Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  “It is true,” he went on. “Crane was there as a soldier with the troops attacking the settlement. He is English born. Is that not apparent by his speech?”

  “No,” she murmured, then remembered the trace of an accent she’d thought was likely British. “Not so much. He must work to sound not English. How long has he been gone from his place at Niagara?”

  “Since the autumn. I spent some time then looking and found some Oneidas—good ones—who told me of a red-haired Englishman in German Flats, but they also said this man had left that place with settlers and gone north up the West Canada. It was coming on for winter, and I thought if he went to a settlement, he might well keep there. It was a chance I took, but there were other things I needed to do.”

  “Look for me?” She’d closed her eyes but could hear the smile in his voice.

  “Yes. And bring in meat for my family.”

  With what remained to her of thought, she considered that it would be a good thing—for her—if Joseph removed Aram Crane from Shiloh. Though it might not prove an easy task. Crane was a killer of Indians, a dangerous man. And now that Richard had seen Joseph lurking …

  “Will you tell the Scotsman?” Joseph asked, interrupting her bleary thoughts.

  “Do you think he would try to stop you if he knew?”

  “I do not know enough of him to say. But what he does not know, he cannot tell.”

  Willa’s eyelids fluttered. The cabin swam in her vision. “I am learning to know him. He would do what is right. He has a good heart.”

  But she didn’t want to think about Neil MacGregor’s qualities or the warmth that filled her when she thought how he hadn’t hesitated to help another Indian, perhaps saving his life. Had he taken her words about looking past a man’s skin to heart, or had she misjudged him? Had she looked at his white skin and made her own presumptions?

  She didn’t know, but she felt ashamed of those words spoken on the road to Shiloh now.

  “I will not tell him if you do not wish it,” she hurried to say, but it was too late. She had said too much about Neil, and Joseph had noticed.

  “It is different between you, from when I first found you here.”

  Willa lifted her head from his shoulder, feeling it sway on her neck. “What is different?”

  “He grows to care for you.” The weight of bullet lead was in Joseph’s voice. In her chest too, of a sudden.

  “He has helped me. As have you.” Evading his gaze, she rested her head on his shoulder again. “I do not care about the British or what they want with the men who flee their forts. I would be happy to see Crane gone. But, Joseph, you have already been shot. Is there no other way to provide for your family?”

  She felt his chest heave, then his wince as the sighing hurt his wound. She’d nearly drifted asleep against him before his voice roused her again. “There is one thing that would turn me from this path. If you leave this place and come west with me, I will let that man alone and never again be a dog to fetch for the British.”

  Protest rose in Willa’s mind, but before she could decide how to again refuse him, she remembered something else she needed to tell him. “Anni said a thing to me that I think you will want to hear.”

  “What is that, my sister?”

  She tried not to hear the sadness in his voice—sadness that she had not given him the answer he had long sought. “There is to be a council, some sort of peace talk, between the Longhouse nations and the Americans, at Fort Stanwix. It is about their lands here, I think.”

  “What else?” Joseph murmured. Her cheek rose and fell with the deep breath he drew. “When is it to be?”

  “At the end of summer … I do not know exactly.”

  “Did she say whether Thayendanegea would be there?”

  “Thayendanegea?” Willa said, or tried to say. She could not remember whether Anni had mentioned Brant by name or not, and she was too weary to make more words.

  She felt herself sinking down and down, with Joseph’s hand warm and heavy on her head.

  That was how Neil found them, coming in to retrieve the bark containers Willa meant to store the jerked meat in. He’d hoped she’d be asleep, just not in the lap of Joseph Tames-His-Horse, who looked at him with a faint smugness in the set of his mouth.

  “I tried to lift her.”

  Neil crossed the cabin. “Dinna try it again. You’ll undo all my work to patch ye up last night.” He squatted to get his arms under Willa, grunting as he got his knees under him and pushed to his feet. Her long body sprawled across his sagging arms.

  “Not exactly dainty, is she?”

