Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  Anni’s father looked at her sharply, as though trying to discern a slight in her words. “Did you never attempt escape?”

  The Colonel’s question jarred. “How should I have? For weeks I was closely guarded, moved from place to place. By the time I was settled …” By then, she’d been adopted, named, and she had met Joseph Tames-His-Horse.

  She couldn’t say when it happened, but sometime during the months after that meeting in the cornfield, as she allowed herself to be drawn into the life of the Kanien’kehá:ka, into the family who patiently taught her their ways and words, a day had dawned when her first thought had not been suffused with longing for the family and the life from which she’d been torn.

  The Colonel abandoned the mantel for the chair across the table, grimacing as he sat. “Far be it from me to judge a situation I have not, by God’s grace, been forced to endure. You were young and alone and did what needs must to survive. You chose to return to us in the end. We will leave it there.”

  Willa did not wish to leave it there. “I returned because the mother who adopted me died. And the man who was my husband fell in battle. And then when the smallpox took—”

  “Wilhelmina. I’m aware the Mohawks have suffered—those in Canada as well as here. The British tossed them aside like a spent weapon on the field as they fled.” The Colonel must have seen her flinch at his words, for he made an effort to soften his voice. “I wonder if Anni told you one other thing. Did she tell you Richard spent weeks searching for you, as far afield as Montreal? He was barely more than a boy, but he made that journey. For you.”

  “She told me.”

  When she said no more, he asked, “Does that soften your opinion of him?”

  Neil drew breath to speak, but Willa forestalled him with a look. She did not know what to make of Richard’s painful attempt at apology, or the news that he had tried to find her so long ago, before giving up. But one thing had not been retracted or erased.

  “Richard made it plain he will take my land from me. I have made it plain I will stop him—and anyone else who tries—if I can. The land is all I have, Colonel.” Knowing she risked making an enemy of the one man in Shiloh who could be of help to her, she said, “That is why I cannot accept your invitation, as generous as it is. Not as long as Richard dwells under your roof.”

  A sharp light flared in the Colonel’s eyes. “I have forbidden him to harass you, but it would help to keep the peace if you don’t provoke him.”

  “Provoke him?” Neil replied, but again Willa’s look forestalled his saying more. She’d glimpsed a truth in the Colonel’s eyes when the sharpness came into them. Elias Waring did not see—or would not admit to seeing—what the war had done to his eldest son. Perhaps in all fairness he could not see it clearly, having witnessed a change that must have happened in stages. Perhaps, too, Richard had grown adept at hiding from his father the darkness in his heart. A darkness she’d seen staring from his eyes when he first rode into her cabin yard. She wanted to believe Richard was sincere in his repentance, but the knot of dread she’d carried in her chest since that meeting had not been dispelled by any words he or his father had said since.

  They took their leave of the Colonel on the front steps, but had not gone a dozen paces toward the track that would take them back to Shiloh before Richard came striding around the house from the direction of the stables, face set with a determination to match his pace. Aram Crane trailed behind him but stopped at sight of Willa and Neil.

  Richard hesitated, then squared his shoulders and came toward her. Willa halted.

  Colonel Waring, standing in the doorway, blurted his son’s name. “Richard!”

  Perhaps it was only surprise at his appearance, but it sounded like a warning in Willa’s ears. Richard’s expression worked itself into something perceptibly softer. His breeches and long work frock were stained. He’d clearly come straight from his fields. He wore no hat, and his bound hair was streaked from sun and sweat.

  “Willa,” he said. “I heard you brought the mule back.”

  Aram Crane had obviously run to fetch him. Of his own accord, or had Richard requested he do so?

  She was conscious of Neil MacGregor rooted at her side. They both looked to where they had seen Crane, but the man had retreated behind the big stone house.

  “I hoped for a chance to talk to you. Alone.” Richard made something less than rudeness of the word by bending his head to acknowledge Neil MacGregor.

  “Ye dinna need speak to him,” Neil said to her, low near her ear.

