Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  There was an instant when his focus was on the children, when he was unaware of her, an instant when her heart jumped as if it meant to leap out of her chest and rush across the mill to him. Then he tilted back his head to laugh at something one of the children said and caught sight of her. He came to a halt. Lem bumped into his back.

  Goodenough and Francis came into the mill. Goodenough said something Willa didn’t hear above the muffled rush of the falls—or was it the rushing in her own head?

  Neil MacGregor didn’t seem to hear either. Bodies flowed around him like floodwaters past a rooted tree. His face had lit at the sight of her, as if he felt the same startled joy racing through her now.

  “Willa,” he said, and this she heard, for everyone else had fallen silent and was looking at her, smiling in expectation, and her mouth wanted to smile too because of the blazing joy, then a spark shot out of the blaze, a spark of bewildered anger. Its small heat jolted her to her senses. Neil MacGregor was here.

  “Why are you here?” Her voice was a sharp-edged thing, though she hadn’t meant it to be. His smile faltered at it. He slid Maggie to her feet. Goodenough and Francis came toward her, then passed on with Anni’s children and Lem to climb the path to the cabin. Matthew and Maggie lingered.

  “Mr. MacGregor came back,” Maggie said, her smile undimmed by the tension searing the air above her head. Matthew, more wary of it, looked uneasily between them.

  “Run on up to Miss Anni’s cabin,” Neil told the children, never taking his gaze from her. “I need to speak with Willa. Go on and dinna fash,” he added when they made to protest. “Ye’ll see me again, I promise.”

  Reluctantly they crept past her, two dark, sleek heads. The collie slipped out on their heels.

  Neil came toward her across the dusty mill, creaking the aging boards beneath their feet. She watched him come, sweating now from more than running, each lungful of air filling her senses with the smells of creek water and corn chaff and old wet wood, until he stood in the sunlight that spilled through the door over her shoulders, hot on the back of her head. He didn’t seem the least perturbed as silence stretched between them, a silence too heavy for her to bear.

  “You have come back because you are unwell? More headaches?” Even as she asked, she knew it wasn’t so. He looked in better health than she had ever seen. The sun had browned his face and arms, making his eyes more vivid, his complexion more robust. But there was something else changed about him. She couldn’t put a name to it, but she’d never seen him look so whole, so strong, so assured in himself.

  His teeth shone white against his skin when he smiled, and her heart made the little eager jump again.

  “No headaches. I think this cracked head of mine has finally made its peace with the frontier. ’Tis awfully good to see you, Willa.”

  This time when he said her name, her belly turned over as well as her heart, as his eyes threatened to pull her straight into his arms, all good sense abandoned. It was like wrenching a knife from a wound, but she took a step back from him, nearly exiting the mill.

  “Why are you here?”

  He closed the space between them. “I should never have left.”

  She frowned at that. “You have your work to do.”

  “Willa—” His smile fell lopsided. He rubbed the back of his neck. “At least it didna take a talking donkey to turn me from my folly, just a canny horse and a bear. I have that over Balaam.”

  Willa shook her head. Absent or present, silent or talking, men were a complete exasperation. “I do not understand.”

  “You dinna need to just now,” Neil said with maddening calm. “Listen, I dinna mean to intrude upon you. I willna come to the cabin if ye dinna wish me to. I’m staying with the blacksmith.”

  “With Gavan and Leda?”

  “Aye. And I did get a bit of work done while I was away. Gavan’s helping me with the annotation now.”

  “He is?” She sounded like a simpleton, questioning his every utterance, but none of it was making sense.

  Voices interrupted as Charles and a customer entered the mill.

  Neil put a hand to her arm. She jerked away. Disappointment flickered in his eyes but didn’t dim his smile.

  “I ken you’ll be anxious, being away from the farm. Shall we go on up so you can collect the children and head back?”

  It was an offer of escape, and she took it, turning her back on him to hurry up the path.

  He followed in silence, yet she sensed it wasn’t the silence of defeat. She suspected she’d find him smiling at her still, did she dare look back.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  From the moment they left Anni’s cabin, all the children could talk about was Neil. Across the creek on the foot log, through the long stretch of muggy woods, they strung their questions like beads on a thread with barely a breath between: “Why did he come back?” “Why isn’t he living in your cabin?” “Why didn’t he come to see us first?” “What does he mean to do?”

  Glancing over field and yard to assure herself all was as she’d left it, Willa opened the cabin door. She tried to push aside the crowding collie with her knee, lost that battle, and turned on the children as the dog rushed in ahead of her.

  “As I said the first time you asked, I do not know. How can I know? I have seen him for less time than you have.”

  She set about boiling the corn for their late dinner. The children hung back, stomachs growling. She could feel them casting glances at each other behind her back.

  Matthew ventured, “He spoke to you in the mill. Did he say—”

  “He told me nothing.” That wasn’t true, but what he had told her made her wonder if he’d lied about not having the headaches, the ones that could scramble his brains. Talking donkeys?

  “He is staying with the smith,” she added, hoping it would satisfy.

  “We know,” the children said in unison.

