by Tess LeSue
And then he sat in the furs, with his head in his hands. He felt ten years old again. Bereft.
31
AVA WAS CRYING by the river when he found her. He was the last person she wanted to see. Well, maybe the second-to-last person. But, unperturbed, he came and sat down beside her. He stared at the confluence of the two rivers and the ways their waters flowed together, causing ripples of silver, like the fins of many fish.
“Did he ever tell you about his mother?” Two Bears asked thoughtfully.
“What?” Ava frowned.
“My son. Did he ever tell you about his mother?”
Ava scrubbed the tears from her face. She didn’t want to cry in front of him or anyone related to him. “No,” she said sulkily, wishing he’d go away so she could just cry herself into a puddle. Maybe she could flow with the rivers out to sea and just disappear. “We didn’t have that kind of relationship.” That set the tears off again. It turned out they didn’t have any kind of relationship. She didn’t mean anything to him except, oh God, as a sexual plaything.
She let out a hiccupping sob, and Two Bears gave her a startled look.
“I never had daughters,” he told her gingerly. “I don’t know quite what to do . . .”
“You don’t need to do anything. Just leave me alone.”
He made a thoughtful noise. “Well, I have had wives. So I do know enough to know that’s not true.” He simply sat there with her, watching the river slide by, while she cried.
“What about his mother?” Ava asked eventually as her curiosity got the better of her.
A smile flickered across Two Bears’ lips. His lips, which looked remarkably like a bow turned on its side. “Brings Death,” he said, his voice warm.
“Pardon?”
“That was her name. Brings Death.”
“Oh.” It was a name that conjured up all sorts of unpleasant things. It was no wonder she’d had such a heartless son, with a name like that, Ava thought ungraciously.
“She came one winter, during a snowstorm,” Two Bears said. “I was out checking traps; I remember I wasn’t having much luck, and I didn’t want to go home to a scolding from my wives. We all felt like fresh meat by that time of the winter, and they’d been giving me hell. So I stayed out later than I normally did. And then I saw a shape through the snow. I thought it was a bear. Bear meat is a treat beyond measure in the depths of winter.”
“Wouldn’t a bear be hibernating?” Ava interrupted. She was so caught up that she’d stopped crying.
“Mostly they do. But this one wasn’t.” He gave her a quick smile. “But of course it wasn’t a bear. It was Brings Death.” Two Bears stared into space as he remembered. “Her white name was Gail Woodruff. She’d been traveling with her husband and children when the Lakota set on them.”
“Traveling in winter?” Ava was horrified. Winters on the plains were brutal. The drifts could be twenty feet deep.
“They were green,” he said with a shrug. “And they suffered for it. By the time she staggered toward me, she was the only one left. I took her in, and my wives nursed her. Unfortunately for us, she brought white plague with her. The tribe sickened and people died, and I was forced to cast her out.” A shadow crossed his face.
“You loved her,” Ava guessed.
“We never said the words,” Two Bears said, “but I suppose I did. She wanted a house, like the whites live in, so I built her one, not far from the winter village. She lived there until she died. Rides with Death was born there.”
“Rides with Death,” she blurted. “Because he was the son of Brings Death?”
Not because he was a terrifying killer . . .
“Why are you telling me all this?” she asked.
Two Bears shrugged. “Because life is messy. And then it ends.”
She didn’t find either thought particularly cheering. He patted her on the knee. “You’re young. You’ll understand one day.”
“Understand what?”
“That it will always be messy. You’ll never understand each other. You’ll be at cross-purposes. And then one day you won’t have them anymore, and you’ll wish you could argue just one more time. Misunderstand each other just one more time. Never say ‘I love you’ just one more time.”
I never said I loved you.
“It’s not the same,” she said miserably.
“It never is.” He stood up. “I’m sorry you’re sad, Woman in the Furs.” He put his hand on the top of her head. “My son has made me sad many times. And happy many times.” He gave her a pat. “If you ever decide you want to get married, I will be waiting for your offer. I have a son who is in desperate need of a wife. Do you have a mother?” he asked abruptly. “Marriage is a job for mothers.”
“I do, but she’s thousands of miles away, and I haven’t seen her in years.”
“Humph,” he said. “That might make things difficult.”
Ava watched him amble off, back up the slope, toward his people.
She had no people to go to, she thought as she looked at the sea of humanity spread across the plains. Not even one person. There was just her.
What on earth was she going to do now? Where could she go?
* * *
• • •
RETURNING TO THE fort had been a searing humiliation. The superintendent and the colonel were too busy to have paid much attention to her comings and goings, but Captain Scott noticed. He gave her a gloating look that boiled her blood. She wasn’t going to stay, she decided. She had enough for a book—and she was going to write a book, no matter what Deathrider thought of it—so she didn’t need to stay.
In the morning she would ride out. Where, she wasn’t sure yet. St. Louis wasn’t far. Maybe she could take a steamboat upriver. She was tired of being in the saddle. Maybe some time in a cabin on a boat was just what she needed. She bet there were all kinds of characters on a steamboat.