  “He will do nothing untoward,” Willa replied. “Not in front of his father.” She nodded at Richard and crossed the yard, stopping to face him when they were out of earshot of the others. He stood too close for her comfort—she could smell the earth and sweat clinging to his clothes and skin—but she did not step back. “What do you wish to say to me?”

  As they had in the rain outside her cabin, his words came with struggle. “Did the Colonel … Did he tell you … Did he offer the invitation?”

  “To come and live here with you? He did.”

  Richard’s brow furrowed. “And?”

  “I mean to live on my land, to plant and tend it.”

  The muscles in Richard’s jaw stiffened. “It gave me grief to see you grubbing in the dirt yesterday, to see the drudge those savages have made of you.”

  She had thought she’d slipped away before he saw her. Then his words penetrated. Grubbing? Drudge? For a woman to bring forth sustenance from the land was a sacred thing, not shameful. Willa contained the urge to rake her nails down the front of his work-stained chest.

  “You have nothing to say to me that I wish to hear.” She made to step past him, but he put a hand to her arm.

  “Willa. That came out all wrong. Just … listen. Why won’t you let us help you?”

  For an instant she glimpsed a shadow of the younger Richard looking at her from this damaged mask—or imagined that she did—and she wanted to believe the person she’d known and admired still existed. Then she glanced past him to Neil MacGregor. He wasn’t liking this. She could tell by the set of his jaw, the dark line of his brows. Even the Colonel had come down the steps of his stone house, watching them with worried eyes.

  Tension thrummed in the air and through her very flesh. It was coming from the hand still gripping her arm, as though some immense tide of feeling inside Richard were building and building and it needed all his strength to contain it.

  She pulled her arm free to hide the shudder she couldn’t suppress. “I am going now. Do not hinder me.”

  Moving past him, she strode to where Neil waited, and he fell in beside her. But Richard was not finished. Across the distance widening between them, he called, “Has anyone told you that I came for you?”

  She did not look back.

  “I tried to find you—did you know?” Frustration, anger, maybe even loss, clogged the words. The sound of it touched a place in Willa’s soul that she did not want anyone, least of all Richard Waring, to touch. She quickened her stride.

  “Willa! No, Pa, let me—”

  Neil glanced back, but Willa did not. She knew what she would see. Colonel Waring had stepped in front of Richard, perhaps taken hold of him, to prevent his coming after her.

  Neil muttered something low that might have been a prayer. It did not drown the Colonel’s voice, the last to reach them as they started down the track to Shiloh.

  “There’ll be another time, Richard. Let her go.”

  “There must be someone who kens what happened to your parents,” Neil MacGregor was saying as they came in sight of the mill. He’d been talking since they left the stone house, as if enough words spoken might blot out the awful scene Richard had made in the dooryard. “Is it possible they went back east? Albany, perhaps?”

  Willa had only half-listened, but now her rattled mind produced a memory. The cabin porch … Papa reading letters exchanged with a cousin—or someone—in Albany.

  Who had it been?
She could not remember a name.

  “It is possible,” she began, but Neil put out a hand to halt her. A tall, thin figure of a man was hurrying up the track toward the mill, coming from the town.

  “Is that Jack Keegan?” Neil asked.

  It was. But Keegan did not notice them. “Sorry, Mrs. Keppler! Turned my back and she slipped out again.”

  They continued on, until the point where the track crested the rise of land behind the mill, before it took its eastward turn toward Willa’s land, was visible. And there was Anni, an arm around old Maeve Keegan, waiting for Jack to reach them.

  In seconds he had his mother in tow, leading her back down to the cluster of log buildings that included their store, his body blocking the sight of Neil and Willa as they passed. Willa halted—not because of the quick, distracted nod Jack Keegan shot her, but for the words the old woman was muttering: “Dagna. Dagna … For the love of … ’Tis gone now. Gone …”

  Neil halted too. “That’s your grandmother’s name she’s saying, aye?”

  “It is.” Willa watched the old woman totter down the slope, dwarfed by her tall son.