  “Then you know as much as I know.” Reaching for a chunk of wood, she turned her mind from the memory of Neil’s gaze spilling over her, naked with the answer to all the children’s questions. And her own.

  She built up the fire, swung the kettle over it, and set about husking the corn. The children had gone out to the porch, where they went on asking each other questions in lowered voices. She dropped the corn into the water and sat down to watch for the first curls of steam to rise.

  Her hands were shaking.

  Despairing of sleep, Willa descended the loft ladder and stood over the boy and his sister to be sure they slept undisturbed. Even the collie lay curled and slumbering, barely cracking an eye at her when she lifted the bar from the door and slipped outside.

  The heat had broken at sunset with a rain that rumbled through, intense and brief, then passed across the hills as twilight fell. A freshening breeze blew in its wake. The air felt scrubbed clean.

  Having no real aim in mind, she crossed the yard barefoot under a moon so bright she could see her shadow. When she spotted a stray branch strewn by the storm, she picked it up. A few paces on, she bent for another. Making a circuit of the clearing, she gathered windblown limbs for kindling.

  She stopped to feel the breeze on her skin, sensing in it a distant hint of autumn. And on the other side of autumn … where would she be? She had no more than caught that haunting worry from the corner of her mind before a well-worn memory slipped in to distract her: ’Tis the color of winter oak leaves, your hair …

  Kingfisher had never said such a thing to her. How could a man saying such a thing delight and terrify her in equal measure? She wasn’t like Neil MacGregor, lacking a sense of self-preservation. From the day he stood up to Richard and was brought to his knees for it, she had seen this. Everything she’d learned of him since confirmed it. He didn’t fear bodily pain. Nor the more terrible pain the heart could feel. He was unafraid to risk its breaking.

  She’d left the cabin to stop thinking of Neil. Better to fix her mind on the land auction and the letter from her mother’s cousin that had yet
to come. Her hope in it had frayed to a desperate thread. The only thing that had changed since she stood at the edge of the cornfield, facing her three stark choices, was that Neil had come back.

  Did that mean there was a fourth choice?

  No. She dared not let there be. But since he was back, maybe he would agree to look after the children while she went to Albany to find Tilda Fruehauf. If he would not, and Joseph did not return in time, she saw little left for her here. It came hard to admit it, but probably it was already too late to make such a journey.

  All her work. All her struggle. It had been for nothing. What else was left but to give up and go back to the People? At least that would make Joseph happy, for a time. But what about a year from now? five years from now? How would he feel then? Did he mean to live his life as no woman’s husband, no child’s father, because he couldn’t have her in that way?

  He deserved more.

  Hugging the bundle of storm-cast limbs to her chest, she moved along the corral, weeds wetting her feet and the hem of her shift. Wind rattled the trees at the clearing’s edge and ran cool fingers through her unbraided hair. Somewhere a night bird called, and she thought: Neil could name it.

  With a sigh she turned back toward the cabin. As she reached the empty horse shed, the breeze kicked up again. It covered the small sounds that might have warned her before a horse nickered from the other side of the shed wall. Which wasn’t empty.

  Flinging aside all but the stoutest limb, she rounded the shed. A figure stepped out, towering and broad. With a half-choked cry, she swung.

  Joseph caught the limb in an upraised hand, but the tip of it raked him below the eye. He recoiled a step but didn’t let go.

  “Burning Sky.”

  She snatched the limb from his grasp and flung it aside, fear ebbing, anger flaring. Moonlight revealed the scratch she’d left, dark across his cheek. “What do you mean, giving me such a fright?”

  “I saw you leave the cabin. When you came close, I called to you.”

  “The bird call? That was you?”

  His teeth in the moonlight were white when he smiled. She peered into the shed. He hadn’t come empty-handed. A few feet from his mare, a gutted deer hung from a roof pole.

  “I’d have suspected you crawled off to die in a thicket somewhere if you hadn’t left us meat a few times—and I thank you for that—but now tell me where you have been. You couldn’t have taken Aram Crane away or I would have heard of it. Did you decide you had the wrong man and go off to find the right one?”

  Before her flood of questions abated, he was laughing softly, deep in his throat. She was mightily tempted to hit him again.

  “Aram Crane is the right man,” he told her, amusement fading. “But after what you told me about the peace talk, I wished more news of it and of Thayendanegea, so I went to that place to see what I could learn.”

  “So you did go to Fort Stanwix? All that way with your wound barely healed?”

  “I had good reason, and not just for learning what might happen to our people.” He was a tall shadow in the darkness, with the moon at his back. He moved closer. “Thayendanegea will come to this talk.”

  “I should think so,” Willa cut in. “But how does that matter to you or me now?”

  “Listen, this is how it matters. Because he comes to Fort Stanwix, I will not have to take Crane to Niagara but only as far as that fort. I can let Thayendanegea and the others take him the rest of the way. Then I can come back here to—for the children.”

  She wondered briefly what he’d started to say, before her mind moved on to the children. At last he would take them away. She closed her eyes, waiting for the relief to come.

  It did not come. There was only emptiness and a stirring of something like panic.

  “You’ve left me to wonder about all this for weeks,” she said, hearing the scold in her voice, unable to temper it. “You might have said something before you went so that I wouldn’t have worried and wondered.”

