After the Thunder

by Genell Dellin

  “You truly don’t remember, do you?” he said. “You fulfilled my prophecy but you don’t remember it, and that makes me feel quite forgettable, myself.”

  She laughed, too.

  “What in the world are you talking about?”

  But she almost knew. Suddenly, a frisson of memory ran through her mind but she couldn’t quite catch it.

  “On the contrary, Cotannah Chisk-Ko,” he said, slowly as if quoting the words, “someday you will seek me out.”

  The words rang in her head like so many cool, short strikes of the clapper in a silver bell. Then she knew, and her blood leapt in her veins, brought her hands to his shoulders again to cling to him.

  “You!” she cried. “I cannot believe it’s you. You stole me in the Stealing Partners Dance when I was waiting for Tay!”

  His wide, topaz eyes, bright in his dark face, were probing hers in the moonlight.

  “You were wearing a hat and it was dark,” she said defensively. “I never saw your eyes or your face that night.”

  How, how could she not have known when now she knew that she had found her man? How could she have forgotten that she’d seen him before?

  A great confusion of feelings began rising in her, just as they had done on that long-ago evening when her heart had been so heavy and he had taken her hand and led her to dance like a feather in the wind.

  “I knew you on the Texas Road,” he said.

  “You should have told me then!”

  “No. You have to learn to look at other people instead of only yourself.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Think about it.”

  But she didn’t even care. What she wanted to know was how that first encounter with him had happened.

  “Where did you come from that night?” she demanded. “And how did you know my name, even then?”

  “I asked someone.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged.

  “I saw you the minute I walked onto the dance ground. You looked so full of life, so full of spirit, so full of feelings of every kind, that I wanted to kiss you then.”

  “I was crazy in love with Tay, or at least I thought I was. You taunted me about that. You were making rude, judgmental remarks to me, even then,” she said, laughing.

  She made her hands into fists and pounded him gently.

  “So I should have recognized you on Race Day when you told me I was degrading myself!”

  He held her gaze, but a slight confusion, almost a chagrin, shadowed his eyes.

  “Well!” she said, teasing him. “Maybe you have the grace to be a little bit embarrassed by your bossiness.”

  He grinned, such a lopsided, bad-boy grin that she wanted to kiss him again.

  “I make rude, judgmental remarks only to make you think,” he said.

  “I am thinking now,” she said. “I’m thinking all the time, and I’m going to change my ways, so you don’t have to say rude things to me anymore.”

  He laughed.

  “If you really mean that.”

  “I do.”

  They stared at each other through the thick silence that fell them.

  “That’s good to hear,” he said. “It’s a great relief to me, Cotannah. The strong life forces in you have been rushing in every direction and opposing each other—it’s enough to make you explode like powder in a gun.”

  She looked at him for a long while without speaking.

  “That’s true,” she said.

  “So listen to your spirits inside and the ones outside you to know what you should do to send them all in the same direction.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  “Yes.”

  “And are you happy?”

  Surprise flickered in the back of his eyes. It made her heart turn over.

  No one has ever asked him that before. No one has ever cared, Cotannah thought.

  “Most of the time,” he said slowly.

  He’s so vulnerable, really, so alone.

  “When are you not happy?”

  The surprise in his eyes changed to resentment.

  No one ever questions him or passes judgment on him. It’s always the other way around.

  “You have said some very personal things to me,” she said. “Turnabout is fair play.”

  “When I’m … lonely,” he said, at last.

  “Your friends Basak and Taloa are always with you.”

  “Sometimes I …” He looked at her straight in the eye. “All creatures at some times need their own kind,” he said. “That’s a new thing I’m learning lately.”

  She felt a clutch at her heart.

  “So,” she teased, to try to stop it, “you miss me when I’m not around? You get lonesome when there’s no one to spy on and say rude things to?”

  He smiled, but he looked uncomfortable, and his shoulders tightened. He was regretting that he’d talked about his feelings at all.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” she said quickly. “I learned that same thing when I first went to live at the ranch, when I met Emily and Maggie and began to see what it would be like to have friends, real friends for the first time in my life. Within days, Emily was my very first best friend, and I felt like I’d known her forever.”

  “So that made it even worse that you both loved Tay.”

  He made the flat statement knowingly, yet there was questioning in his eyes. He wanted to hear the whole story from her. And why not? He had been there, he had taken her hand, on that terrible night when Tay never chose her to dance.

  And he wanted to kiss her ever since that long-ago time.

  So she sat down, then stretched out to her full length in the cool grass beneath the moon, and looked back into the past.

  “I had thought I would marry Tay Nashoba for years and years—since the day he came home from the War,” she said. “And the minute I first thought it, right there in the middle of the street in Tuskahoma, I blurted it out to him and told him to wait until I could grow up. From that moment on, Tay was my dream of my future.”

  To her total surprise, Cotannah began to pour out her heart—about Tay and about Emily, about her mother’s death and how she’d always missed her, and, to her own deep shock, even the details of the twin horrors of Headmaster Haynes and being kidnapped by the bandidos. How could she hope to win his respect and approval if she told him all this?

