Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  Willa blinked, reminded of a small hand clasping her own. The irrepressible sweetness. The pain.

  Goodenough’s voice sank like a fire settling as she looked downslope. “ ‘It’ll be all right,’ he say to me. ‘You’ll see. You’ll be good enough to please my mama.’ ” Goodenough laughed, soft and low. “I didn’t give a jot then what might please his mama, but I never forgot ’twas out of kindness he said it.”

  Richard had reached the smithy, was dismounting from his horse. Willa looked away from him, eying the woman beside her. “He said you would be good enough?”

  Goodenough smiled. “Miz Sarah Waring see me climb down from the wagon in her yard and ask my name. I tell her, ‘Ma’am, yo’ boy say I’m good enough. Reckon, then, I am.’ ” She waved a hand, as if her name were of no matter. “All the Waring babies was good babies, even that Francis with his odd ways. But Richard was the kindest to me. Nothing but sweet temper did I ever get from him.”

  Goodenough turned her face to Willa, who still found it surprising to look another woman eye to eye. “Now Francis, Anni, and Richard be all that’s left us.”

  “And Lem,” Willa said softly.

  Goodenough met her look and smiled. “Mm-hmm.” She looked again toward the distant smithy, the smile fading.

  “I know the war done things to him,” she said, and she wasn’t speaking of Lem. “I know he’s changed. But what he is now ain’t what I see when I look at him. I see that boy in the wagon taking hold of my hand.”

  Willa couldn’t see that boy, or even the youth she’d known, in the hulking form of the man lingering in Jack Keegan’s store. Though she’d ignored him from the moment he stepped in behind her, she knew exactly where he was—over by the cloth bolts, fingering a length of calico. He was like a wolf, she thought, a hungry wolf skulking beyond the circle of her fire, menacing those who would help her, waiting for her vigilance to falter that he might rush in for a strike.

  She tried to turn so he couldn’t see what she was doing, but her scalp prickled as Jack took the second letter to Tilda Fruehauf and put it with the small collection of sealed missives waiting for the post rider’s next visit.

  She’d known Richard was in town. She’d seen him ride in. She should have waited for another day to do this. But she was already as far as Anni’s and couldn’t spare the time to come back again.

  “I’ll make sure it goes out with the next batch,” Jack told her, casting a look behind her. Willa thanked him before turning on her heel for the door.

  Richard stood behind her, blocking the way.

  “Willa, are you sending that letter for your houseguest?”

  She stiffened at the question. “It is my business. I do not have to tell you.”

  His eyes flared at her sharpness, then narrowed. “True enough, only I didn’t think you had anyone to be writing to, after all this time.”

  She’d done the last thing she meant to do—aroused his suspicion. Now he thought she was doing exactly what she was doing, hiding something from him.

  “I’m sure you’ve been thinking about my offer,” he said, moving on to an even more grievous subject. “I was hoping you’d come to the house, that we might discuss it further—with the Colonel, of course.”

  Her fraying patience snapped. “You think you know all that concerns me—my thoughts as well, apparently—but you do not know me, Richard.” She looked him in the eye, wishing she could drill her words straight through his skull. “I am not who I was when we were younger, and neither are you, and now I ask you to step aside so that I might leave this place.”

  Richard held her stare long enough for heat to blaze in her face, long enough that she wondered if Jack would intervene, or if she would have to shove Richard out of her path. But he shifted, giving her room to pass.

  “By all means,” he said with chilling courtesy.

  She slipped past, trying not to touch him, and wasn’t sure over the banging of the door and that of her own heart whether she imagined the words he muttered after her. An echo of her own.

  Leave this place.

  They’d stayed longer at Anni’s than Willa had intended. Watching Pine Bird with the other children, drawn out of her shyness into spirited play, she hadn’t had the heart to cut short their time together. But after returning from Keegan’s, she’d been almost terse in collecting the child and heading for home, so rattled she’d taken the road instead of the path.

  She slowed her step now. Pine Bird had fallen behind while she trudged ahead, vexation over Richard driving her pace.

