.”

  “Wasted fretting, Anni. He’ll get himself loose within the hour and will be haring off to the hills. But I didn’t come to talk of our brother.” His gaze snapped back to Willa. “It’s her?”

  “She can speak, Richard. And can’t you see her eyes?”

  From atop the tall bay, the man’s gaze raked Willa from beaded moccasins to braided hair. “So. What name did they give you?”

  Neil comprehended neither the question nor the resentment behind it.

  Anni apparently grasped both. “Richard—Alan—Waring! There’s a time and a place.” She started to move protectively toward Willa, who warded her off with a look.

  Standing straight and unshrinking under Richard Waring’s glare, Willa spoke a word in a language Neil didn’t know, though the sound of it struck a chord of familiarity.

  It struck more than that in Anni’s brother. Loathing rippled over his face. “Burning Sky?”

  The skin across Willa’s cheekbones tightened until the bones stood stark beneath. “You speak Kanien’keha?”

  “More than I ever wanted to.” Waring swung from the saddle with smooth, athletic grace—an impressive feat, given he had to be a full four inches over six feet, and thickly muscled with it. “What was the name of the buck they mated you with?”

  The blood left Neil’s face in a rush of visceral outrage, followed swiftly by comprehension. How ridiculously slow he’d been to grasp the truth when he’d been staring it eye to eye since yesterday—the carrying basket, the clothing, even the faint accent with which she spoke, an accent he’d last heard moments before the scar on his forehead was put there.

  Willa Obenchain had been an Indian captive.

  He knew of the practice, of course, how the tribes took captives to replace those lost through battle or disease, but he’d thought Willa just another refugee, dressed more rustic than most, returning to her frontier home like so many others from some place of shelter back east. But those few women he’d seen on the roads had come with wagons, stock, goods, and families. Not alone.

  Willa had lifted her chin, unflinching before Anni’s brother. “What need have you to know his name?”

  Neil saw the twitch of Waring’s big hand, the threat of violence in his eyes. With no conscious memory of moving, he found himself beside Willa, startled despite the tense situation that she stood nearly equal to his own six foot height.

  Waring didn’t so much as blink to acknowledge him, but the violence Neil had glimpsed in his eyes receded, replaced by anger, and pain. “What need? I meant you to be my wife, not despoiled by some red savage.”

  “You may have meant her to be your wife,” Neil said. “But she isna now, and ye willna offer her further insult while I’m here to prevent it.”

  Waring flicked him a glance, taking in his splinted arm. “What have you to do with her—or need I ask?”

  “If that’s your manner of inquiring, I’m Neil MacGregor, member of the American Philosophical Society, associate of”—his thoughts raced, coming up with the most notable of his society acquaintances—“Dr. Benjamin Franklin, commissioned to compile a field guide of the flora north of the Mohawk River. Insult me all ye like, Mr. Waring, but I canna stand by while ye cast aspersions against Miss Obenchain, who’s been naught to me but kindness itself.”

  Waring smiled at him, a full smile with an unexpected charm. “Can you not?” h
e inquired mildly, before he rammed his fist into Neil’s gut. “Then by all means—sit.”

  It doubled Neil like a hammer blow, driving out his breath. He dropped to his knees, pain spiking up his injured arm as instinctively he tried to catch himself. A gray curtain dropped around him. At its margin was movement. Moccasins took a stride forward, stopping in a spurt of dust beside large boots.

  Willa’s voice sliced through the curtain like a blade. “This man has taken shelter under my roof. You will not touch him again.”

  Silence stretched while Neil fought for breath and the blood rushed loud in his ears. At last a deeper reply came, laden with disgust. “Not today.”

  The boots stepped away. Saddle leather creaked. Neil’s lungs remembered how to work. He pulled in a desperate breath as Waring’s parting shot issued from on high, aimed not at him, but Willa.

  “You’ve no place here, Burning Sky. Go back where you came from, or burning is what you’ll bring down on yourself if you stay.”

