by E. B. Brown
“I saw ye that night, when ye visited with him. I followed him into the woods. I watched him take ye, in the dirt, like an animal.” His throat constricted as he swallowed. “I thought of nothing but saving thee after that,” he said quietly.
“I didn’t need to be saved. I loved him,” she whispered, tears bursting forth on her pale cheeks. “He is dead, and I love him still.”
His lips twisted, and she saw a glimmer of wetness at the edge of his eye.
“I thought I was the better man, but I am not,” he said softly, and in that moment all her feelings of tenderness toward him evaporated and she hated every ounce of his soul. “Charles told the others what we heard. I could not stop him. He’s accused ye of witchcraft. They want to hang thee, ye know.”
“And you? Would you see me hang?” she asked, her chin tilting up a notch with her words.
“Yes, my wife,” he murmured. “I will.”
He closed the door behind him when he left, and the latch clicked to lock. She sat down on the bed in the room to wait.
***
They came for her at dawn.
She imagined a more orderly abduction, sure the English would treat a woman prisoner in a better fashion than Nemattanew had treated her, yet she was chagrined to discover just how brutal the cultivated whites could be. Bound fist and ankle, her mouth gagged with a dirty bit of rag, she succumbed to the arrest without a fight.
Benjamin watched from a few paces away. By his side stood Charles Potts, his hand resting on Benjamin’s shoulder in an apparent show of sympathy.
Someone was laughing, a frivolous, shrieking howl that near curled her toes inside her leather boots. It was not until they hurled her up into the wagon that she realize the laughter came from her own lips, only slightly muffled for their efforts to quiet her.
“This is ridiculous!” she screamed, the words emitted as a slur amidst her howling. Jonathon Pace bent over to tie her hands to the bench, and when he came in range, she butted her head against his with a crack. He uttered a rather feminine scream and fell back holding his nose, and then Charles leapt into the wagon.
“She hit me! The witch broke me nose!”
Charles glanced at the bleeding man, and then to Maggie. She shrugged her shoulders and rolled her eyes, and shouted a few foul responses into the rag before Charles lifted his revolver over her head.
“I’ll clout ye, witch. No more trouble, ye hear?” he snapped.
Bound beyond any hope of moving, her hands tied to the bench at her side, what other option did she have? She nodded in agreement and slid back as far as she could away from them.
“It’s a half-day ride to James City, best ye spend it praying fer yer black soul,” Charles added. He gave his companion a kerchief from his pocket, and they all settled back for the ride.
Chapter 21
Thump. Thump.
Maggie grimaced at the infernal banging noise, her eyes still sealed shut from sleep.
Thump.
Damnit, there it was again. The back of her head began to ache, the steady pain washing through her skull in a rhythmic throb. She cracked her swollen eyelids and saw her hands sitting in her lap, bound by a coarse length of rope twisted into a double knot. The wagon lurched, and her head snapped back.
Thump.
The noise was her own head banging against the wooden wagon brace.
She adjusted her hips and squirmed back up against the pole, moving as little as possible when she spotted the three men resting across from her. Jonathon Pace and Charles Potts, still there. Great, the English had sent her to death accompanied by two village idiots. Not that it mattered anymore how her life ended, but she did take slight offense at the fact that her security team was chosen from among the incompetent.
Benjamin was the third man. While the two half-wits slumped dozing along with the rocking of the wagon, Benjamin sat across from her, his long legs sprawled so that his heels touched her toes, his arms crossed over his chest. He was staring straight at her.
Maggie bent her legs and pushed hard with her feet to shove away from him, which was not much considering that her ankles were still bound. He slowly uncrossed his arms and sat up, leaning forward toward her, and she shrunk back as flat as she could against the wagon brace. His lips twisted at her evasion, but he continued to breach the space between them, placing two fingers to his mouth in an effort to silence her. He eyed the other two men, and once satisfied they slept, he swiftly moved across the wagon to take the bench beside her. His lips bent to her ear, but he did not touch her.