  “I am sorry,” he said, one hand coming warm around her shoulder. “You worried for me?”

  The way he said it, surprised and hopeful, made her cautious.

  “Of course I did. When is it to be?” she asked, though she knew the answer.

  As she’d hoped, the question diverted him. His hand fell away from her. “Not until Seskeha is past.”

  The time of freshness: August.

  “That is barely more than a fortnight. What do you think will happen?”

  “The Mohawks will not come back to live along the river. The Oneidas will want to stay on their lands—they have the favor of the Americans as allies, so this may be a thing that happens. But even much of their land is overrun with settlers, land takers. They would be as islands among them, even if they lived as the whites do, each man on his farm. You remember I told you Thayendanegea talks of land in Canada to resettle the Kanien’kehä:ka?”

  His words fell like stones into the pool of Willa’s thoughts, stirring questions that surfaced until she skimmed off the one that truly mattered. “Do you still mean to follow Thayendanegea?”

  “That depends.”

  Joseph moved closer. He wore no shirt, only leggings and breechcloth. Willa felt the warmth coming off his skin. Her face was inches from the hollow of his bare throat.

  “The Scotsman no longer sleeps beneath your roof?”

  She was cautious again. “He went to the mountains for a time. But he has come back—to Shiloh.”

  “You spoke to him. I saw you at the mill.” His dark eyes were fathomless in the moonlight. “I was on the ridge above you. I saw you leave. You did not look pleased with him, though him you did not hit with a branch.”

  “I didn’t have one to hand, or I might have.”

  She saw the flash of his teeth, the slight wince as the skin across his cheekbone pulled at the scratches she’d made. She raised a hand to his face.

  “I should take you in by the fire and clean that.”

  Joseph put a hand over hers, pressing it to the wound. His hand covered hers completely, making her feel small and delicate, both of which she was not. “Soon,” he said.

  She knew what he meant to do even before his face bent toward hers.

  “Yah, Joseph.” She spoke gently but with finality, and raised a hand so that it came between their lips before they touched.

  He jerked back from her. Even in the moonlight, she could see the flooding sadness in his face, like the blood that pours from a wound when the knife is pulled free.

  Sorrow came down on her. But not regret. “Joseph, I will always care for you. But you are my brother.”

  The ache of wanting her was thick in his voice. “What keeps us apart now? Is it our clan? Or is it him?”

  She knew who he meant. Her mind rose up to deny it, but the words stuck in her throat.

  “Answer me, Burning Sky. Or is it that you fear to love anyone again?”

  She tried not to wince at that.

  “You want me to go away and take those children with me.” He took her in his arms then, too swiftly for her to prevent it.

  Though she stiffened at first, she sensed this time he held her as the brother who’d comforted her in a cornfield far to the north, a lifetime ago that suddenly felt like yesterday.

  “Do not let fear rule your heart,” he whispered into her hair. “We are Wolf Clan, you and I. But even a wolf is not meant to walk alone.”

  She stayed in the shelter of his arms for a moment, then forced herself to leave it and move beneath the shed to the hanging deer, where the smell of blood was strong.

  “Come. Help me build the fires, and we will smoke this good meat you’ve brought me.”

  Easing his weight off the balls of his feet, Joseph Tames-His-Horse settled his haunches on the earth and watched from a stand of pines west of the village. The clank and bang of the smithy had ceased for the day. On a bench behind the log structure, the Scotsman sat, using the last of the daylight to work. He had been at it long, but
the light was fading.

  There. He was gathering up the tools of his trade—field sketches, brushes, paints, the shell bowl; Joseph was too far away to recognize each object, but he’d seen them often enough to know what the man required to work. The Scotsman didn’t walk to another cabin, nor to find his horse and ride away on it. He went inside the small lean-to at the back of the smithy. Soon, smoke was coming from the chimney.

  Dusk was fading to twilight when another man rounded the building.

  The blood in Joseph’s veins quickened. He’d watched the deserter often enough to know his build, his stride, the small habitual movements that marked him, even without light enough to show his bright hair. So absorbed had he been in watching the Scotsman, Joseph had missed the man riding into the village. Now there he was, behind the smithy emptying his bladder against a sapling tree.

  Thought of sending an arrow into some vital part of the man while his breeches were undone amused him, but he did not intend to kill Crane, if he could help it. Deserting soldiers brought back living were more useful to the British than dead ones. Most of the time. And he had better be about the business, now that Burning Sky had made her choice.

  Did she even know it herself? She had not answered him about the Scotsman, so perhaps she didn’t realize yet that she loved him, despite all her protesting that it was not so, that she wished only to be left alone.

  If only the man had not come back.

  He pushed up from his crouch and made his way to where he’d hidden the mare, emptiness in his heart where for years hope had clung. He wanted with all his being to hate the Scotsman, but the man had taken the lead ball out of his side and seen him through a fever. He’d showed Owl and Pine Bird affection and care. He was a man who took his God seriously, yet didn’t take himself with the unassailable gravity of most white men, possessing instead a self-deprecating humor Joseph could appreciate.