Under the Same Sky
Page 1
A dream made flesh…
Suddenly Andrew knew the girl was there. He could feel her. He concentrated as hard as he could, harnessing his mind’s strength until he was able to visualize her. He focused on her eyes, which held his like magnets. He saw her soft lips and slightly upturned nose with the sprinkling of freckles across its bridge. He pictured the waves of brown and gold that framed her face.
The vision grew from his thoughts, becoming so clear it seemed she stood in front of him. Her eyes were round with wonder. She looked as surprised as he felt, and she reached out her hand, close enough to touch him. Andrew’s heart pounded and power streamed through him, fueled by the chunk of gray stone. He used all his strength to channel it through his arms so finally, impossibly, he reached her hand and gripped it between his own. He could feel the softness of her fingers, the warmth of her skin. He could smell her clean, earthy scent. And then he heard her.
“You can do this!” she exclaimed, her voice ringing like a bell in his ears. “You called! me…”
Under the Same Sky
GENEVIEVE GRAHAM
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2012 by Genevieve Sawchyn.
Excerpt from Sound of the Heart by Genevieve Graham copyright © by Genevieve Sawchyn.
Cover illustration by Gregg Gulbronson.
Cover design by George Long.
Cover hand lettering by Ron Zinn.
Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
BERKLEY SENSATION® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Sensation trade paperback edition / January 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Graham, Genevieve.
Under the same sky / Genvieve Graham.—Berkley Sensation trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-425-24523-1 (pbk.)
1. Americans—Scotland—Fiction. 2. Scotland—History—18th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.4.G723U53 2012
813’.6—dc23 2011036631
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Dwayne
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to say thanks:
To Dwayne, the love of my life, for reading my very first page and saying, “You know what? That’s not bad!” (and trying not to sound surprised). Thank you for putting up with this strange new lifestyle of “Author” and assuring our kids, “Mom’s writing, not playing.” For building my confidence and my office and for giving me plot ideas both brilliant and ridiculous. You led me back when I lost my way, put up with more than any man should have to, consoled me when I was inconsolable, and you were always my rock. My very huggable rock. I love you, Dwayne.
To our beautiful and incredibly talented daughters, Emily and Piper, who reminded me that dreams are to work for, not wait for. Thanks for being proud of me, and thanks for making me proud of you every day.
To my mom for giving me great books to read and inspire me. Dad, I wish you were here. I bet you would have loved all this. Especially the Scottish stuff.
To Diana Gabaldon for unwittingly helping me discover my passion for writing; to Connie Kostash for being my original critic; to the amazing Rona Altrows for telling me, “Yeah, you’ve got it, kid”; to Guy Sheldon, Laird of all Knowledge Highlandish, www.historichighlanders.com; to Sabine Hope for her insights and warm friendship; to the man with Cherokee wisdom and patience, Iron Head Vann, www.cherokeebyblood.com.
To my fantastic new community of online writer friends—I learn every day from you.
To my wonderful agent, Jacques de Spoelberch, who believed in my potential as well as the story, and who did so much more than just “sell the book.” And finally to Wendy McCurdy and Katherine Pelz at Berkley, who took my hands and patiently led this rookie author every step of the way.
Table of Contents
PART 1
Chapter 1: A Dubious Gift
Chapter 2: Battle Dream
Chapter 3: Beyond the House
Chapter 4: Damaged Goods
Chapter 5: At the River
PART 2
Chapter 6: Childhood Dreams
Chapter 7: The Battle Lost and Won
Chapter 8: From Darkness into Shadows
Chapter 9: What Remains
Chapter 10: Survivor
Chapter 11: A Cry for Help
Chapter 12: Entreaty
Chapter 13: Rescue of the Innocents
PART 3
Chapter 14: Into the Light
Chapter 15: Communication
Chapter 16: Cleansing
Chapter 17: Restless Souls
Chapter 18: The Green Corn Ceremony
PART 4
Chapter 19: A Restless Peace
Chapter 20: Plans
Chapter 21: Another Traveler
Chapter 22: Farewells at the Fire
Chapter 23: Toward the Sea
Chapter 24: Lochs and Glens and Leaves of Gold
Chapter 25: Greenock
PART 5
Chapter 26: Changing Leaves
Chapter 27: From the Village to the Town
Chapter 28: New Windsor
Chapter 29: The Darkness Within
Chapter 30: Possession
Chapter 31: The Light of Day
PART 6
Chapter 32: Another Life
Chapter 33: Almost Home
Chapter 34: Andrew
Chapter 35: Resolution
Chapter 36: Guardians
Chapter 37: Lost Voices
Chapter 38: Life Continues
Epilogue
PART 1: MAGGIE
From This World to the Next
Chapter 1
A Dubious Gift
He has always been there. That fa
ct is as important to me as my own heartbeat.