  Joseph grinned at that, rubbing his legs as though they’d lost feeling.

  Neil eyed the ladder on the far side of the hearth. There was no hope of his climbing to the loft. “I’ll put her in my bed.”

  Not till he’d wedged them both through the doorway to the back room did it strike him how Joseph might interpret that intention. He was the one grinning as Willa’s head lolled and her eyelids fluttered open. Her voice slurred with fatigue. “Wha …?”

  Neil grunted again with the strain as he lowered her to his blanket roll. “You’re going to sleep if I have to tie ye hand and foot, that’s what. Hush now, and do as I bid.”

  Amazingly she did, going limp even as he drew his blanket over her. He knelt, looking at her by the light from the papered window. After days in the fields, the sun had lightened her hair. It flowed like bright hanks of silken thread—brown, copper, and gold all spilled and tangled.

  He lifted a strand and brushed it against his lips, before hurrying a little guiltily from the room.

  To Tilda Fruehauf,

  I am Wilhelmina, daughter of Dieter and Rebecca, writing to you. You will know about me that I was Taken and I have lived with the People north of here many Years and I was not Unhappy there but for a while at First, and at the end. I am come back now to Shiloh but here are no longer my Parents and I do not know about the Land. There are men who say Papa did not side for the Americans but the British. I do not believe this and I am writing to ask if you Know if this is True or a Lie. If it is a Lie against Papa do you have a Letter written in his Hand that will make it Plain to show these Men who wish to take away Papa’s Land from me? And where is Oma? I am hoping for Word from you soon if you are still alive.

  Your Cousin,

  Willa Obenchain

  A few days after the meat was jerked, Neil MacGregor braved the black flies to ride into Shiloh and see the letter Willa had penned to her mother’s cousin added to the post bound for Albany. He returned with a smoked ham, a gift from the MacNabs. As Willa squatted at the hearth to slice enough to feed them supper, she dared to let herself feel hopeful about the land for the first time since Richard rode into her yard and made his threats, and she learned about the land auction.

  Hope was tempered a few mornings later when she spotted Francis skulking near the cabin. He came to her with a lip split open and an eye swollen shut.

  Later in the day, Richard came to call.

  The children burst from between the cornstalks, panting from running, and found her crouched low, inspecting the squash plants. At their breathless announcement of a rider on the track, she stood to look, and there was Richard sitting on his blazed horse at the field’s edge, looking back across the distance at her.

  “Go to the cabin,” she told the children. When they didn’t move, she sharpened her voice. “Owl, take your sister inside.”

  The boy’s eyes flicked to the motionless horseman. “Do I tell them?”

  “Tell Neil you are hungry, that I sent you in. I am sure it’s true.”

  “He’s always hungry.” Pine Bird gave her brother’s arm a shove. Ignoring her, Owl looked doubtfully at Willa but took his sister’s hand and did as she bid.

  She watched until they were well away through the rustling stalks, then bent for her musket and began the long walk out to meet Richard, waiting where the field met the woods’ edge and the track to Shiloh. He d
ismounted as she neared, his face impassive.

  It wasn’t his expression Willa sought to read, but his hand. The right one, holding his horse’s reins. She expected the knuckles to be broken—by the bones of his brother’s face.

  “I wasn’t m-meant to tell.” It was all she’d coaxed from Francis to explain his injuries, while Neil raided her garden to make a salve to treat them.

  It was enough. The graves. What else could it be that Francis wasn’t meant to tell? This was her fault. Her fault for telling Anni about the graves, for mentioning Francis. Anni must not have considered the graves a secret she was meant to keep from Charles, who must have let it slip to Richard. Or had Anni been the one to let it slip?

  Oh, Anni. Willa felt sick in the pit of her stomach as she reached Richard, who wore riding gloves against the black flies and hadn’t removed them when he dismounted. A kerchief covered his neck, and high boots protected his legs. She was dressed in leggings and her deerskin skirt, her long stroud tunic. Bear grease smeared her face and hands. Richard’s nostrils flared when she stopped.