  But Walks-With-Spirits stretched out beside her and listened without saying a word, only making a sound now and then to let her know that she should go on. When she was done, at last, they stayed as they were for a long time. Finally, she turned and looked at him where he still lay with his hands tucked behind his head as she was. The moon was dropping low in the sky.

  “Thank you for listening,” she said, a little embarrassed. “I’ve never told all that to anyone before. So many bad things have happened to me that I always refuse to talk about them.”

  He smiled at her, his eyes golden in the waning moonlight.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I never meant to destroy your peace even more with all my old turmoil,” she said.

  “You didn’t. You brought yourself peace, instead.”

  She nodded slowly, surprised, as his words sank in, that they held so much truth.

  “You’re right,” she said, “I did.”

  His next remark deepened her surprise to consternation.

  “Next time we talk I’ll tell you my childhood and how I came to the New Nation.”

  Next time! He wanted to talk with her again. Her breath caught. He might want to kiss her again, too.

  A look passed between them then, a new kind of look that held no judgment, no reserve from him and no flirting from her. A look of knowing, as if they knew each other now, although he had told her very little.

  A look that shook her to the bone.

  “I … I need to get on back to Tall Pine,” she said. “It’ll be morning soon, and neither of us needs to give any more grist
to the gossip mill.”

  He got up, then, and so did she.

  She felt such a warmth in the air between them, but it wasn’t the tension that precedes a kiss. It was more the feeling between friends.

  He felt it, too—she knew because of the way he smiled and said, “Go safely, Friend.”

  She smiled back at him and began walking away, but the word caught and held her as if he had taken her heart in his hand.

  Because it was right, they were friends, he was her first new friend, real friend, since … Emily. But how could a real friend of hers possibly be a man? A man who kissed her like no man she’d ever known.

  Halfway to Tall Pine, a realization hit her.

  Walks-With-Spirits had been her friend from that first day’s supper. He wouldn’t have censured her or criticized her behavior if he didn’t care something about her; he wouldn’t have told her she was degrading herself if it hadn’t bothered him to see it. Another thought followed that one like thunder after a bolt of lightning.

  He had been her friend from the very beginning two years ago because during the dance he had asked her needle-sharp questions about Tay. To try to make her think about Tay’s actions and feelings toward her. If she had listened to him and used her head, she might have saved herself a lot of grief.

  During the dance.

  She tucked her hair behind her ear and began to race away from him.

  The dance Walks-With-Spirits had danced with her, the dance he had also predicted they would share again someday, was the Wedding Dance.

  Chapter 8

  It was an hour after daybreak when she slipped into the house through the back door because she had wandered slowly across the fields in the dawn light, thinking about everything and feeling how the sliding stones of her consciousness had settled. Listening to her inside spirits, as Walks-With-Spirits had put it. The talk with him had helped her immensely, but she was proud of the fact that she’d known when she went to see him that she would take charge of her life. Now she would do it. There would be no more men like Jacob anywhere near her, ever again.

  The sound of voices coming from down the hall startled her, and she closed the door silently behind her and stopped still until she could know who was up and about. She didn’t want to see anyone right now, not even Emily. She wanted to go to her room and remember Walks-With-Spirits’s kiss one more time and then sleep.

  “We’re here to petition you, Chief Nashoba,” a rough male voice said. “You must tell the witch called Walks-With-Spirits to leave the Nation. He must be gone before Grandfather Sun comes and goes three times more.”

  Cotannah’s stomach lurched. The voice was truly vicious.

  It was coming from Tay’s study, the large room across from the parlor where he conducted a great deal of tribal business. She glanced through the window lights on each side of the front door at the opposite end of the hallway from where she stood and glimpsed several saddled horses tied in the front yard.

  Tay’s rich tones sounded then, answering the rude command with a calm as great as that man’s agitation, saying, “There’re as many of the People who believe Walks-With-Spirits is an alikchi as there are who think he’s a witch.”

  “Last night he proved what he is!” the man shouted. “We saw that he possesses strong medicine and that it’s black medicine. Jacob Charley is young and strong, yet the witch whipped him soundly, quickly. Too quickly for a human to do.”

  Someone else spoke up.

  “The witch said that Jacob Charley, one of our most prominent citizens, does not deserve to live, and he put a death curse on him. Next thing we know, the witch will kill the innocent Jacob, by his hand or by his incantations, if we don’t run him out of the Nation.”

  “Seems to me that it was Jacob who threatened to shoot Walks-With-Spirits like he did the coyote,” Tay said mildly. “Maybe it’s Walks-With-Spirits who’s in danger.”

  “Ha! Didn’t you see? Didn’t you hear? Jacob is in danger from the curse!”

  Then several voices spoke out all at once, all angry. Immediately, then, came the sounds of chairs scraping on the floor and footsteps. Cotannah dashed down the hallway and into the empty parlor.

  She didn’t want that bunch of fanatics to see her—why, they’d probably say she should be sentenced to a whipping for calling the dangerous Walks-With-Spirits down on poor, innocent Jacob’s head!