I first saw him when we were children: a young boy with eyes as dark as rain-soaked mud, staring at me from under a mane of chestnut hair. I kept him secret, invisible to everyone but me. He should have been invisible to me as well, because he was never really there, on the same windblown land, under the same sky. We never stood together, never touched as other people did. Our eyes met, and our thoughts, but our bodies were like opposite banks of a river.
When I was little, I thought of him as just another child. One with a slow smile and gentle thoughts that soothed me, as if he held my hand. When he didn’t fade with my childhood years, I began to wonder if he were a spirit, communicating through my dreams. In my heart, I knew he was more. His world was the same as mine. He was as human as I.
I was born in the year of Our Lord 1730 on a patch of grassland in South Carolina. Our pine-walled house, dried to an ashy gray, stood alone, like an island in a sea of grass. Its only neighbours were a couple of rocky hills that spilled mud down their sides when it rained. They stood about a five-minute run from our house, just close enough to remind us they were there. The house barely stayed upright during the mildest of storms, and we had no neighbours to whom we might run if it ever collapsed. When winter struck, the wind sought out gaps in the walls, shrieking around bits of cloth we stuffed into the holes. The cold pierced our skin as it had the walls, and we wrapped our bodies in dried pelts that reeked of tanned leather. Our barn offered even weaker shelter to one aged horse and a few poorly feathered chickens who, fortunately, were good layers. My father owned a rifle, and he occasionally chanced upon a prize from the nearby forest. He also ran a tangled line of traps that provided most of our meals. Beyond that, we had little. What we did have we mended many, many times.
I was never a regular child, spending my days with nothing but play and chores on my mind. How could I be? My dreams showed me what would happen an hour, a day, a year before it did. I had always dreamed. Not symbolic imaginings of flying or falling, but dreams that showed me where my life would eventually go.
I could also see what wasn’t visible, and hear what made no sound. When I was a toddler, my mother encouraged my odd abilities through games. She would pry a toy from my grip and hide it somewhere, then return and say:
“Go, Maggie. Go find your toy.”
I ran to the target and came back every time, prize in hand.
Mother said I had “the Sight.” I never told her there was more. I never told her about the boy I could see, who spoke to me without words. I wanted to keep him safe within secrecy, as if sharing him might make him disappear.
My dreams introduced me to people I had never seen, and took me to places I could never have known existed. Most nights they appeared and vanished, leaving vague memories in the back of my mind. Other nights I awoke bathed in sweat, drowning in images I didn’t understand: hands flexing into fists, bristled fibres of rope chafing my skin, the thunder of horses’ hooves. And blood. So much blood.
Mother didn’t experience dreams like mine, but she knew I had them. Their existence terrified her. Mother was a small woman of few words. When she saw me awake from the dreams, my head still fuzzy with half memories, her face paled and she looked away, helpless and afraid.
Her mother, my grandmother, had had the Sight. Mother both respected and feared its power. My grandmother saw her own death a week before it happened. She felt the hands as they tied her to a stake, smelled the smoke as the tinder beneath her bare feet caught fire, and heard the jeering of the crowd as they watched her burn as a witch.
Mother told me the story only once. That didn’t mean it couldn’t repeat itself.
Mother did the best she could. Many nights I awoke in her arms, not remembering her arrival, only knowing she came when my screams jolted her from sleep. She held me, rocked me, sang lullabies that ran through my body like blood. But her songs held no answers, offered no way to chase the images from my mind. She did what she could as my mother, but I faced the dreams on my own.