  Being so near him unnerved her. There was about him that barely contained animal energy, as if something feral lurked just beneath his skin. Something that longed to break free and—

  “The crop looks well,” he said.

  He didn’t say she looked well, yet he hadn’t taken his eyes off her since she stood into his view. They bore into her now.

  “It is a good crop. The land is rested.”

  Silence hummed with the chitter of cicadas, the scold of a jay, some other bird’s more melodious call. She watched Richard’s eyes, thinking them pale and cold, accustomed now to Neil MacGregor’s warm, drenching blue.

  Richard flicked a look along the track, though the cabin could barely be seen from that distance with the trees in full leaf. “Those children I saw with you … They’re Mohawks?”

  “Yes.”

  His gaze snapped back. “Yours?”

  At least Anni had not related everything she’d shared.

  “They are in my care for now.”

  Richard waited, but she had no more to say. It wasn’t a warm day, but the air was thick and moist. Sweat made rivulets down the sides of his face. His throat moved as he swallowed. He had something to say to her. She wished he would say it. “The crop looks well, and the children look like they could be mine. Did you ride all this way to tell me things I know?”

  That earned her a grimace, which he quickly wiped from his face. “I’m told you’ve found graves in the woods, that you think they’re your parents’.”

  She tilted her head. “Who told you this?”

  Richard raised a gloved hand as if to brush away the question. “I didn’t come here to make trouble for you, Willa. I came to say I’m sorry about your parents.”

  She looked at him hard, wondering if she could trust this show of sympathy at all.

  “I wish they’d fled to Canada.”

  “Rather than be murdered?”

  Richard’s jaw clenched, but he simply nodded.

  “On that at least,” Willa allowed, “we can agree.”

  He took a step toward her, but a cloud of black flies chose that moment to descend upon his horse. The animal tossed its head. Richard whipped off his hat and swatted at them, which did not please his horse any more than had the flies.

  Willa watched him, trying to puzzle him out. She half-wished for the Richard who’d thundered into her cabin yard, the one who threatened and lashed out with his fist. This Richard was harder to read. Had he known her parents were dead? Had he anything to do with their deaths? Or concealing those deaths?

  “You should go,” she said. “Your horse is unhappy here.”

  Seeming to concur, Richard clapped his hat on his head and swung into the saddle, which creaked beneath his weight. “I also came here with a proposal for you—for how things might carry on between us after the auction, provided mine is the highest bid, of course.”

  Bristling at the idea of things carrying on between them, she bit down on the impulse to tell him about the cousin in Albany, or the letters that might have been saved. About unmitigated proof.

  “What proposal?”

  “I’m willing to let you go on living here. You can farm the land or plant an orchard—keep bees, if it suits you. I’ll only ask a percentage of whatever you raise.”

  “As your tenant?”

  “If that’s as you want it.” Richard stared at her with a look of speculation that made her queasy, as if he were envisioning her worth in the amount of milled corn and strings of beans he could expect to gain. But his next words banished that queasiness in a flush of fear.

  “I saw an Indian in the woods, a few days back. On the Colonel’s land, very near the house. I shot at him to drive him off. Don’t know for sure whether I hit him, but I think so.”

  Willa watched his eyes, keeping her face still as stone. “Why do you tell me this? I have seen no Indians in the woods.”

  Richard held her in his scrutiny overlong, as if he took leave to doubt her, but finally he looked past her again toward the trees that hid the cabin. His mouth firmed in a harder line. “Is he there still?”

  Fear washed over her again. Her thoughts were still dizzied with alarm over Joseph and whether Richard suspected her of sheltering him. “Who?”

  Richard’s mouth twisted. “The exalted member of the American Philosophical Society. Who did you think I meant?”

  Before Willa could speak, from the trees behind Richard came the snick of a rifle being cocked.

  “Aye. He’s still here.”

  Willa stepped back, startled, and nearly raised her musket to the ready, though she knew the voice at once.