Through her window she could see the teepees glowing in the dusk. They were like lightning bugs in the darkness. Some were painted with designs that shivered and danced as the light moved inside the teepee.
Because life is messy. And then it ends.
She sat on the bed, the same bed where she and Deathrider had first made love.
He was such an idiot. And so was his friend, that Micah fellow. Both of them such idiots.
She sat in the dark, brooding, staring out at the lightning-bug teepees. The thing was, they weren’t idiots. Not really. She was feeling so horrid precisely because they weren’t idiots. Because everything they said was true. Their lives had been in jeopardy because of the books she’d written.
But everything she’d said was true too.
Because life was messy.
She didn’t want to go to St. Louis. Or New York. She wanted to stay here. With him. Because she loved him.
Him. Not the legend, not the character in her books, not the larger-than-life figure who cast a long shadow from here to California. She didn’t know that man.
She loved the droll Apache she’d picked up in the desert, the man who never lost his wits, even after being blinded and left for dead. She loved the man who was too kind to leave her or Becky or Lord Whatsit to suffer, even though it meant putting his own safety at risk. She loved the man who had a mouth like an archer’s bow turned on its side, who had eyes like sunlit ice; the man who could kiss her until she couldn’t remember her own name and love her until she wanted to die from the pleasure of it. The man who listened to her chatter and who soothed her when she fretted. She loved him.
Even though it was messy. Even though she didn’t know the hidden depths of him. Even though he’d never said he loved her. She loved him.
Ava prided herself on her independence, on her courage and on her ability to survive just about anything. Well, here was one more thing she had to survive, that was all. So her h
eart hurt? Didn’t everybody’s?
She didn’t want to give up yet, she thought fiercely. She remembered the black hole of the past months, before she’d found him again. Her life had felt like a wasteland.
Him being angry at her was still a damn sight better than not being near him at all.
It was infuriating but true.
Because life was messy.
32
WHAT IN HELL are you talking about, ‘life is messy’? What kind of nonsense is that?” Deathrider snapped. He stopped dead when he stepped through into the teepee. Ava’s manuscript was sitting on his furs, propped up so he couldn’t miss it. It was still crumpled, but his father had done his best to smooth it out.
“Stop meddling,” he warned his father, snatching the manuscript and tossing it to Two Bears. “I’m not in the mood.”
“You haven’t read it,” his father said.
“Of course I haven’t damn well read it. I have no interest in reading it.”
“Did you hear they’re making Cut Nose the headman of all the nations?” Two Bears said.
Deathrider blinked at the abrupt change in topic. Cut Nose was Arapaho. It didn’t bode well for their relationship with Red Cloud’s Oglála.
“Our emissaries will go into that amphitheater and sign the treaty tomorrow,” Two Bears continued. “Or not. But none of the headmen is allowed to represent the nations. The emissaries will be named ‘chiefs.’ As headman, I will not be one of them.”
Deathrider was shocked by the heavy-handed crookedness of it. And he didn’t think the U.S. Army could have shocked him any more than they already had.
“Red Cloud will not allow the Oglála to sign,” Two Bears told him pragmatically. “Of the Lakota, I think only the Brulé will sign it. The treaty demands the Lakota hand over the lands by the Powder River to the Crow—Red Cloud will never stand for that.”
“It will mean war,” Deathrider said.
“There is always war.”
“But this whole stupid process was meant to stop the killing. What was all that talk of ‘lasting peace’?”
“There is no such thing.”
“What are you going to do?” Deathrider asked his father. He felt stunned.
“Me? I’m going to help myself to all of their gifts, and then I’m going to go home. I think the more relevant question is, what are you going to do?”
“About what?”
Two Bears handed him the manuscript.
Deathrider refused to take it. “She’s a liar.”
“Or she’s just a person who told a lie or two.”
Deathrider scowled at him.
“Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?”
“Yeah,” Deathrider said sarcastically. “Life is messy.”
“It is.” Two Bears nodded, pleased.
Sometimes Deathrider thought age might be getting to his father.
“People lie,” Two Bears told him sagely. “Nobody agrees. Wars will be fought. Land will be lost. People will die. It’s just constant mess. None of it seems like a good reason to kick a woman out of your furs. Especially a woman who loves you.”
“She doesn’t love me.” Deathrider scowled. “She was only sleeping with me to get information for her damn books.”
“You’re only saying that because you haven’t read this.” Two Bears put the manuscript in his hand.
“How do you know? You can’t even read.”
“I’m your elder. I’m wise.” He reached out and took Deathrider’s face in both his hands and pressed his forehead to his son’s. “Sometimes you are so much like your mother.”
Deathrider couldn’t stay mad at him after that. The man was a weasel.
* * *
• • •
WHILE TWO BEARS fussed about, packing up so they could leave after the treaty was signed and the gifts collected (although who knew when that would be), Deathrider started reading the damn manuscript. The title alone caught him off guard. The Redemption of Ava Archer: A Setting Straight of Many Things. He read it all the way through without getting up from his furs. The thing made him mad as hell. Maybe madder than he’d ever been in his life.
