Jessie's War (Civil War Steam)

by Connors, Meggan

  “What happened?” he asked, his voice low and soft. Calm. She had to struggle to hear him over the pounding of her heart in her ears. “Talk to me.” When she didn’t answer, he prompted, “Jessie.”

  She pulled herself together and looked up at the sky where her ancestors were surely having a hearty laugh at her expense. “I can’t believe he just did that.”

  He stood up, extended his hand out to her, and helped her to her feet. “What happened?” he repeated.

  He had gone still and quiet, and she recognized this as Luke at his most dangerous.

  Her voice little more than a whisper, she told him.

  “He just married us.”

  Chapter Twelve

  As they made their way to the winter camp, Jessie watched Luke as he rode with her grandfather and Cheveyo. As the leaders, they were at the head of the tribe, the first to fight and the first to die, should enemies attack.

  Warriors surrounded her, flanking the sides and the rear. Protecting her.

  Around her, she heard a smattering of languages she recognized as Bannock, Paiute, Cheyenne, Shoshone and Apache, some of which she understood and some she didn’t. Many of them belonged to tribes who had once been enemies—with each other and with her tribe, too, yet all of them wore the braided belts marking them as Ewepu Tunekwuhudu. Marking them as belonging to her grandfather, and, by extension, to her.

  Add Luke to their ranks, and this was, perhaps, the strangest tribe to ever have existed.

  Luke turned in his saddle and caught her eye, and he leaned over to speak to Cheveyo before he turned his horse and galloped back toward her. This man dressed in black astride a big, black horse was as fierce and deadly as any of them, and the Ewepu Tunekwuhudu had long been one the other tribes in the region and white men gave a wide berth.

  Her grandfather was one of the most feared men in the West, yet no one would openly call him enemy. She’d banked on his reputation—and the rumors and exaggerations of what had happened—for so long she rarely thought about how he had faced an entire regiment alone, armed with nothing more than his voice and his dance, and single-handedly won the Paiute Wars.

  A great storm had arisen from the ground, a whirling cyclone spanning the gap between earth and heaven. When the wind died and the dust settled, all that had lain before him were the bodies of the slain. He’d told the lone surviving general the soldiers’ deaths had been the will of the ancestors. The Union government had immediately signed the Paiute treaty of 1861, granting autonomy to the Paiute and Shoshone nations. In theory, the end of the conflict meant they were to be left alone, unmolested.

  The truth was somewhat darker.

  And now here she was, accompanied to her tribe by her grandfather and an agent for the Union Army, a man who should be an enemy and yet had been welcomed as a friend and brother.

  Luke sidled up next to her, but he didn’t look at her. Instead, he studied the surrounding landscape, the barren peaks and the ocean of snow-covered brush stretching out for endless miles. Beyond that, the great lake spanned out in front of them, the tufa pyramid of Anaho Island rising out of the dark cerulean water.

  “You all right?” he asked softly.

  For a moment, she wasn’t even sure he was talking to her.

  “Jess?”

  “Oh,” she mumbled. Even after all they had been through over the last few nights, she still found it hard to accept the idea that Luke Bradshaw lived, her ghost brought back to life. She brushed hair out of her eyes, and pretended his presence didn’t pain her in a way she couldn’t find the words to describe. “Yeah.”

  “Good.”

  Silence settled into the space between them, and she found herself wondering about the kind of life he’d been living since he’d left. What had he been doing? What had he done? Who had he befriended and whom had he been with?

  Eventually, he said, “I talked to your grandfather.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah.”

  Damn him, he was going to make her ask. And she wouldn’t. She would resist, if only because asking was what he wanted her to do.

  She stayed quiet, listening to the sounds of the horses as they trod over the frozen ground.

  “This marriage can’t be legally binding,” Luke offered after a long period of quiet. “There was no license and the marriage wasn’t recorded anywhere. Neither of us actually agreed to anything. Once we’re away from here, who’s to say anything ever happened?”

  She attempted nonchalance, though her emotions were as raw as a skinned knee. “Me. Grandfather. My tribe.” She paused for a moment. “My ancestors.”

  “Your ancestors?”

  “If Grandfather says it’s their will we’re married, then we’re married,” she said. “I’ll not go against them.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t superstitious.”

  She released bitter laughter into a biting winter wind. “I’m not. Superstition implies an irrational belief not based on reason or knowledge. Based on that criterion, I’m not superstitious at all. I dare you to defy Ewepu So’wina’.”

  “And die for it? I don’t think so.”

  The way he said the words told her still didn’t understand, despite his reluctance to confront her grandfather, and she didn’t expect him to. They may have grown up together, but they were from different worlds. Only she had one foot in her father’s and one foot in her mother’s and would never be fully accepted by either of them.

  For some reason, he seemed to be accepted by both.

  “The only way out of this is to have Grandfather nullify the marriage.”

  “Would he do that?” Luke asked.

  “Don’t sound too eager, Bradshaw.” She squared her shoulders as she prepared to ask the question that had been plaguing her from the moment he’d stepped through her door. “You got some woman waiting for you?”