  Standing against the wall, she held her breath until the group of five men, followed by the ever-courteous Tay, had filed past the parlor and out the front door onto the veranda. There Tay talked to them for a moment more—she could see him through the window—and then they mounted their horses and rode out of the yard.

  Tay, frowning thoughtfully, came back into the house, and she stepped out into the hallway to meet him. He raised his eyebrows in surprise and smiled at her.

  “Tay, I am so sorry about all that happened last evening,” she said. “It’s my fault that these people are coming here putting you in such an impossible position.”

  “Cotannah,” he said, “a Principal Chief is in an impossible position the minute he’s elected.”

  “Maybe so, but those men sounded so adamant about forcing you to run Walks-With-Spirits out of the Nation! By acting like a stupid flirting fool, I’ve caused all this controversy about him to be stirred up again.”

  He took her hand in both of his and patted it consolingly.

  “No, none of this is your fault,” he said. “Walks-With-Spirits is always the subject of controversy because people don’t understand him. Come with me to the kitchen for coffee, and I’ll tell you about the first time I ever saw him.”

  “You’re as gallant as ever, Tay,” she said, as they walked down the hall side by side. “But right now that can’t distract me. I’m too worried that that bunch will try to force Walks-With-Spirits out of the Nation themselves, when they find out that you won’t do it—they sounded so mean and vicious when they said the word, ‘witch.’”

  Then a worse thought hit her.

  “Oh, Tay, do you think Jacob would try to make good on that threat to shoot him the way he did his pet …”

  She paused, practically hearing Walks-With-Spirits’s voice saying that the animals were his friends, not his pets, “… the way he shot Taloa?”

  “No,” he said, and he sounded so calm and sure that he allayed her fears instantly. “Now that Jacob’s said that in front of witnesses, he’d be scared to carry it out because Olmun, his father, believes Walks-With-Spirits is a true shaman, and Olmun’s money has always supported Jacob.”

  He stepped back for her to go ahead of him into the kitchen, but she stopped in the hallway.

  “Thanks for the offer of coffee, but I think I’ll just go to my room now,” she said. “I want to ask you one more thing, though. What was Walks-With-Spirits saying to you after the fight last night?”

  “He was telling me in no uncertain terms to keep a closer eye on you, Miss ’Tannah,” he said, smiling down at her affectionately. “He’s afraid you’ll get into even bigger trouble next time.”

  She didn’t even feel the resentment she usually felt at being treated like a child; instead she felt a thrilling warmth that Walks-With-Spirits was so protective of her. But that was because she had this new strong, calm confidence. Because she was different now.

  “There won’t be any next time,” she said, smiling back at him. “I did a lot more thinking than sleeping last night, and I’ve changed my whole outlook. I won’t be getting into trouble anymore, I promise you.”

  Surprise, and then gladness, flashed across his face.

  “I’ll count on that when it comes to men like Jacob,” he said. “But it’s hard for me to imagine you, the famous Cotannah Chisk-Ko, not attracting any trouble at all.”

  They both laughed, and she gave him a quick hug before she turned and ran up the stairs. Life was full of irony. Two years ago, she would never have dreamed that Tay and Emily, who had betrayed her, would already be her best friends aga
in.

  Except for Walks-With-Spirits, who she had thought felt only scorn for her. Would he turn out to be her best friend of all?

  For most of Saturday and Sunday, she spent her time alone, getting accustomed to the rearrangement of thoughts and attitudes in her head. Her promise to Tay further confirmed her new resolve to take herself in hand—she could already tell that it wouldn’t be hard to do.

  And that was because of what Walks-With-Spirits had done for her. In some mysterious way, he had made her believe in herself and her instincts again the way she did when she was ten years old and eleven and twelve and thirteen, before she’d ever gone to the Academy in Arkansas, before she’d ever seen Headmaster Haynes.

  Monday morning she was up before dawn, leaning out her window to breathe in the crisp air of the frosty fall morning that called to her like a song. It was cold, she thought, shivering in her nightgown as she ran to the armoire and pulled out her beloved old cord breeches that always seemed too heavy for the Texas weather and the loose jacket that matched; an outfit of Cade’s when he was a boy.

  When she was growing up, wearing them had made her feel closer to her often-absent brother, and on this glorious morning the thought of him actually made her smile. He’d be surprised when he found out she didn’t need him to boss her around anymore.

  This would be fun, riding out and seeing the frost on the leaves, watching the fall coming to the trees and mountains. This was one thing she loved about the Nation over the ranch in Texas: the definite change of the seasons and the always-shifting weather.

  She grabbed a faded cap knitted from red wool that someone—maybe some ancestor of Tay’s—had left on the top shelf and stuffed her hair up under it so she didn’t have to mess with it and miss the sunrise, ran from the room and down the stairs on tiptoe, hoping no one would wake. She didn’t want any company on this early-morning ride but if she ran across Walks-With-Spirits somewhere out there in the woods, now that would be fine.