  Staring after Jack, Willa hadn’t noticed Anni coming down to meet them until she stopped beside her, puffing out a breath. “That’s the second time she’s done that. She’s got Mrs. Mehler fixed in her mind. She must be trying to head out to your farm, Willa, thinking your grandmother’s still there. Poor thing gets as far as the mill, then wanders in circles.”

  Willa’s heart was beating hard. “Did she do this before she saw me again?”

  “No. But you do resemble your grandmother.” Anni brushed the rounded slope of her apron, flecked with bits of cornmeal. “How was your talk with the Colonel?”

  Willa tore her gaze from the Keegans, still making their slow way to the store, and saw in Anni’s face that she knew what her father had asked of her. “We returned the mule, and now I must get back. There is still—”

  “Much to be done,” Anni finished for her, disappointment in her tone. “I take it you declined his invitation.”

  “Was that your notion?” Neil asked her.

  “I’m not sure if it was Richard’s or the Colonel’s. But I thought it a good one. Still, you’ll do as you think best, Willa.”

  Though her friend embraced her before hurrying back to the mill, her words left Willa smarting, convinced even Anni thought her foolish for laying up provisions for a winter no one believed she would—or should—spend in the cabin Dieter Obenchain had built.

  THIRTEEN

  Throughout the night of the storm, and during the days following, Joseph Tames-His-Horse’s thoughts were less focused on the game he hunted than on the woman he hunted it for. Even so, he’d gotten his deer. The buck, quartered in its hide, rode his shoulders as he retraced his trail to the mare, concealed in a tamarack thicket he’d camped in the previous night, a day’s ride north of the cabin Burning Sky’s father had built.

  Her white father.

  The notion rested in Joseph’s mind as easy as a switch of stinging nettle. As he picked his way through pines dotting a stony ridge, the musky tang of blood and deer hair was strong in his nose.

  Stronger was the memory of Burning Sky’s scent as he held her on the cabin porch. The memory made him ache with longing and cringe with self-reproach.

  We could never be together like that. Not among the People. You know this. Her words still made his heart writhe.

  That she was adopted did not matter. That she was born white did not matter. Even his dream of her—the one that came before they met, the one he’d assumed meant God had intended her for him—could not change the fact that every person in a clan was considered kin to every other person in that clan. And marriage within one’s clan was forbidden.

  Yet on this day, with the sun high and his kill made, a fresh thought crossed that troubled path his mind had worn like an ancient trace. Perhaps what Burning Sky had done in returning to the whites wasn’t a mistake, but a step on a path to a future they could share. Perhaps what his father had done in sending him to Kanowalohale all those years ago had been a step on that path, one he would walk not with Burning Sky of the Wolf Clan, but with Willa Obenchain.

  The name held no meaning for him—no more than did Roussard, the name he could claim from the Frenchman who was his father’s father—not like the name bestowed at her adoption.

  Joseph had not seen that ceremony, but he’d heard the story of her naming, how one night the woman who would be her mother stood in the doorway of their lodge, unable to sleep for pondering the name she would give her soon-to-be daughter. She had lost many family members. Which should be requickened in the soul of this new one the warriors had brought to her and she accepted?

  While she stood gazing, the northern sky began to pulse with ribbons of light, undulating in greens and russets so like the vivid coloring of her soon-to-be-daughter’s strange eyes. Watching them, she recalled the name her own mother had borne as a girl.

  Now it was Willa she wished to be called, as he himself was known by his Christian name among the soldiers and traders at the forts, rather than the one given him in his thirteenth year, when he had caught a horse that had gone wild and gentled it again.

  A name was one thing. A man might wear many in a lifetime. But what of his heart? Could he make that white? Could he forget his family, his clan, and make a place among a people he once fought, a people whose ways he barely comprehended, to have Burning Sky—Willa—as his wife?

  And would she have him so? There was love between them. What manner of love, for her part, he could not be certain. She’d always been more careful with her heart than he had been with his.