  This time, when she wondered if he had found some proper woman to call “wife,” she acknowledged—if only to herself—that she cared if he had.

  The pale clouds clinging to the peaks seemed to fascinate him. “No,” he said, his voice low and quiet. “You are my one and only wife, if that’s any consolation.”

  Relief sang through her. “Don’t be nasty. I don’t want to be married to you any more than you want to be married to me.”

  “Wasn’t trying to be nasty.” He let the words hang between them for a long time, and for a change, she had nothing to say. “What about you? You have a man waiting for you?”

  “Wouldn’t be here with you if I did, but you’d know this if you’d kept in touch.” In a rush, the words bubbled out of her before she had a chance to stop them. “What happened to you? I wrote you every day for six years. I wrote to you even after my letters went unanswered for over a year, even after my father and Hiram said you must have died at Bear Creek. I still wrote to you after several of my letters came back marked addressee unknown. I wrote…” Her voice broke and she stopped short.

  I wrote love letters to a ghost who wasn’t dead.

  She’d poured so much pain into those letters. At first, she’d kept them light, thinking he might be alive out there somewhere and may read them one day. But as time wore on, and she didn’t hear from him, she’d told him everything. She told him about her fears for the future, how much she missed her mother and Gideon. How much she missed him.

  Luke pushed his hat up on his head and rubbed the scar running through his eyebrow. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and his lips tightened. He cleared his throat, opened his mouth to speak, and cleared his throat again.

  “I never wanted to hurt you, Jessie,” he said. “It’s complicated. I’d explain it to you, but…”

  “I wouldn’t understand,” she filled in. Of course things were complicated—she had seen the map of scars on his back.

  “No, I think you’d understand. I don’t think you’d agree, but I think you’d understand.”

  The knot in her throat portended tears, much like the wind whipping through the v
alley portended snow. The coming storm was inevitable.

  “What happened to you, Luke?”

  His shoulders dropped. “Jessie…” he began.

  “I’m not asking you to explain what happened to us. That’s... past,” she said, her voice fading. “I want to know what happened to you. I saw your scars, your mechanized leg. I want you to tell me what happened to you.”

  I want the details, so I can understand why there can be no us.

  He blinked several times fast. “The leg is an excellent piece of work. My friend designed it. There’s not another in the world. Not sure there ever will be.”

  “I want to know how you got it.”

  “Why do you care?” His tone was cautious.

  She couldn’t find it within herself to answer.

  He regarded her for a long time, his expression a study in bland neutrality. Inhaling deeply, he gestured to the badge pinned to his chest. “You know what I am.”

  “Special Services, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Do you know what we do?”

  “I take it you’re a bit more than a local sheriff.” He inclined his head to acknowledge her words. “Hiram said you were a spy. Espionage, sabotage, murder.”

  The muscle in his cheek worked as he ground his teeth together. “Special Services isn’t just spies and espionage. We’re the investigative branch of the army. Within the Service, there are several divisions, and we each have our own responsibilities. I got recruited directly from military service into the intelligence division.” Luke’s cheeks colored, though Jessie got the impression it wasn’t from the cold. “I showed a certain talent for acquisitions.”

  Acquisitions. She almost laughed. Luke had always been a thief. After all, they’d met when he’d been caught stealing meat pies off her mother’s counter. He’d been eight at the time. The same age as Jessie’s brother.

  Her mother had taken pity on him and offered him the food, then forced him to take a bath and gave him some of her brother’s clothes. Like a stray dog, he’d kept coming back until he became one of them. Until the house didn’t feel right unless he was in it.

  Jessie’s family may have been the only ones in town safe from Luke’s sticky fingers, unless she counted her heart among the things he’d stolen.

  “Yeah, I know, it’s ironic I would get paid for doing the one thing that got me in so much trouble before.” He grinned. “Anyway, I’m part of an information gathering team. Sometimes, we work witness and dignitary protection, but mostly we find things to use against the Rebs. Weapons. Information. People. All kinds of things. And we try to make sure our stuff doesn’t fall into enemy hands.”

  “Like Pop’s invention.”

  He nodded. “Among other things, yeah.”

  She gestured to his leg. “Seems like a dangerous line of work.”

  “It can be. That’s why agents in my division are carefully chosen.” The finality in his tone told her he didn’t intend to offer more.

  “What happened to your leg?”

  He studied the hills for a long time. “Got myself into a spot of trouble a few months back. It might have healed on its own, but something came up and I had to get back in the field, so I had the docs take it. Rather than being strapped to a desk for years—or maybe permanently—I was able to get back out in six months.”

  Had the docs take it? What kind of man would do that for the sake of a job?

  “You were that certain it would work?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “But you did it anyway?”

  “Yep.”

  “It couldn’t wait?”

  Luke stared straight ahead, and the pain in his eyes told her more than his words ever could. “The job waited for as long as it could. If someone else could have taken over, I would have let him. I didn’t have much of a choice.”

  “Did it hurt as bad as they say?” She had seen mechanized limbs before, but only on the miners, and never one attached between two pieces of living flesh. The mechanic legs she had seen never worked as well as the real thing, the joints neither as fast nor as fluid. This concept of an artificial leg attached between a real knee and a real ankle was genius. Though his limp became more pronounced as the day wore on, he didn’t move like a man with an artificial limb.