  A more welcome image sprang to Willa’s mind as she paused to wait—one of Lemuel tagging after the girl, even when Samantha brought out her cornhusk dolls, turning to more feminine play, leaving Sam sitting on the porch glumly rolling his eyes. The memory made her smile.

  Pine Bird raced to catch up. As she had that morning, the child reached for her hand. The fingers curled around Willa’s were grubby now. So was the child’s face.

  “We must get you cleaned up and supper started. If you gather some eggs, I will …” Her words died as she caught a scent on the air, pungent, sharp in her nose.

  Pine Bird looked up at her. “Smoke.”

  “Hen’en,” Willa answered without thinking. She did smell smoke. Were Neil and Owl returned early from their roaming and getting their own supper?

  The smell was too strong. They weren’t far from the place where the woods ended and the cornfield began, but still too far to scent smoke from the cabin’s chimney.

  Up through the trees, a gray haze drifted, faint against the bits of sky visible. Something was burning that shouldn’t be.

  Willa dropped Pine Bird’s hand to run.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The corn was burning, the northwest corner of the field, farthest from the cabin. Long green leaves whipped Willa’s face as she raced through the hillocks toward the crackle of flames.

  Behind her Pine Bird cried out, and she whirled to see the child sprawled among the squash plants.

  “Stay back from this! You cannot help!”

  The words were barely out of her mouth when she heard her own name shouted. Neil MacGregor came plunging from the smoke, soot covered, clutching the hoe. He grasped her arm, coughing out breath in ragged spasms. “We’re cutting a break. I dinna think you’ll lose it all.”

  As he spoke, he tugged her toward the thickest smoke. She saw what he was doing, digging up a swathe of the crop several yards out from where it burned. She yanked free.

  “Where is the spade?”

  Neil cupped a hand to his mouth and bellowed into the smoke, “Owl!”

  Seconds later the boy came leaping over vines dragging the spade, face streaked with dirt, eyes round with excitement and fear.

  Willa yanked the spade from his grasp. “Find your sister. Get her to the cabin. Wait—first get the buckets off the porch. Fill them at the spring.”

  “I did that!”

  “Good. Do it again!”

  Two buckets, a hoe, a spade—against a burning crop. But a green crop still moist with rain. Did they have a chance?

  “Show me where you left off digging!”

  Neil showed her, then ran to where Owl had been working.

  Through thickening smoke Willa saw the flames devouring her sustenance, her tenuous hope. She hacked at more of it, tearing down the beautiful stalks, ripping out the beans, shouting with the effort, raging against the need. There had been rain in the night but no lightning. It was no accident, this fire. Who had started it? Richard had been in town. And why would Richard wreak such havoc after making his offer to let her live there as his tenant?

  The fire’s heat was scorching. Grasshoppers and beetles fleeing the flames struck her face and hands. Sweat stung her eyes. Her palms rubbed sore as with the spade she attacked the earth, severing cornstalks, hurling them away, bending and lunging between hillocks like a warrior in a maddened dance.

  Owl’s slight figure rushed past. The boy hurled water against the c
reeping flames and made off again with the buckets.

  It would not be enough.

  Yet she kept tearing at the earth and its bounty, until her arms and shoulders screamed with the effort, until every breath was a searing in her lungs, a booming in her head. Until a warm, fat splash struck her face.

  Willa staggered, caught herself … and listened.

  The booming wasn’t in her head but above her in the darkened clouds. Relief so profound it buckled her knees washed over her.

  She turned her face to the sky as the rain came sweeping in.

  He had prayed. Since the moment they paused on the ridge, spotted smoke rising from the field, and the first clench of dread had gripped him, he had prayed. While they raced Seamus back to the cabin, grabbed spade and hoe and buckets and ran to save the crop, he had prayed. But he hadn’t prayed with such faith to warrant this glorious summer shower now doing the work he and Willa and the boy couldn’t have accomplished. The crop was saved, minus a blackened half acre.

