Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Light in the distance, more tongues of leaping orange, revealed to Willa the field beginning to burn, the dry corn standing on its hillocks going up as fast as the cabin. Above her in the sky, twilight was fading to purple, but around the cabin, the ground was bathed in fiery light, as were the two men in the yard. Two men matched in height and build, locked together in battle: Richard Waring and Joseph Tames-His-Horse, frozen eye to eye, lips peeled back from gritted teeth, a tomahawk poised above them. Joseph clutched the weapon. Richard clutched at Joseph’s raised arm, but if they made any sound at all, Willa couldn’t hear them. She heard nothing above the fire’s terrible roar and crackle.

  “Matthew … Maggie!” Screaming their names, she raced around the cabin, choking on smoke, seeking a way within unbarred by fire, calling to the children, stopping to listen for their screams in reply.

  There was no sound save the flames devouring the last remnant of her father’s hand upon the earth. The last remnant of the life she’d hoped to reclaim. But not the children. Please, not the children.

  Searing heat and burning debris scorched her skin. Rounding the porch on the far side of the cabin, she saw three figures, men, running up from the field. One still held aloft a burning torch. Closer by, Richard and Joseph were exchanging blows with their fists. The tomahawk lay discarded in the grass, its blade catching a gleam from the burning cabin. She wanted to scream Joseph’s name, to plead with him to help her find the children, but knew he was helping in the only way possible.

  The porch was already engulfed, the fire more advanced at the cabin’s front. She wouldn’t get in that way. She was bathed in heat and light, but neither Joseph nor Richard seemed aware of her presence. The three men—she recognized them from Keegan’s store that first day in the village—raced into the yard, armed with muskets, all their attention on the fighters. Joseph had gotten the upper hand in the fight, but two of the men piled onto him now, dragging him off Richard. One clubbed him over the head with a musket, and he dropped to his knees. The third snatched the hunting knife from his sash, disarming him.

  Richard wiped blood from his nose and spotted the tomahawk lying in the grass. The murderous intent on his face made the rage in Willa flare hotter than the fire. She drew the knife from its sheath at her breast.

  The flame’s dry roaring covered the noise of her feet, but at the last moment, her throat opened and she screamed, shrill and ululating. The men holding Joseph captive, perhaps too startled, made no move to hinder her as she passed them.

  Richard heard her as he bent for the hatchet. He straightened in time to keep his throat from being slashed, taking the blade instead down the length of his forearm. Bellowing in surprise and pain, he struck her a blow to the head that knocked her to the ground.

  Grass was in her mouth, the grit of dirt between her teeth. White sheeted her vision.

  “Fool woman!” Richard’s boot struck her side. “Didn’t I say burning’s what you’d come to?”

  A weight fell on her, shoving the air from her lungs. Knees sought to push apart her thighs. There was a reek of male sweat, the metallic smell of blood—the drip of both onto her face—Richard cursing, wrenching at her skirts.

  “I gave you every chance, offered you everything,” he said, bleeding, panting, fighting with her petticoat. “I’ll have one thing from you at least—”

  For an instant, she looked straight into Richard’s face, into his eyes pale and fire lit, frenzied with hate … and excitement. And she knew. He had done this before. Somewhere in a village while crops and lodges burned, he had raped women who were her sisters, her mothers. And when he was done with her, he would throw her to the other men. She heard their hoots and shouts and knew this would happen, all while the children burned and Joseph was made to watch, if he still lived. She had heard these stories. Now they were her own.

  Only she still held her knife. She felt it now across her open palm. Richard in his lust to take her had not taken it.

  Resolve flowed through her limbs, and with it, feeling. Her fingers clenched the knife’s hilt. She raised her arm to plunge the blade into the broad back pinning her down.

  The knife was jerked from her grasp.

  Richard’s weight lifted. She lay stunned for a second, then rolled onto her knees, heard men shouting—a different sort of shouting, enraged, alarmed—sensed a mill of confusion and bodies near her, expected all the while another blow, a slash to her throat. But these things didn’t come.