Now and then he read bits out to Two Bears, who agreed that he had every right to be mad. When Deathrider was done, he dropped the manuscript and glared at the teepee wall.
“Well, hell,” he said.
“I’ve laid out your ceremonial clothes,” Two Bears told him.
“What the hell for?” He wanted to kick things. She’d not only made up lies about him and ruined his life, and the lives of his friends, now she was depriving him of being mad at her. That book she’d gone and written was a thorough accounting of each and every exaggeration, fabrication and out-and-out lie she’d ever written. But she’d gone further than that. . . . She’d put herself in the book. It was the story of her life, warts and all. She had written about her childhood, her parents, her lovers, her travels, her loneliness, her greed, her desperate longing to meet the Plague of the West. . . .
And she’d ended it in the Apacheria, long before she’d ever met Deathrider, when she was alone and scared and at risk of dying of thirst. It was a book about consequences. And about the longings of a lonely girl . . . to have people listen to her; to be an adventurer, rather than a decoration or a plaything; to matter.
“Courting requires nice clothes,” Two Bears said, brushing down the fringed tunic.
“Courting?” Deathrider looked up.
“I’ve asked her to dinner. That seems like a good first step.”
“You what?” Deathrider’s heart seemed to jump in his chest.
“You’re a slow reader. I thought you’d be done well before now. She won’t be long.”
“Have you cooked anything?” Deathrider asked him. It was a stupid question, but he was so abruptly overcome with nerves that he couldn’t think what else to say.
“Buffalo,” Two Bears said proudly.
“Where did you get buffalo from?”
“I traded for it. Now, get dressed. I have things to do.”
“What things?”
But Two Bears didn’t answer.
* * *
• • •
DEATHRIDER’S HANDS WERE shaking as he laced his shirt. He shook them, trying to get rid of the tremor. Why was he so goddamn nervous?
Because he loved her.
He loved that madwoman. She was a fast-talking, quick-tempered, no-good, lying, sexy-as-all-hell harridan. She brought him nothing but trouble. But, as his father said, life was messy.
And he was a stone-cold idiot.
Micah was right too. What kind of idiot fell in love with the woman who’d ruined his life?
A lucky one.
He remembered watching Alex torture herself over Luke Slater, and Matt Slater torture himself over Georgiana—and his father torture himself over his mother. So, this was what it felt like. . . .
It was an upside-down, painful, horrid, flat-out wonderful way to feel.
* * *
• • •
AVA WAS SITTING in bed writing up her notes when Two Bears came knocking at the window. She frowned when she saw him there.
“Why didn’t you come to the door?” she asked after she’d lifted the sash.
“Because I wanted to talk to you,” he said, like that made perfect sense.
“Oh.” She peered down at him. “Do you want to come in?”
“I’ve come to ask you to dinner.”
Ava narrowed her eyes. “Does Deathrider know about this?”
“Yes,” Two Bears said cheerfully. “He’s getting dressed now.”
“And he’s fine with it?” Ava didn’t trust him. “Are you matchmaking again? Because you know he hates that.”
“He won’t hate it this time.”
&
nbsp; “He will,” she sighed. She hated herself for getting her hopes up. For a moment, she’d thought Deathrider really had invited her to dinner. But of course he hadn’t. Because he hated her. “He will most certainly hate it this time. And next time. And all the times after that. You need to accept that he doesn’t want to get married, not now, not ever.”
“Why are you still here?” Two Bears asked her bluntly.
“I . . . the treaty . . .”
“Because you love my son.”
Ava flushed. It was true. But she didn’t like other people knowing it was true.
“And he loves you.”
Ouch. “No,” Ava hastened to correct him. “He doesn’t. In fact, he told me he doesn’t himself.”
“He’s read your book,” Two Bears told her, “the one you left for him. Now you’re asked for dinner. And he’s wearing his ceremonial robes.”
Ava couldn’t take it all in. “What does that mean, he’s wearing his ceremonial robes?”
“It means he loves you.” Two Bears tugged on her wrist. “Come on. You don’t have time to change.”
Ava didn’t know how to feel. She was tingling with hope, but also sure this was a mistake. Two Bears was meddling again, and Deathrider was bound to lose his temper.
But at least if she went, she’d see him. And if she saw him, she might be able to talk to him.
“Hurry,” Two Bears urged her. “We need to find some buffalo meat on the way.”
“We what?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll find some. Have you seen how many people are out there? Someone is bound to have cooked buffalo.”
33
TWO BEARS ABANDONED Ava at the entrance to the teepee. He lugged the pot of roast buffalo meat to the cook fire, muttering about how he’d been cheated by the person who’d sold it to him.
What did she do now? How did you knock on a teepee? There was no door.
“Hello?” she called nervously. Her palms were sweating. She rubbed them down her thighs.
The hide pulled back, and there he was. He looked even better than she remembered. For a moment, she was so glad to see him that she grinned. But then she saw his solemn expression, and her grin faltered.
