After the Thunder

by Genell Dellin

  Except to reach out and pull her to him.

  His lips hurt for another kiss, his tongue cried out for another taste of her, his arms ached to hold her. His very blood burned with the sudden, coursing need to know how it would be to lie down with her—here in front of the fire, to press her whole body against his, to strip off their clothes and feel the yielding of flesh against flesh and the shimmering heat of the fire on one side, the cool nipping of the night breeze from the window on the other. Or to carry her outside into the night beneath the waxing moon and make sweet, sweet love with her until the moon went down and the sun came up.

  The thought set fire to the inside of his skin, gave his body complete control over his spirit.

  He couldn’t let himself think this way, he could not.

  If he kissed her again and again, he would hold her and do more and that would only make it harder, much harder for him to meet his fate with a serene mind and spirit. A stab of panic cut through him. Could he regain his harmony? It had been disturbed ever since the first time he had laid eyes on Cotannah, yet whenever they kissed, he had never felt so attuned to his soul, body, and spirit, to the Earth Mother and the Great Spirit.

  Yet now, at this moment, he had never felt such a tumult.

  Nor had she, judging by the noise she was making.

  His kiss had moved her deeply. If he ever hoped to help her prepare to go on with her life without him, he must not so much as touch her again.

  She appeared in the doorway with a bucket in her hand.

  “I’m going for fresh water,” she said, her eyes wild in the glow from the lamp.

  “Let me.”

  “No! I have to do something,” she cried.

  She ran across to the door and out into the night.

  He got up and paced back and forth in front of the fire, his whole body aching for her. But if he ever hoped to dissuade her from this hopeless quest to save him, he must not touch her anymore. He bent his head to his hand in despair. Now he didn’t want the quest to be hopeless, he wanted to stay in this world, to stay with her, and, if that was so, how could he ever pass to the other world with a scrap of true peace left to him?

  This was so shallow, so wrong, to be so enamored of the sensations of his mortal body that he let desire steal his peace. He tried to cling to that thought but as he stared into the flames his spirit saw that his feelings for Cotannah were more, far more, than those of his mortal body. Truly, she fit into his soul although he could not know why or how.

  She came back into the cabin like the whirlwind she’d become, filled the coffeepot and hung it over the fire, went back into the kitchen without a word. He followed, and the minute he stepped silently into the room, she knew he was there. She turned to him, conflict raging in her beautiful face.

  “Tell them the truth when we get back to Tuskahoma,” she said. “Please, Walks-With-Spirits. Half the Nation or more will believe the words of an alikchi. Tell them you didn’t mean the curse, so it didn’t kill Jacob. Tell them because that may be our only chance.”

  “Don’t,” he said, gripping the doorframe to keep from going to her and taking her into his arms. “Please, Cotannah, don’t worry like this.”

  “I can’t help it. Will you tell them?”

  Pure despair sharpened the edges of her voice.

  “How can I? What if it’s true? I did say the incantation, after all. You heard me.”

  She gripped the edges of the table with both hands. Her soft skin—oh, his fingertips and his lips knew how soft it was!—stretched tighter across her bones, hardened the beauty of her features.

  “Did you hear me when I said that you are too good in your spirit to ever kill anyone? I saw you with Sophie and I sensed how much you wanted to stop her pain. I felt your righteous wrath when you saved me from Jacob. You were angry—that’s all the curse was, just angry words coming out of your mouth. That incantation didn’t have your spirit in it, so it had no power.”

  She was trembling, and her voice shook, her eyes were wilder still. At this rate she would never stay whole through the hard days to come.

  It would be easier for her not to carry so much hope that might be misplaced. He walked to the table and leaned toward her, held her eyes with his. “I wish I knew that as surely as you do,” he said. “But you didn’t see inside my heart as I said those words over Jacob. At that moment, Cotannah, I wanted him dead.”

  He stared deep into her eyes, willing her to listen, to know this.

  “I felt so protective of you and so jealous of him—never, ever have I felt so strongly about anything,” he said. “Those feelings I had were strong enough to kill him, no matter what we both would like to believe.”

  “Jacob had enemies,” she said stubbornly. “He was not a good person, Shadow, dear. His own actions killed him, not your few words.”

  A sharp, new sensation ran through him. A thrill.

  “What did you call me?”

  “Shadow,” she said, smiling. “You appear and disappear silently, like a shadow.”

  He smiled back.

  “A nickname.”

  Her smiled broadened.

  “Yes. A nickname for you, Mr. Alikchi, sir.”

  He couldn’t stop smiling at her, couldn’t stop hearing the affection in her voice. But he mustn’t forget what he was about, here, mustn’t let her fall in love with him. And he mustn’t fall in love with her.

  “Listen, Cotannah, my darling, and listen well,” he said. “No matter what I might say to the judges it would make no difference. That death curse convinced too many people that I am a witch.”

  She looked at him with the storm still raging in her eyes, then, gradually, it died down. “I go by my instincts that you once called earthbound,” she said, speaking slowly, as if working out her conclusions in her head as she spoke. “Those instincts tell me that there’s more to Jacob’s death than meets the eye. They tell me it wasn’t a natural death, because he was young and healthy and very strong. So I’m going to keep on looking to see what I can find out.”