  Willa blinked and cleared her vision. Richard had his back to her and was in a fighting crouch, blood streaming from the gash she’d opened in his arm.

  Joseph, free of the men who had held him—one of whom was on his knees—brandished the knife with which she’d meant to kill Richard. It was Joseph’s hand that had snatched it from her. Blood coursed from a cut on his brow, streaking his face like war paint, but through that mask she saw it in his eyes. He was saving her from killing Richard, by killing him for her.

  “No!” The scream came from her throat as a musket fired. She felt the breath of the ball as it passed.

  “Hold your fire—this Indian’s mine. Then her.” Richard raised a hand, signaling the man holding Joseph’s hunting knife, and caught the weapon as it was tossed.

  The knife Joseph had taken from her was half the size of the one Richard now wielded, but it was Joseph who made the first rush. Richard lowered his shoulder and hurtled forward to meet it.

  For the smoke and tears that stung her eyes, Willa didn’t see clearly what happened next. It seemed Richard meant to feint to the side and deliver a slash to Joseph’s belly, but something happened—Willa thought he must have tripped—for he fell hard into Joseph. There was a brief struggle, the two of them grappling on their feet. Then Richard slumped to the ground and lay face down.

  The long blade he’d welded protruded from his lower back, driven straight through his own belly. Joseph sprang away, looking ready still, his face fierce and expectant, as if he did not realize what had happened.

  Richard didn’t move.

  Had Joseph got his knife away and thrust him through with it, or had Richard in falling into Joseph somehow impaled himself on the blade? It had happened too fast. She didn’t know. Nor did she know what Richard’s men had seen. She scrambled to Joseph’s side as they rushed forward, shock on their faces. One turned Richard over, grasped the blade, and yanked it free. Blood came gushing.

  “Idiot!” another shouted. “Now he’s like to bleed to death.”

  “Get the Indian! He’s knifed a white man!”

  “He’s murdered a white man.”

  “Maybe not. Get him anyway. I’ll gather the horses.”

  They left Richard lying in his blood, big hands clamped over his belly, red snaking through his fingers. One man ran for the horse shed. The others came at Joseph, faces white and savage in the fire’s light.

  Joseph turned to her with eyes of sorrow. “Run,” he said, pressing the small knife into her hand and giving her a shove that nearly sent her sprawling.

  But she kept her feet, and her head. She sprinted toward the woods on the far side of the burning cabin, ignoring the screaming pain in her side where Richard’s boot had landed, the throbbing of her cheek and temple where his fist had struck. Sobbing as she ran.

  No one pursued her.

  At the woods’ edge, she stopped. Two men had fallen on Joseph as if to kill him on the spot, but after several blows they bound him unresisting. They tied him to a horse’s saddle when the animals were brought up, while the third man tore Richard’s shirt and wrapped his torso tight with it. Even Willa could see the dark bloom that stained the bindings.

  It wasn’t murder, but it might yet be. Or made to seem so. There was no hope for Joseph if Richard died. Scant hope if he lived.

  One man swung onto Richard’s big mare. The other two between them lifted Richard to the saddle.

  “I … can … ride,” he ground out and somehow stayed upright.


  The second man slid off the horse, mounted his own, and in seconds they were riding out of the yard at a trot that must have jarred Richard unmercifully. Down the track past her burning crop they went, Joseph running hard to keep from stumbling and being dragged.

  Willa screamed after them. “Where are they? Where are my children?”

  If they heard her, they paid her no mind. Eyes stung with smoke and despair, voice all but spent, she turned back to the cabin, her heart tearing out of her chest with the need to find the children, to do something for Joseph. She could not do both.

  She could not do either.

  She fell to the ground in a tangle of skirts, coughing and choking. Like the billowing smoke, the faces of her lost ones rose before her. Kingfisher. Goes-Singing and Sweet Rain.

  Papa, who had built the cabin. Mama, who’d made it their home. Oma, who thought her beloved books a waste of time, who didn’t even have a grave.