“Answer me one question, Maggie,” he whispered. “Do you love Winn still?”
Her eyes felt too swollen to shed more tears, and thankfully, they were, because the sound of his name sliced through her heart like a blade and it was all she could do not to scream herself senseless. Did Benjamin wish to torture her, as if her mind were not already filled with visions of Winn as she rode to her death? How surely she had misjudged him, thinking Benjamin had a kind heart inside his stately façade.
“I love him still. I have never stopped,” she said softly in reply. There was no more reason for lies between them. She expected the confirmation to wound him further, and wondered if he would be happy to see her hang. Perhaps she deserved his anger for her deceit, but she never imagined him such a callous beast.
Benjamin closed his eyes for several a moments, and then nodded, as if agreeing to his own internal dialogue. When he opened them, he took her bound hands to his lips and kissed them softly.
“Then go. Go to him.”
She panicked. What was he talking about? She had no time to consider his request before he leaned over and cut free her bound ankles. Jonathon Pace stood up, and when he saw what Benjamin meant to do he reached for his pistol. Benjamin was faster, and took only a moment to wrestle the gun away and then shoot him point blank in the chest with his own pistol. His blue eyes were cool but sure when Charles jumped to his feet, saw his dead friend, and threw himself at Benjamin as the wagon came skidding to a stop.
“You killed him! You’ll hang for this, Dixon!” Charles shouted, his eyes darting from his dead friend to the eerily calm Benjamin.
Maggie heard horses screaming and the wagon lurched when the second shot went off, but she kept hanging onto the bench with her fingertips as the wagon tipped dangerously sideways.
With the second man wounded, but still struggling, Benjamin glanced back at her.
“Benjamin!”
“Get out! Go, now!” he shouted. “So help me, Maggie, get out of this wagon! I won’t see you hang! Go!”
He lifted his hand to point, urging her to make escape, but when he turned his palm Maggie caught her breath, her feet frozen in place. Singed into his bare hand, pale and aged, was a carved entwined scar. A knot that looked exactly like her own.
“Benjamin?” she whispered. Their eyes met one last time.
“Go!” he roared, then launched himself at Charles.
She braced against the beam and looked out the back, stumbling as the wagon shifted and falling to her knees. The wagon finally ground to a stop, and she took the moment to jump out, landing on her hands and knees in the frigid creek bed. She scrambled to gather her sodden dress in her bound hands and crawled forward, making it up on one leg before she tripped on the heavy fabric and fell face forward again.
The sound of screams and gunfire suddenly broke from the front wagon in the caravan, the cries of both horses and men shattering the air. She spit up creek water and tried to push herself back onto her knees, knowing she only had moments before they chased her. Bracing herself on her palms, she wrenched her skirt up to her thighs and rose up on bruised knees when she heard the splashing of footsteps through the water beside her.
She slowly looked up. Two chiseled legs attached to beaded moccasins stood before her, water dripping off the gleaming bronze skin. The familiar face attached to the legs glared down at her, his face streaked with red war paint and his chest splattered with blood. He
r heart sank as Makedewa bent down with one hand and swiftly jerked her to her feet, knife in his other hand.
She knew her pleas would mean nothing to him, and she would not give him the joy of seeing her beg before he gutted her. She closed her eyes and waited for the blow. Puzzled when it did not arrive, she cracked one eye to peer at him, and watched as he slid the blade between her wrists and cut her bonds free.
“You are much trouble, Red Woman,” he growled. “Come!”
He pulled her through the shallow creek, away from the melee. She looked back at the caravan and shuddered, seeing dozens of Indians in battle with the English. One of the horses was down, struggling to rise, but caught in the stays of the wagon and unable to stand. Braves on their war ponies crashed through the water, their shrieks overtaking the cries of the English. She wondered where Benjamin was, and grabbed Makedewa’s arm.