  His eyes were wary. “Yeah. Still does.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m not.”

  The stranglehold grief held on her throat tightened. “I hope it was worth it.”

  “It was.” He gave her a long look. “Look, Jess, about the letters… It’s not that I didn’t want to write.”

  Jessie studied the mountains, the brightness of those snow-covered hills, the darkness of the water and the clarity of the sky. Focused her attention on her grandfather’s village rising in the distance.

  “I’m not asking you to explain.”

  He shifted in his saddle uneasily. “I know you’re not.” A fleeting smile ghosted his lips. “Maybe that’s why I’m so damn on edge. We’re so good at fighting that when we’re not, I keep waiting for the next disaster.”

  “I’m pretty certain things can’t get much worse for you, Bradshaw. You’re married to a harpy.”

  He turned surprised eyes in her direction and burst out laughing.

  She didn’t miss the spark of real joy in his eyes. She caught herself smiling and didn’t bother to suppress it.

  “Careful, Jess. If you keep teasing me, it might lead me to think you don’t hate me as much as you say you do.” His silvery eyes glinted with amusement. He gestured up to her grandfather and Cheveyo. “Look, I’ve got to go back up to them. I promised your grandfather I’d ride with him, and something tells me I’d better obey him. You’re all right back here?”

  “As right as rain,” she responded. “No need to worry about me. I’m not going anywhere.”

  He turned his horse away from Jessie to catch up with her cousin and her grandfather. He was but a few lengths in front of her when he turned back to her.

  “Me neither,” he said softly.

  It was a promise. One that turned her inside out as joy—real joy, a thing so foreign she could barely tolerate it—sang through her.

  She had gotten so used to the bite of pain its absence actually hurt worse.

  He spurred his horse and left her staring at his back.

  * * * *

  A few hours later, they reached the winter camp. The tribe as she remembered it had always been relatively small, so she was surprised to see what amounted to a small city, with several dozen wikiups stretching in every direction, most of them hugging the river where it met the lake. Beyond the village, pillars of tufa rose from the dark water, and steam from nearby hot springs ascended into the bright sky.

  Jessie sat alone on the banks, watching the water tumble over the rocks on its way toward the lake. After a few moments of being still and quiet, a large trout dashed through the reeds, its tail thrashing in the water, its scales glinting in the pale light. Throughout the day, the snow had continued to melt, leaving the mountains covered in white, and the valley brown and frozen. The scent of juniper and sage filled the air instead of sulfur and smoke, the clouds in the sky brilliant white against an azure sky.

  There was freedom in the quiet, in the heart of this land.

  She heard rustling behind her and she didn’t turn, but she was unsurprised to hear her grandfather’s voice.

  “Here you are.” He paused for a moment. The touch he didn’t quite give her was like a whisper of wind. “You’re looking in the wrong direction, Granddaughter. You always have been.”

  Jessie turned toward where Luke stood with Cheveyo amid a cluster of barren cottonwood trees. Cheveyo said something, and Luke laughed. He’d always been so quick to laughter. In so many ways, he was the boy she remembered and loved.

  In so many ways, he was a stranger.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Grandfather’s smile was both haunting and sad. “
I think you do. You always do things your way. You fail to see what’s right in front of you.” Bending down, he picked up a piece of old wood and scraped a trench in the sandy bank of the river. “Looking at the mirage in the distance, you fail to see the water in front of you. Death is in the distance. Life is at your feet.” He motioned back to the torn ground, to the water welling up.

  “I’m not some desert metaphor, Grandfather.”

  He smiled like he had when Jessie had been a small child and been too stubborn to recognize the importance of what he said.

  That one small action infuriated her. She didn’t need him or his tribal wisdom anymore.

  “Everything is. Life can be found in this desert. So can death. I wonder, which one will you choose?”

  “You should tell fortunes. You’d make a killing.” Before the words had even left her mouth, she regretted them.

  His eyes flashed, his face cold and ferocious. Her words had been more foolish than brave. “You mock me.”

  “I apologize. I mean no disrespect.”

  “But you do,” Grandfather snapped. “You’ve never been good at holding your tongue, but you don’t say anything real. It’s all about this anger you carry. It will be your undoing.”

  “Don’t you think I have a reason to be angry?” she asked. “I’ve been alone for so long. Once Mother died, you were nowhere to be found. Then Luke comes back, after he let me think he was dead. And now you’ve forced me into a marriage I don’t want. You mock me, Grandfather. Whatever you think of my father, you know Mother loved him. She gave up everything she’d ever known, and she was happy. I want to love someone like that. I don’t plan to settle for anything less.”

  “I don’t expect you to. But you’re not angry about your union.”

  Her heart skipped a beat, maybe two, and panic rose beneath her breast, as if her darkest secrets had been exposed. She looked away. “Release me.”

  “No.”

  She folded her arms and watched the river tumble over the rocks, much like her heart tumbled inside her chest. “You expect me to lie with him.”