  Neil MacGregor, who saw past her fear into her soul and wanted to give her what it craved. The children she hadn’t wanted but had grown to love in spite of herself. Maggie … Matthew.

  The Almighty had fashioned for her another family, had placed them in her path so she must step over them in order to leave them behind. In fear she’d done just that. She’d spurned His gift, thinking she could keep the world at a distance, protect herself from its pain. But the world had pushed its way in regardless, both the good and the evil of it. She’d refused the good. Now she had nothing but the ashes the evil had left her.

  “Forgive me,” she whispered to the children who were dead, to the man who was gone, to the God she had mistrusted.

  The cabin roof fell in with a crack of timbers. Sparks columned upward. Ashes and debris blew outward in a blackening cloud, but she didn’t move to safety. On her knees, arms wrapped about her belly, the woman who had been Burning Sky rocked herself and wept.

  When she heard them, Willa thought the voices were only memories taunting, for they were children’s voices, calling to her. Calling her Istah. Mother.

  Her dead children. Was the grief and regret not enough to crush her, but their ghosts must come to haunt her in this moment? She buried her face in sooty hands, as the ashes rained down.

  “Istah!”

  “Get back! Away from the fire!”

  Ghosts did not rush with bruising force into the arms of the living. They did not grasp and tug with the urgency of flesh. Willa dropped her hands to look at those pulling at her now. Children’s hands, very much of this heartbreaking world.

  “Please, Istah, get back from the fire!”

  She had no will to resist them. In a wondering, aching daze, she let them lift her up and tug her toward the trees. Stars glittered through the haze of smoke that billowed above the clearing. The firelight was beginning to dim, but it was enough to show her the faces of Matthew and Margaret Kershaw, filthy, tear streaked, singed around the edges, but whole.

  Her voice was a thread, constricted by smoke and heat and tears. “How? Where …?”

  Before they could answer, she had them in her arms, laughing for the joy rising in her. Because she laughed, so did they, and while the collie she hadn’t even noticed until now licked and nudged and wriggled over them all, in tumbled snatches they told her everything—how Richard Waring had come riding up with his men, forcing Francis to leave and shoving them inside the cabin, where he tied them and left them to burn as the cabin was put to the torch.

  How Francis had come back after they were shut within, breaking in through the door that used to open into another room.

  How Joseph had come as well, but they didn’t know from where, and fought with Richard while Francis got them out of the fire and up the slope into the trees and told them to hide and not come out.

  How they saw Willa running from the trees right after that but were too frightened to come down and did they do wrong, should they have come down before now?

  “No. Oh no,” Willa told them, stroking small sturdy backs, kissing sweaty brows and smearing soot all over. “I am happy now that you didn’t come down.”

  Matthew was the first to pull from their embrace. “We’re sorry we let your cabin burn.”

  “And the corn!” Maggie cried, a wail of anger in the words as she gazed toward the still-burning field.

  “Corn?” Willa said, shaking her head. “What do I care for corn when you are both safe?”

  The cabin was still falling in, the blackened timbers crumbling onto themselves. Willa’s heart ached at the sight, but that which was truly irreplaceable wasn’t lost. Later she would make sense of the rest, especially Francis’s role in it all—Francis, who had lied to her and saved her children, then vanished like the smoke still curling thick into the night sky.

  Right now it was Joseph who needed her.

  THIRTY-SIX

  She took up the tomahawk left in the yard and led the children by the path to Anni’s cabin, across the foot log over Black Kettle Creek. Struck mute by their sudden and bedraggled appearance, Charles and Goodenough, the only two still awake, listened in disbelief, then horror, as Willa told her tale of fire and blood.

  “Richard’s taken hurt bad?” Goodenough, arrested in the act of lifting a kettle at their arrival, set it on the hearth and ran from the cabin without another word.

  “Richard?” Charles echoed, standing from the chair he’d occupied in peace moments ago. “And who’s this Indian—Joseph? What’s he to do with …” His glance fell to Matthew and Maggie.

  “He is not the father of these children,” Willa said. “He’s my brother. He’s come and gone this summer long, hunting for us.”