  FIVE

  She could not stop shaking. Not after Anni led her to the cabin porch, or pried her fingers from the spade’s handle to lean it against a post. Neil MacGregor came up to the cabin and lowered himself gingerly to sit beside her.

  Anni stood with tears on her cheeks. “I wish you’d brained Richard over the head with that spade, Willa. It might’ve knocked some sense into him.”

  The image of Richard Waring’s face, aged and hardened, hung before Willa’s eyes. She was as rattled by it as if another soul had stolen the face she remembered, a malevolent soul that had distorted its shape with its darkness and wore it now like a mask. She had not recognized the person staring out of Richard’s eyes. She had seen a Long Knife soldier. An enemy.

  “Mr. MacGregor, are you all right? I’m so sorry for what my brother did to you.”

  Anni’s words jarred Willa from her thoughts in time to see Neil MacGregor shift on the porch, and wince. The man was clearly in pain, but if he regretted coming to her defense, he did not show it.

  “Aye, Mrs. Keppler. It wasna your fault. But what he said there at the last—what did he mean by it? Why should he threaten Miss Obenchain?”

  Anni wiped her cheeks. “It’s the land—your father’s land, Willa. I started to tell you he was suspected of being a Loyalist. This farm was confiscated as Tory property, years ago. Lots of farms were, and now they’re being sold off to the highest bidder. Richard has had his eye on this one since the war’s ending. He means to bid on it whenever the auction is held.”

  A coldness formed in the pit of Willa’s stomach, as the news both chilled and confused her. Anni’s words swirled through her mind. Tory property. Confiscated. Sold off. But all she could force past her lips was, “My parents were not Tories.”

  Even as she spoke, a niggle of doubt wormed through her thoughts. The Kanien’kehá:ka had taken her in the autumn of 1772, nearly twelve years ago, long before the outbreak of war. But even then there had been talk of its brewing, on that very cabin porch. She remembered Papa reading aloud letters exchanged with some relation back east. In Albany, she thought. Taxes, government, the English King George … those had been the subjects of those letters. Had Dieter Obenchain been a king’s man? She could not remember. She’d been barely fourteen years old, with her nose buried in romantic novels, not letters about politics.

  “ ’Tis a thing happening all over,” Neil said, nodding as though the situation was beginning to come clear to him. “The war was a staggering drain on the states, not just New York. Debts are owing. Selling off Tory land is a means of paying down those debts.”

  “Now that there’s no fighting,” Anni said, “all Richard talks about are the committees of confiscation and which farms along Black Kettle Creek will be up for auction soon. I don’t know how soon, Willa, but there’s a man coming to assess the properties north of German Flats. Richard has made it no secret he expects to own this tract.”

  Willa clenched the porch’s edge—planks Papa had hewn and set in place, planks her feet had helped to smooth. Her parents were gone. She wanted desperately to ask when, how, but could not in the face of this new shock find the words.

  Neil MacGregor found them for her. “You were fixing to tell us what happened to Willa’s parents?”

  Anni shook her head and looked with sympathy at Willa. “They disappeared six years ago. Your grandmother with them, we think.”

  Six years. The coldness in Willa’s belly spread, encompassing her heart. “Killed?”

  “Maybe not. Their—forgive me—their bodies were never found.”

  “I do not understand, Anni. If the British or Long Knives did not kill them, where are they?”

  “Long Knives? Is that what you—” Anni did not finish the question. But her voice hardened a tiny measure as she said, “Let me try to explain, Willa. There were so many raids during those years—a homestead burned by one side, then weeks later another by way of reprisal, sometimes many at once—but after such raids, the families who sympathized with the Tories, the ones that got spared, would pack up and flee, follow the raiders back to the British in Canada.”

  Neil frowned, glancing between them. “You’re saying that’s what Willa’s parents did? They fled to Canada?”

  Anni raised helpless hands. “They didn’t come to Fort Dayton, or Herkimer, with the rest of us. Some would say that’s proof enough where their loyalty lay.”

  “But our barn … It is nothing but ashes.” Willa dragged the words past an aching throat. “If my parents fled during a British raid—fled with the redcoats to Canada—then why was our barn burned?”