  “Usually I’m all in favor of hope,” he said, around the lump that was forming in his throat. “But in this case it’s going to make you hurt so much more, Cotannah. Look at the state you’re already in.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “Out of old habits, I’ve let my feelings get out of hand here, but I’m in control again. Really, my darling, I’m calm inside. I really am. Finding out how Jacob died, trying to prove that you didn’t kill him—that gives me a purpose like I’ve never had in my life before.”

  He heard it all, but it was the endearment, the sweet quoting of the words that he had said to her that rang in his ears like a bell. Her voice was filled with so many feelings that he knew she not only meant them but that she understood everything he was trying to tell her as well.

  She nodded, as if she had read his mind.

  “Jacob had enemies,” she said again, but very calmly. “Everyone knows that.”

  “So tomorrow you’ll go on to see this Folsom Greentree?”

  “Yes. Will you go with me?”

  “Yes. I’m going to protect you until the day I die.”

  Quick tears sprang to her eyes.

  “Please prepare yourself, just in case,” he said softly. “One thing to remember is that I can’t ever be at peace or find my balance again if I sully my honor by swearing that my curse didn’t kill Jacob when I don’t know for sure if that’s true.”

  She went pale around her eyes, at the sides of her nostrils.

  “That helps me some,” she said, just as softly, “but not as much as clearing your name will do. Even if I, God forbid, should fail to find out what the secret is about Jacob’s death, I have to leave no stone unturned. Cade told me that my thoughtless selfishness would cause a killing someday, and now it has. I have no choice but to do everything in my power to stop it from causing the Lighthorse to kill you.”

  He stared at her in the kitchen’s lamplight, willing her to under
stand. Praying that she would hear him.

  “And I have no choice but to uphold my honor. One reason I now see—and it is because of you—is that if I refuse to run away, if I practice the old Choctaw way and return to accept my sentence after being set free for my last days, I will help to strengthen the old traditions against the culture of the white man.”

  He paused to let that soak in, telling her with his eyes not to speak.

  “When I say this thought came to me because of you, I speak true,” he said, too quickly, because it scared him to think how much she already had come to mean to him. “Most of the time the healing I do and the connections I make affect animals in the woods and the Earth Mother, but not a human person.”

  Her lips parted and her eyes grew huge and shiny. For an instant he feared that he had made her cry, but she didn’t. She was listening intently, taking in his words, thinking about them.

  “When you met me on the road that morning beside the Tulli Creek and said that you believed your flirting with Jacob had caused my death sentence, I understood, suddenly, how one person’s decisions could be said to cause another to act in a certain way, that people’s lives do tie together when they live in a community.”

  He waited, but she only looked at him, her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. He felt a stab of surprise at her quietness. And hope. He was getting through to her.

  “Now, because of you and your honor, which demands that you try to get me out of this death sentence because you think you got me into it,” he said, “I want my actions to affect other people’s lives. I see that I strengthen their honor when I satisfy my own.”

  “So,” she said softly, “you will die so that your life will affect other people.”

  He nodded.

  “Because of you,” he said.

  “But don’t you see?” she said, triumphantly. “That proves that you agree with me: it is my actions that have brought you to this terrible pass.”

  His heart clutched as an awful sincerity suffused her face.

  “That means that now you also must agree that I cannot stop trying to save you.”

  She searched his eyes.

  “You understand that now, don’t you, Walks-With-Spirits?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled, a glittering, unexpected pleasure to see, a new smile like sun coming out on snow. His heart gave a quick, hard stroke and began to beat faster and faster.

  “So you’ll start to help me now. You’ll use your powers and help me at Greentree’s place?”

  He couldn’t trust himself to speak, so he answered with a nod. He would go with her to protect her and help her all he could to make her happy, even if he did still think that there might be no information to find because he might’ve killed Jacob.

  The main reason he would go was to protect her. That came first. And he would help because this search was something she had to do. He wasn’t going because he couldn’t bear to be separated from her now.

  No. It was not that at all.

  The next morning, riding through the countryside with Walks-With-Spirits seemed like a dream to Cotannah. They left the cabin behind and turned the horses toward the dazzling, new sun, and when they did, he took her completely into that present world and left all the past behind. And the future, too. She didn’t even think about what they might find at Greentree’s Crossing.

  From the moment she’d called him to breakfast from his bedroll which he had spread in the yard, he had showed her this familiar country she’d grown up in as if it were a brand-new place. He’d suggested that they sit on the cabin’s porch to eat so they could watch the squirrels gathering pecans in the yard and his talk about them, or maybe just the rich sound of his voice, had smoothed all the thoughts of the death sentence from her mind.

  Or maybe it was the sight of him that had filled all her senses until she couldn’t worry anymore. Now, one glance at his strong brown hands on the reins made her think of how he caressed her face, one glimpse of his sensual mouth made his taste spring strong to her lips, and she was lost in the delicious awareness of being alone with him in a beautiful country where the breeze blew brisk and cool and morning had come.