  “Richard said he shot an Indian.” Charles sounded stunned. “Weeks ago. Over by—”

  “That was Joseph. But there is no time to explain.” Willa gave Matthew and Maggie a gentle push forward. “Will you see to these children so I can go to him?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “I’ll go with you!” Matthew protested.

  “You will not.” Willa turned on him with unassailable resolve. “Stay here where I know you will be safe.”

  Lanterns burned around a log house near the smithy and farther on at Keegan’s store. Willa saw them from the crest of the path before she plunged down the slope and crossed the footbridge used when the mill was shut for the night. As she raced down the track, she saw figures, silhouetted in the light, moving about both structures. One of those figures outside the log house was as tall as most of the men, but skirted—Goodenough, who had bolted from Anni’s cabin moments before Willa.

  Goodenough paused to speak to someone outside, then pushed past to go within. That would be where they had taken Richard. Joseph must be at the trading store. A prisoner.

  Someone would have ridden for the Colonel. Would Joseph be spared long enough for Elias Waring to hear the truth of how his son was injured—burning her out of her home, trying to kill her children?

  But what was the truth of those last vital seconds? Only Joseph could tell her that.

  Willa raced past the smithy to the store, ignored the shadowy faces of men loitering on the porch, pushed open the door, and collided with Jack Keegan standing just inside. Jack steadied her as she staggered.

  “What have they done with him?” She craned to see past the stacked goods cluttering the store. Others were within but hidden from her sight. She could hear their voices. She could hear the thud of fists on flesh.

  “Joseph!” She yanked free of Jack’s grasp.

  Two men, bloodstained and disheveled, came from the back of the store and stood in front of Willa—two who had ridden with Richard. A third joined them. The fists of the third man were cracked and bleeding.

  “They brought the Indian here for keeping,” Jack explained, “till the Colonel’s seen to Richard.”

  “He’s done nothing wrong. It was Richard Waring and those three.” Willa flung an arm at the men blocking her way, her voice hoarse as she said, “They set fire to my cabin. They tried
to burn my children inside it.”

  “She’s lying,” the man with the bleeding knuckles growled. “That Mohawk did the burning. Like they always do.”

  Willa had run from Anni’s cabin with Joseph’s tomahawk in hand, hidden in the folds of her skirt. She raised it now, pulling back her teeth in a snarl. Only Jack Keegan’s long reach kept her from hurling its blade into the smirking face of the man with Joseph’s blood on his hands.

  “Willa, calm yourself! Colonel Waring will—”

  “Do not tell me to calm myself!” She wrenched loose from him a second time. “Ask Francis Waring. He saw everything. He knows. Richard forced him to help.”

  This only amused the other men. One laughed. “Waring’s half-wit? Can that boy even talk?”

  “Francis speaks! He was there. He will tell you …”

  The words died on Willa’s tongue. Someone had entered the store behind her. She knew it by the looks of the men fronting her. By those looks, she knew who it was before he spoke.

  “What will Francis tell us, Wilhelmina?”

  Elias Waring looked as if he’d aged a decade in the months since Willa last saw him. In the glow of the store lanterns, his hair looked gray. His shoulders stooped as he leaned on his stick. Fresh grief scored his face.

  “Richard?” she asked him.

  “I left him living. Goodenough is with him.” The Colonel’s eyes, distant with the shock of his son’s injury, said what his words did not. Richard’s life hung by a thread.

  Willa felt ready to collapse from the exhaustion of this terrible day, but her battle was far from over. Words she must say to this man clogged her mind like logs jammed in a mill race. While she scrambled for the right ones to begin, the Colonel’s gaze fell on the three men blocking the maze of trade goods. “The rope is ready. Where is he?”

  A stunned second passed while Willa digested that. Rope. They were going to hang Joseph, without even hearing her side of the story. The blood rushed from her face.

  “Colonel … no.” She stepped in front of him, raising soot-smeared palms. “Look at my face, my hands. These men burned my cabin and my fields this night. They tried to burn my children. Richard was with them, leading them. Richard did these things!”