  There were no answers here, only endless questions. And now, Richard’s threat. And behind him, this threat of confiscation.

  The shaking had stopped. Willa took up the spade and stood, planting its handle firm on the ground when she swayed. There was little cornmeal left. She’d made a cake for Neil in the dark while he slept but had not broken her own fast.

  There were green things growing now. Fiddleheads, wild lettuce, milkweed, dock. She would gather them … soon.

  The sense of too little time pressed hard on her. There would be an auction, Anni said. An assessor was coming. Well, let him come. He would find her hard at work. On her land.

  “I cannot listen anymore. There is too much to do.” A distant barking drew her gaze to the hills. “There, your dog at least is come back,” Willa said to Neil, and set out for the field, armed with spade and musket.

  The soil of the upper field, nearest the cabin, was hard and weed choked. She had not broken another square yard of it before Anni came marching out after her and stood in her path.

  “Go ahead and dig, Willa, but whether you want to listen or not, I have more to say.”

  Willa moved around Anni’s worn shoes. She stabbed the earth with the spade, while Anni’s voice stabbed her heart.

  “You are very changed, and I can only imagine you suffered your own hell. But that’s exactly what the past years were for us here. Hell—or the nearest I ever expect to come to it. The British and that red fiend, Brant—”

  Willa clenched her teeth at the name. Joseph Brant—Thayendanegea of the Mohawk, schooled by the Reverend Wheelock as a young man, a warrior who’d done his utmost to preserve the People’s land and independence—a fiend? She supposed Anni would see him so …

  “And the militia being called up,” Anni was saying, a tremble in her voice. “The murders, massacres, loyalties questioned, families torn apart—”

  “Like mine.”

  “Like everyone’s.” Tears glistened in Anni’s eyes when Willa looked up, but there was a spark of something sharper too. “We lost Mama and Edward to raiding Indians, just before your parents disappeared. That very same spring—before everyone forted up. We’d lost Nicholas and Samuel at Oriskany the summer before. Richard and the Colonel never found their bodies—a blessing, maybe, considering what the Indians did to the fallen after that battle. But Mama was never right in her mind again after the n
ews. And Francis. The day Mama and Edward were killed, Francis hid in the woods and saw them scalped in the dooryard.”

  Willa clenched the spade’s smooth handle. “Anni,” she said, but there were no words to touch such grief and horror. She knew there were no words.

  Her mind latched onto the last member of the Waring clan Anni had mentioned, the youngest, who had hidden in the woods and survived. Francis Waring had been seven years old the last time Willa saw him, a child who spoke rarely, and then with a stutter that often rendered him unintelligible. A boy prone to wander, feral and unkempt, causing no end of worry. Other children had shunned him. He’d discomfited many an adult with his strange ways. Yet whenever she had visited the Warings’ home and found Francis mewed indoors, he’d followed her with timid, curious eyes.

  Willa thought of the kettle, the wood, the flowers. She touched the spade with the toe of her moccasin. “Was it Francis who left this spade?”

  “I can’t think who else it could have been. He comes here sometimes. It vexes Richard.” Anni drew a breath and released it with a sigh. “I didn’t mean what I said about braining Richard, for all he boils my blood. He’s still my brother, and I love him, but … he isn’t the boy you remember. All through the war he rode with the militia, as a scout for part of that time, and saw more death and butchery than anyone should in a dozen lifetimes, and maybe did too much of the same himself—I’ll never ask. But all that violence—it shattered something in him.”

  A bruised reed, Willa thought. So Richard was one too. But the pity that should have followed the thought found no purchase in her heart. Fear choked it out.

  “He’s full of hate,” Anni said, “but he’s not past healing. I have to believe that.” Her eyes begged for understanding.

  Willa looked away. “Hate for my people.”

  “Indians, you mean?” Anni grasped her arm, forcing Willa to look at her. “How can you call them so? They took you from your people, your life. Of course Richard hates them. He’s the one who …” Anni bit her lip, searching Willa’s face.