  Richard swung his horse to face Neil MacGregor, standing beside an alder tree, Joseph’s rifle held across his chest, pointing off into the woods. He must have circled around from the cabin, keeping all the while in cover, with such stealth even Willa hadn’t sensed his approach. For a moment, she was irrationally furious that Owl had disobeyed her. Then she was as deeply relieved.

  Neil didn’t release the rifle’s hammer. “Why are you here?”

  “With a truer purpose than I reckon you can claim.” The words were kept from belligerence by a wry edge. “I had a proposal to make. I’ve made it. I expect you’ll hear all about it.” Sparing her a last unreadable look, Richard touched his hat. “Think on it, Willa.”

  Richard kicked his horse into a canter, headed back to Shiloh. Leaving Willa staring at Neil.

  He lowered the rifle’s hammer, then propped it over his shoulder at rest, arching one thick brow at her. “A proposal?”

  Willa shook her head. “Later. Where is Joseph?”

  She looked around, expecting him to step from the trees as well—and ready to scold him for being on his feet when he did. When he didn’t, she turned back in time to see the play of emotion cross Neil’s face—hurt and embarrassment resolving into reluctant amusement—and she realized she’d wounded his pride in assuming him incapable of such woodcraft on his own.

  “That is Joseph’s rifle,” she said. “That is why I asked.”

  He came out of the trees. “Aye. No doubt he’d have come here with it in my stead, if he could.”

  “Better that he didn’t. He mustn’t let himself be seen.”

  Neil stopped close beside her and touched her arm. “True, but that isna why he didna leave the cabin. He’s taken a fever, Willa. You’d best come back with me now.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Sometimes he saw their faces or felt their hands on his burning flesh, turning him, bathing him, prodding his side where the ball had torn through him. More often their voices were all that reached him through the fiery veil.

  “It is three days. Is there nothing more to do? Tell me what to do.”

  “You can go up to the loft and sleep.”

  “No.”

  “Ye canna help him by making yourself ill.”

  He took the sound of their words deep into
his heat-ravaged flesh. Not only the words, but what lay beneath, emotion vivid enough to flay him. Her fear and helplessness. The Scotsman’s frustration and tenderness. Both of their stubborn resolve.

  “I willna close my eyes till you’ve opened yours again. The children are by to help, if I need it.”

  “You will call me if he wakes?”

  “I promise.”

  He did not wake. His body was not through waging war with the flames, though every parched and aching fiber of him cried for water. His mouth must have made the word. A cup rim pressed against his lips. A strong hand supported his head. Cool relief on his tongue. He swallowed. Blue eyes swam in his vision.

  The voices again. They troubled him, tethered him. The small frightened voice of the girl. The boy, masking worry with anger. The voice of the Scotsman. Her voice, scratched with weariness, speaking of a letter on which all her hope seemed to rest—someone in the east who might yet live, who could claim her as kin, who might hold her fast to this place where he knew now he could never be with her, even if he threw aside all that made him one of the People and his soul survived such a scouring. The Long Knives would not let him be with her. Never in peace.

  “Do you think it has reached Albany? Do you think she has seen it?”

  “Aye, maybe. Far too soon yet to expect a reply, though.”

  “There will be one. I have been thinking … It is like a miracle that Oma’s name is still in Maeve Keegan’s mind, when so much else is gone.”

  “Aye, it may be the Almighty kept it there. But we dinna ken what’s to come of it yet.”

  “I wish we knew. The waiting—it is hard.”

  “ ’Tis dashed hard. But here’s what I ken—the Almighty Lord has a path for ye to walk, and a place in mind for ye to be. But whether or not that place is here, d’ye trust Him to lead you into whatever is best?”

  It was a good question. Joseph longed to know her answer, yearned for it as his tongue again craved water. He wanted her to say she would be at peace wherever the Great Good God chose to lead her. But the fire in his bones leaped high and crackling, writhing between them. If she answered, he did not hear it.