  They stood at the field’s edge, gulping moist air as the rain’s drumming eased to a patter, as drenched now as they had been scorched with the fire’s heat. From the cabin, they could hear Cap’s muffled barking—Owl had shut the collie inside before racing to the spring—but over the three of them had settled a stunned silence.

  Willa broke it, turning to Owl. She brushed rain-plastered hair from his face, then took up his hands to inspect them. “Let me see you. Are you hurt anywhere?”

  Looking embarrassed, and pleased, by her attention, he said, “No. I’m not hurt.”

  He wasn’t. Not physically. But his eyes told of another kind of hurt, and Neil recalled with an inner lurch what other devastation had been wrought in their absence. The rainfall swept away as abruptly as it had come, leaving behind a silence unbroken by birdsong or insect hum. It was then they heard it, a sound Neil sensed had been issuing for some while, masked by the drumming of the rain. A child’s grief-stricken wail.

  “Ach, no. I didna mean her to see. There wasna time to do aught about it, not with the fire.”

  Willa looked at him, dread reemerging on her rain-slick face.

  Owl took off running down the track toward his sister’s cries. Willa stared after the boy, her body straight as a sapling, but one storm-battered and swaying. It was all Neil could do to keep from wrapping his arms about her, to shelter her from the next blow.

  Instead, it was left to him to deliver it.

  “The goat, Willa. ’Tis been slaughtered.”

  Maggie was inconsolable. They’d told the children it might have been a wolf, come prowling while they were away. Owl had shot them a narrowed stare. A wolf would have dragged off the carcass or left considerably less of it to find. A wolf wouldn’t have made a straight slash across the animal’s tender throat.

  “Aye,” Neil said as they stood alone by the pen. “ ’Twas done by a wolf, right enough, but one that goes on two legs.” He studied Willa as she gazed at the sodden carcass. Her own hair straggled wet about her shoulders, and the bones of her face looked high and stark.

  “It will make a meal or two. If you could hang it to bleed, I will see to the rest.”

  “I’ll do that,” he said.

  She started to move away, but hesitated. “I saw your plant press and desk on the porch. Did you find what you sought?”

  His brief outing with the boy might have happened days ago. “I made a few new sketches. Let the lad try his hand at it too.”

  Instead of softening, her features hardened further. “It was foolish of me to leave the fields and yard unguarded. It will not happen again.”

  “Willa.” He moved toward her, but she stepped away, leaving him only words to offer. “ ’Tis going to be all right, ken. Most of the crop was saved. ’Tis a pity about the goat, but I’ve coin enough to—”

  “Thank you, but no, I do not need your coin,” she said, rebuffing the offer before he could make it. Her eyes flicked up to his, almost pleading—for what, he wished he kent—then she tore them away and strode to the cabin, took up a cloth and soap she’d left on the porch, and headed toward the spring.

  He let her go. There was the goat to see to and the children. He did both, then changed his shirt and breeches. But even after a cursory ablution in his room, Willa hadn’t returned from the spring.

  Maggie had cried herself to sleep. Owl lay unconscious beside her, spent from their early rising and the fire. He left them sleeping, Cap curled nearby, and went outside.

  The sun was setting, streaking the sky above the hills to the west with banners of fiery gold. The startling beauty of it after such a harrowing few hours struck in him a chord of longing—not the old longing to be roaming those hills, eyes to the ground in hope of spying some as-yet-unnamed floral specimen. It was a longing to remain precisely where he was, with this view before his eyes, this land under his feet. And Willa Obenchain beside him.

  He’d glimpsed the mother Willa had been when she looked to Owl’s welfare in the fire’s aftermath, and later, still rain soaked, sitting cross-legged beside the pallet where Maggie lay crying, stroking the girl, comforting her in murmurs. He wished he’d been close enough to hear what she’d said. There was a strength in her like no woman he’d known, yet there was also as great a capacity to embrace and console, though she let herself show it so rarely.