“We have to help Benjamin! He killed two men to help me escape- we can’t leave him to die!”
“No! We leave now!” he shouted. She balked and twisted away when he tried to lift her up, his hands like steel around her waist as he refused to let her go back. More warriors approached, a sorrel pony leading them, the gleaming warrior astride its back afire with rage.
His chest and face smeared with red war paint, his head flanked by a crescent of black tipped eagle feathers, his face was contorted as he screamed their fierce cry, water spraying around him as he galloped toward them down the creek bed. She realized Makedewa meant to pass her off to the rider and she tried to twist away from him.
Makedewa gripped her forearms with a grunt as the rider thundered toward them, and in the moment before he thrust her upward into the warrior’s outstretched arm she wondered if she imagined the flash of bright blue eyes beneath the paint.
The horse scrambled up the riverbank until it was on solid ground, and she grasped its mane to keep from falling off. Half perched, sliding against his chest, he yanked her closer as another rider approached. She recognized Chetan as the man in all his war glory, all trace of his gentle nature shadowed by his finery. He nodded at them.
“Go. Take her. We will finish this.” Chetan issued the order and immediately spun his pony around to rejoin the fight. Had even Chetan abandoned her, and agreed to obey Opechancanough by seeing her dead?
She had no power to speak, afraid to utter a single syllable or to even look at the warrior behind her. The horse carried them up through a hill pass, then burrowed down deep through a valley where they put space between them and the English. They came upon a familiar formation splitting the mountains, where a waterfall graced a narrow ledge. The horse navigated the path with a steady pace, and Maggie gasped as they passed through the waterfall.
She sat soaked and shaking, but the warrior gave nothing away, and they made tracks out the back of the waterfall around a small freshwater pool and then through a crevice which led to a sloped grassy alcove.
They had been there together once before. Unchanged since that day, yet still different than when she would live there, the site of her future home awaited them. She remembered him dancing away from the brown bear, saving her life. He took her heart into his that day, and she realized with a pang of despair it was no longer hers to control.
The mouth of a cave was partially concealed in the jagged rock crevice. The rider sat back and the horse came obediently to a stop.
She thought she had no tears left, but when the warrior dipped his head to her shoulder and his arms tightened around her waist, tears came. His voice, strained and low, echoed against her ear.
“Go inside, Tentay teh. A fire burns. I will return soon.”
Part Four
Broken between the layers
Chapter 22
Maggie could not control the shaking that wracked her body, and if it stemmed from the cold or the knowledge that Winn lived, she did not know. The long muslin dress was soaked through, the fabric wrapped around her legs and the weight of the layers still pulling her down. She knew she had to get warm. Standing above the tiny fire, she began to unfasten the front of her shift, but her fingers were numb and slipped off the tiny buttons. Her teeth chattered and snapped together as the shaking overcame her again, and this time it brought her to her knees.
Winn entered the cave entrance as she gave up on her bindings and pulled a fur up around her shoulders. His blue eyes locked with hers as he slowly approached, his gaze never wavering even as the fur slid from her shoulders in a heap around her hips. The traveling sack fell out of his hand and he dropped to his knees beside her.
“You’re here. You’re really here,” she whispered.
It was all a lie. Winn was warm and breathing in front of her. She needed to tell him everything, tell him about the child, and tell him how much she loved him. She needed to touch him, to feel his skin, to know he was there. It was the only way she could be certain he was not one of her dreams.
“You’re freezing,” he said softly.
Her eyes glazed over and Winn was a blur as bent to help her. He knelt beside her, and she felt the fabric of her shift give way. He tore it top to bottom, and continued to rip sopping wet fabric from her body until she collapsed in his arms, completely bared before him. She felt him gather her against his warm skin, sharing his heat. He wrapped a dry fur around them both and lay down next to the fire, rubbing her arms to return blood to her frigid limbs.