  He sent his thoughts rising like smoke, fragrant with longing, to the Great Good God, and followed a dry creek bed into the stand of tamarack where he’d left the horse.

  All was quiet. Too quiet. His mare was not a creature to announce herself to all who came near, but it was a rare thing when she did not scent him coming and give a ruckle of welcome.

  Joseph pushed through dripping boughs into the open space where the fire ring he had made lay black on the earth. Kneeling to lower his kill to the needled ground, he saw his blanket tied to the bough where he’d left it, saddle and bags concealed in the dry underbelly of a tree.

  But there was no mare.

  It is an easy thing to read the sign a thief leaves when the ground is soft from rain, and the thief is barefoot and in haste, and the thing stolen is a horse. The tracks leading from the tamaracks were fresh and deep, but the thief’s barefoot prints were too small for a man. A woman had taken his horse.

  Joseph shouldered his rifle, fit an arrow to his bowstring, and set out after the thief. For a mile and more, he went swiftly, the moist ground muffling his steps and revealing the passage of the mare and her shoeless abductor, until the tracks turned aside into a rocky defile edging a narrow stream. Arrow at the ready, he went forward, straining to hear above the stream’s gentle purl. He reached the first jut of rock, a lichen-fuzzed outcrop that topped his head. Beyond it, the trace of his quarry led up a rise where the stones thinned and pines grew. He edged around the outcrop.

  Movement glimpsed from the corner of his eye gave him warning enough to duck. The blow glanced off the back of his head instead of striking true. Even so, he staggered to a knee as the stick that clubbed him clattered to the ground.

  Feet scrabbled on stone. Joseph looked up through a surge of pain as a slender figure slipped into the pines above. From deeper in the thicket, the mare whinnied.

  Joseph gave a piercing whistle. From above came the thud of a body hitting the earth, then the mare broke from the trees, riderless.

  After lurching to his feet, Joseph caught her bridle, quieted her with a word, then loosed her, knowing she would wait, and barreled his way through the pines still clutching his bow, though the arrow had fallen.

  His barefoot thief lay face down on the needled ground, unmoving. Black hair tangled in Joseph’s hands as
he flipped her over, pinning her across the chest with the bow. His rifle slid around from his back. He grabbed it one-handed and tossed it aside, then got a look at what manner of person he had caught.

  A face golden brown, grubby, boyish. Hair cropped at the shoulders. A body straight as bundled sticks.

  Impressions collided in Joseph’s mind, adding up to revelation. His horse stealer wasn’t a woman but a boy—an Indian, though lighter skinned than Joseph and dressed like a white. And unmoving only because the fall had stolen his breath. He got it back, and with lips drawn in a snarl, he burst into a struggle, churning the matted needles that had broken his fall and landing a kick to Joseph’s shin.

  “Yah. Se’nikònrarak.” Joseph tossed aside the bow to wrestle the boy, keeping out of range of callused heels. “Do not fight me!”

  The words, or the language in which he spoke them, checked the boy’s struggle. Brown eyes darted to Joseph’s face, to the tattoos marking his forearms. “You—you are Kanien’kehá:ka?”

  “Hen’en.” Joseph sat back on his heels, keeping one hand splayed on the boy’s heaving chest. “I am Joseph Tames-His-Horse.”

  The boy’s eyes narrowed. “Joseph is a white man’s name.”

  Joseph admitted this was so. “Call me Tames-His-Horse, if it suits you. But I am thinking your mother or father is probably as white as was my grandfather.”

  The observation did not please the boy. “My mother was Wolf Clan.”

  Was. And he didn’t name his father.

  “I am also born to the Wolf Clan,” Joseph told him calmly, “and do not mean you harm. But I cannot let you take my horse.”

  The boy glowered at him, face half-buried in pine straw. “I need the horse! Ours is lame, and my sister cannot walk.”

  To Joseph’s surprise, tears gathered in the boy’s angry eyes. He was young. No more than ten winters. Joseph took his hand away. “What are you called, young brother?”