Except when I was with the boy no one could see. Sometimes he would brush against my thoughts like a feather falling from a passing bird. Sometimes we conversed without words. We could just be, and we understood.
As an infant, I lived with my mother and father and our decrepit horse. My sister Adelaide was born two years after I was. When I first saw her, wrapped like a pea in a faded gray pod, I stroked her little cheek with my finger and loved her without question. We were best friends before the newborn clouds faded from her eyes. Two years later, she moved out of her crib and my bed became ours.
Our brother was born that year. He died before he drew his first breath. We named him Reuben and buried him next to the barn.
Little Ruth arrived on a cloudless day in March when I was six. Ruth Mary Johnson. She was soft and fair and filled with light. Even my father, a man with little patience and less affection, gentled at the sight of her.
Neither one of my sisters had the Sight. Like my mother, they were slender and delicate, like fair-skinned deer. My mother’s skin was always so pale, even under the baking sun, she looked almost transparent. The only way to bring colour to her cheeks was to make her laugh, and my sisters and I did our best to paint them pink. I took after my father, with his brown hair and plain face, though my hands weren’t as quick to form fists as his. My arms and back were built for lifting.
By the time I turned seven, my dreams had become more vivid, and more useful to the family. I was able to catch Ruth before she tripped down a hill, able to find a scrap of cloth my mother sought. One winter I dreamed of a corn harvest, and my mother, daring to believe, planted a garden of it that spring. Her gardens never provided much food, because the ground around our home was either cracked by drought or flooded by heavy rains that stirred the dust to mud. That summer, though, the corn grew high.
Usually my dreams came when I slept, but sometimes they appeared when I sat quietly on my own. They weren’t always clear. Most of the time they had faded into wisps of thought by the time I came back into focus, but they never fully disappeared.
My mother and I never talked about my dreams. Neither of us acknowledged them out loud.
Just like we never talked about my father’s death.
It happened on the night of my seventeenth birthday.
I dreamed of a wheel from our wagon, its spokes blurred to a quick gray. Our ancient gelding pulled the bumping wagon over a moonlit ridge as my father returned from a late trip to town.
He slumped on the wagon bench, his weary body jiggling over every bump. I saw him lift his chin and glance toward the sky. Low-lying storm clouds glowed in the light of the full harvest moon. Everything around the wagon took on a strange orange tinge: the sparse patches of spring grass, the heaps of boulders casting pointed shadows in the dark. Tufts of salted brown hair peeked from under my father’s hat, and he tugged the brim lower on his forehead. My father was not a patient man. He clucked to the horse and snapped the reins over the animal’s back. In response, the gelding tossed his head and picked up speed just as they reached the peak of a long hill. My father should have known better. The pitch was too steep. Once the wagon started racing down the hill, the horse couldn’t slow. The wheels spun out of control, bouncing off rocks and jolting my father so he barely stayed in his seat. He leaned back, lying almost flat as he strained against the reins, but couldn’t slow the panicked horse.
The wagon clattered downhill, too fast to avoid a boulder in its path, and the front wheel smashed into splinters. Jerking in reaction, the wagon staves twisted from the horse’s harness, ricocheted off a solitary oak, and hit the ground with a sickening crack. The horse screamed and ran faster still. My father struggled to loosen the reins tangled around his wrists, but couldn’t do it fast enough. He was yanked from his seat and tossed into the air like a sack of flour. He hit the ground. Hard. His body crashed against rocks and shrubs as he struggled to free himself from the reins, tearing his clothes and scra
ping long gashes in his skin. The horse raced down the hill, eyes white with terror, chased by the screams and the body that thumped behind him like an anchor.
After a while, the screaming stopped. The horse checked its wild run and trotted to a stop, sides heaving, the insides of his back legs wet with white foam. His nostrils flared, and he bobbed his head nervously at the scent of fresh blood. But he sensed no imminent danger. He dropped his head to a patch of grass and began to graze. My father’s lifeless body rolled to rest a few feet away.
The dream ended and I sat up, gasping, the neckline of my shift soaked with sweat. I twisted toward the window, but all was silent, silver under the moon. I threw back the covers and stood, shaking, on the cold floor.