  “Burning Sky,” he whispered as the sunset blazed before his eyes, and for the first time wondered, was it this for which the Mohawks had named her? She could be as incandescent. Perhaps they’d been quick to see it and simply called her what she was.

  Aye, she was still that daughter of the Wolf Clan, as much as she was Willa Obenchain, daughter of Dieter and Rebecca. If he could, if she’d let him, he would help her see she didn’t have to choose. With him, and perhaps with these children, she could be both.

  It felt like scales falling from his eyes, for what was only half-glimpsed before was now as clear as the sun’s blazing glory. He could see now how the Almighty had led them each to this solitary cabin, had set them like the fragments of a shattered bone, knitting them into what Willa and the children had lost. Family. A gift he hadn’t asked for, but one more precious than all the accolades he could receive from his peers. What matter that he’d never presumed himself anything but a temporary interloper on the frontier. Never seen himself as strong enough, hardened enough, that the notion of permanency in such a place should have ever crossed his mind.

  Perhaps he didn’t need to be.

  “ ‘And God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty,’ ” he said, and laughed softly at the irony of it.

  He might be weak, even foolish. He was also sure.

  With a prayer on his lips, he stepped off the porch and crossed the cabin yard, headed for the spring.

  Stripped to her shift, kneeling by the spring, Willa rocked herself and let the tears flow like the rivulets streaming from her hair. She had tried so long to contain this grief, but it was clawing down the walls she’d built around it like a wild, caged thing, shredding its way out of her, raw in her throat, flooding from her eyes. She-Goes-Singing. Sweet Rain.

  Mixed in with the faces of her daughters as she grieved were the faces of Pine Bird and Owl, her parents, Oma, Joseph … and Neil MacGregor.

  She wanted to go back to the cabin, but whether to take Neil into her arms or simply to hold Pine Bird and weep and weep and maybe never stop, she didn’t know. If she did the last, it would only frighten the child. If she did the first—that she was even having the thought terrified her.

  She had to get hold of herself, to pull this grief back in, to cast down branches across the path to her heart before Neil came looking for her, before he found her like this. He would offer comfort, and she would be so tempted to let him give it …

  No, no. She’d made her decision before ever she came back to this place. She would live alone. A solitary life. To consider weakening, allowing anything else—the love of a man, children�
��made her want to huddle there by the spring and pray never to get up again. It was too much pain to risk. Too much.

  Oh, but to feel Neil MacGregor’s arms around her, just for a moment … A sob escaped her as she snatched up the cloth to dry her hair.

  Her hair hung down her back in a dripping mass, dark against her shift. She’d washed it, which explained her tardiness in returning from the spring. Neil paused on the footpath while she knelt among the ferns edging the runnel, his heart both full and wrung at the sight of her. While he hesitated, she made a sound that carried above the spring’s trickle. A sob?

  Almost angrily she snatched up a cloth from the ground and yanked her wet locks forward to rub them dry—only to drop the towel with an indrawn hiss of breath.

  He was at her side, kneeling in the rain-wet ferns, taking gentle hold of her hands to turn them palm up. Like his, they were rubbed almost to blisters. Unlike his, a reddened streak crossed her right palm at the base of all four fingers. A burn. A slight one, but obviously painful.

  “What …? Did ye grab a burning stalk?”

  She looked at her hands as though they belonged to someone else. “I don’t remember.”

  She averted her face, letting the long wet curtain of her hair fall between them. He took up the cloth. “Let me.”

  The amber glow of sunset had cooled to shadow beneath the trees. The air around them hung warm, still, save for the tiny bright pulses of fireflies at the edge of the cabin yard. He took up her hair and squeezed the strands with the cloth. She didn’t protest, but closed her still averted eyes and made another noise, this one of pleasure.

  He felt a jolt through his belly as her hair slipped wet through his fingers. “ ’Tis the color of winter oak leaves, your hair.” His hand brushed her throat. “So beautiful.”

  He felt her shiver at the touch. She turned her face to him. There wasn’t light enough to distinguish the disparate colors of her eyes, but he could read the softening of her mouth.