Maggie reached for him, but his hand circled her wrist and stopped her attempt. He brought her palm upward and gently pressed it to his lips, closing his eyes.
“Oh, Winn,” she whispered. He grasped her face in both hands, his eyes searing through to her soul, no questions between them to shatter their stolen moment. When she thought she might beg him, he finally bent his head to hers, his warm mouth covering her own shaking lips. He tasted and savored, a gentle exploration that left her breathless with desire. She moved closer in his arms, and a strangled groan escaped him when she laid a hand over the ragged healing scar on his bare chest. He abruptly pulled back, holding her at the length of his arms as if she burned. Confused by his actions, and trembling at the loss of his warmth, she bit back her rising fear. Surely, he would not refuse her now?
“Maggie. I have a gift for you,” he said, his voice low and strained. He pulled the fallen fur up over her shoulders, his motions mechanical. A measure of fear replaced her confusion, washing through her blood and leaving a sickly bile sensation in her belly, and when he held the gift out she stifled her cry.
He held the Bloodstone out to her. When she did not move to take it, he placed it in her hands and stood up, his face a vacant mask that betrayed no hint of the man she loved.
“You will use the Bloodstone to return…to return to your time,” he said. “We will leave when night falls. I will see you safely home.”
“No, Winn, I won’t go.”
“You will. There is nothing for you here.”
She blinked back tears. Anger began to replace her despair, rising rapidly to snatch what control she had left. She could not believe he was casting her away, as if he felt nothing for her. Her pride refused to accept his answer, and with shaking fists clenched to her sides she glared back at his impassioned face. She grasped the fur to her shoulders and stood to follow him.
“There is nothing here for me, Winn? Then why did you save me from the English?”
“I would not see them hang you. And it pleased me to take you from your white husband.” His dismissal stung, but still inflamed her.
“So you do care,” she accused. He grabbed her by both shoulders, the fur sinking to the ground in a heap. His eyes bored through her and his fingers dug painfully into her skin.
“Do I care you chose the English man? I did one time, but no more. You went to his bed. I would not lie between your thighs now where he left his seed.”
She slapped him. He turned his cheek but remained otherwise still, although his grip on her arm tightened. Stunned at his lack of emotion, she moved to strike him again, but this tim
e he grabbed her wrist and twisted it, then dropped it as if it burned him.
He turned and left her alone, staring at the stone.
Stunned, she could find no words. She stared at the Bloodstone. It was her Bloodstone, the one she arrived with, the one he hid from her all along. She turned it over in her hand, felt the warmth that spread up her arm. Yes, Winn had kept the stone from her. But would a man who worked so hard to keep her trapped in his time suddenly have a change of heart? For weeks now she had thought him dead. Had he stopped loving her in that time as well? How could he abandon her when she needed him the most? He owed her an explanation.
Maggie clutched the fur around her shoulders and followed him. The bottoms of her feet felt numb as she stumbled down the rocky incline path to the waterfall. By the time she found him, he was immersed in the cold shallow spring beneath the falls, the sound of the rushing water disguising her arrival. The water tinted pink around him from his war paint and it dissipated into the depths as he moved. He stood waist deep with his back to her, his shoulders flaring as he shook water from his raven hair.
She swallowed hard as she spied on him. The horses stood nibbling grass beside the overhang of the waterfall, eyeing her as she approached but doing nothing to betray her intrusion. Maggie let the fur drop as he left the water, his back still to her as he reached for his breechclout.
His mouth gaped in surprise when he finally spotted her. She stood before him, trembling with her resolve to tame him, yet hungry to be back in his arms. He started to speak, but she placed her fingers against his lips, shaking her head.
“You are a stubborn fool, Winkeohkwet. When did you turn into such a-such a half man?” she taunted him. “I thought you were brave-you said you would always protect me! Was that a lie, Winn? A lie from a sorry excuse for a man?”