  The woods grew close to the path and then, in the open places, they could see out over the layers of purple mountains that rose and fell, higher and higher, until the color paled and faded away into the sky. They took a faint trail through the wooded hills that she remembered from her childhood, a shortcut to the road that led to Greentree’s Crossing.

  “When I was growing up, the muscadines were thick over there in that little gully,” she said. “I never tasted anything so delicious in all my life as they were when we came out to pick them on a frosty morning.”

  He nodded.

  “Frosty muscadines are a gift from the Earth Mother. Like falling stars from the Great Father Spirit.”

  She laughed.

  “I’ve never thought of wild grapes and falling stars in the same breath,” she said.

  “Frosty muscadines,” he said, “dusted with ice stars, they are the color of the sky at night.”

  She sensed him shift in the saddle, felt his eyes on her.

  “Aren’t they?”

  His voice held an edge of humor, the teasing tone that never failed to draw her to him. She couldn’t have kept from looking at him then, not for all the grapes and stars in the world, not even if she’d been trying to ignore him, which she certainly wasn’t.

  Yes. His lips were curved up at the corners in a trace of a smile and his topaz eyes twinkled with mischief like that of a small boy. She smiled back at him and clutched the horn of her saddle so she wouldn’t reach out to him with her hand. They had to keep going, truly they did.

  Without warning, the path led abruptly up the side of a steep, densely wooded hill and he went ahead of her, holding back tree branches and finding the faint trail. When they were almost at the top, he reined in and raised one hand to her in a signal to halt.

  It took a second for her to realize he’d stopped, that he was silent, and then the fear she’d been carrying in the pit of her stomach since his arrest leapt, full-blown, up into her throat.

  “What?”

  Instinctively, she kept her voice low and then said no more, but her hands were trembling and her thoughts were flying wild. Had someone followed them? Maybe the real killer had seen them leave Tall Pine together and surmised that they were looking for him!

  Or maybe Millard Sheets knew that she wasn’t Spanish at all. Maybe he had sent some Indian haters to follow her to Folsom Greentree’s and find out what she was really about!

  But Walks-With-Spirits didn’t seem afraid. He cocked his head and listened for a long moment more and then she heard it, too—low, panting groaning and clacking sounds of sticks struck together, almost like claves at a dance. Then some moaning and grunting and one furious bellowing made her know whatever it was that had stopped them wasn’t human at all.

  Walks-With-Spirits signaled with his raised hand and they rode a little farther up the trail. From there they could see what it was: two buck deer, their antlers locked in combat, pushing and pulling to try to get themselves free. Only a moment of watching showed that they were hopelessly caught, their racks so snarled and twisted into each other that it was impossible to see where one stopped and the other began.

  Their hides were darkened by sweat, their small hooves had dug great holes scrabbling desperately in the dirt.

  “Stay mounted,” Walks-With-Spirits whispered.

  He slid silently from his horse and walked toward the two, speaking to them softly. Not in English, not in Choctaw, but in grunts and snorts and growls. She held her breath. The deer seemed half-crazed, rolling their big brown eyes sideways at him, throwing dirt into the air and making awful noises. They moved back from him a little bit, still struggling, but he walked steadily toward them.

  She reached for the light rifle in the scabbard of her saddle. For the first time since arriving in the Nation she thought of it and w
as glad she was carrying it as she did on solitary rides at the ranch.

  But she didn’t need it. The deer began to calm as Walks-With-Spirits raised his voice and made them hear him. He walked closer, never hesitating, still talking to them. By the time he was close enough to run a hand over each of their withers, they stood quiet beneath the big oak tree.

  Walks-With-Spirits stroked each of them twice, talked to them some more and then reached for the tangled racks, pushing and pulling until the muscles of his shoulders bulged and color flooded into his face. He wrenched at them mightily and his arm muscles seemed on the very verge of bursting his shirtsleeves, stopped, took a deep breath, and wrenched at them again.

  At last they came undone. Suddenly, the deer realized they were free.

  They stood in place, breathing hard. Then they threw their heads up high and stood looking at him. Fiercely. For one endless moment they stood and stared at him, exhausted muscles quivering, sweaty hides shining in the streaks of sunlight while Cotannah wished she’d pulled the rifle, after all.

  But then some snuffling sounds passed among the three of them, Walks-With-Spirits grunted some last message to them. The deer wheeled in their tracks and vanished into the woods, each in a different direction. Cotannah sat her horse, staring in wonder.

  “They’re grateful,” Walks-With-Spirits said, as he walked toward her across the crackling leaves that had already fallen.

  She gaped at him.

  “How did you do that? How did you know their language?”

  “Cotannah,” he said, smiling, “you need to learn to listen as well as to see. You could speak their language, too, if you wanted.”

  He leapt onto his horse without pulling himself up with his hands, with only one light balancing touch on its neck.

  “You should be a likely one to speak the deer’s language,” he said, teasing her, “since you were a girl baby wrapped in a deerskin at birth.”

  She laughed.

  “But even if you were a boy baby wrapped in a cougar skin, when you were separating those two deer you almost became a deer yourself. I thought you were a shape-changer there for a moment.”

  “Or a shadow of a deer?” he asked, with a grin.