Judith E. French (15 page)

I think I love him, she thought. It’s not possible, but I really think I do. Does it matter why I promised to stay with him and be his wife? If I do truly love him, how can it matter if I said the words before I thought about them?

Wolf Shadow ... my great, beautiful broth of a man.

She ran her fingertips along his smooth jawline. Did he ever shave? she wondered. In all the time she’d known him, she’d never seen him do so. Was it possible he had no facial hair at all?

“You aren’t sorry?” he whispered in her ear.

“No, I’m not. I am your wife, and you are my husband. ”

“And if I love more than you do ... does it matter?”

She snuggled against him. “I’m happy,” she said sincerely. “I’m happy, and I want to be here in your arms. Is that enough?”

He kissed her tenderly. “It’s more than I hoped for.”

She closed her eyes and listened to the strong, regular throb of his heart. For long minutes they didn’t speak, then he broke the silence.

“If I could, I would hold you like this forever,
dah-quel-e-mah.
”

“What does that mean?”

He chuckled.
“Dah-quel-e-mah
... my love.”

“Dah-quell-ma.
”

“Close enough.” Gently, he kissed the corners of her mouth and her eyelids. “I never thought I could feel like this about any woman, let alone a white woman. You’ve taught me much, Fiona.”

“We come from different worlds.”

“From this night on, there is only our one world.” He brushed her lips with his.

“You must teach me your language.”

“There is much I want to teach you.”

She smiled up at him in the firelight. He was so real ... so warm . . . so solid. Was it possible she could find happiness with this great, shining barbarian? Joy bubbled up inside her as she remembered the feeling of being one with him. “Am I a good student?” she teased.

His sloe eyes narrowed. “You may need more instruction ... much more instruction,” he said with a solemn expression.

“Soon?” she dared. They laughed together, and she thought that the melody of their mingled laughter was worth more than all the gold in England.

All too soon, he sat up and covered her tenderly with a blanket. “I must return to the great campfire,” he said. “Talk will go on all night. I must be there to speak for the Shawnee League.”

“You have to leave me?”

He sighed. “I do. But before I go, there is something you should know.”

Fiona toyed with a strand of his hair, wrapping it around her index finger.

“If Cameron Stewart is your father, you should know that you are not his only daughter.”

Her eyes widened. She hadn’t thought of that . . . not really. She’d known her father had a wife in England, of course, but she’d never thought of having half brothers or sisters. “He has children by his English wife?”

“There is an English daughter that I know of, but there is one closer. Moonfeather, the peace woman, is his daughter.”

Fiona sat bolt upright. “Moonfeather? But that can’t be.” It was too much to accept.

“She has an amulet like yours,” Wolf Shadow said. “A gift from Stewart when she was a child. I’ve seen it.”

“She can’t be my sister.” Fiona caught her amulet and squeezed it tight. How was it possible? How could they find each other here in the wilderness, thousands of miles from the land of her birth? “Why didn’t you say anything about her necklace if you’d seen it?” she demanded.

He shook his head. “Among the Shawnee, an amulet is spirit medicine. We do not speak of such things. They are too holy for words.”

Fiona sat up, heedless of the blanket as it fell away, leaving her naked before his steady gaze. Moonfeather had noticed her golden amulet; she’d behaved strangely when she’d seen it during the adoption ceremony. “She knew ... She knew and said nothing.”

“Moonfeather told Stewart, and then she told me.” Wolf Shadow took hold of her arms and pulled her close to kiss her. “I love you,” he said when they broke apart, breathless. “I love you, and I will protect you always, from my people as well as yours.”

“I don’t want anything from him,” she said, looking from Wolf Shadow into the darkness. The old ache filled her chest, and her mouth grew dry. “I hate him,” she whispered. “I want nothing of his.”

Wolf Shadow hugged her one last time, then turned to begin dressing. “He will try to persuade you to go back to Annapolis with him. He is a lord among his people, very rich, very powerful.”

“I don’t give a tinker’s damn how rich he is.” She shook her head: “Never. I won’t go a single step with him.” She closed her eyes, and her dying mother’s face rose before her. “He wasn’t my father when I needed one—he’s nothing to me now.”

Wolf Shadow pulled on a moccasin. “Your pain is deep. Sometimes a wound must be opened to let out the poison before it can heal. Do not let your bitterness toward your father taint the tie that can exist between you and Moonfeather.”

“She doesn’t want me to be with you.”

“No.”

“She says that I will harm your alliance, that some people will refuse to listen to what you say because I’m white.”

He settled his wolf’s cape around his shoulders. “You are mine, Fiona. Nothing and no one can change that.”

“But if you ... if your plan fails ... Will you blame me?”

He snapped his head toward her, and the wolf’s mica eyes glittered wickedly in the firelight. “You are Shawnee. You are my wife. I will never give you up.”

“But if it came to a choice?” She rose on her knees and extended a hand to him. “If it was your people or me?”

“My life, in this world and the next, is yours.”

“That’s no answer.”

“I will have both.” His deep voice rang with authority. “I will have you and the alliance.” He moved toward the entranceway. “You are safe here. Yellow Elk and Kitate stand guard outside.”

“Outside?” Fiona’s cheeks grew hot. “They’ve been there all along? They knew what we were ... Oh.”

He chuckled. “They keep watch over my beloved wife. What she does with her husband in the privacy of their lodge ...” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

“I’m sure they have good imaginations.”

“Sleep, Fiona. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

The deerskin flap swung down behind him, and Fiona picked up her Shawnee dress and pulled it over her head. Glancing around the wigwam, she realized that this was her first home as a married woman.

Married. Am I, she wondered, or am I no wiser than my mother? Have I traded everything for a man’s arms around me, for his sweet promises?

She sunk to her knees beside the fire pit and stared into the glowing coals. Ireland, her homeland, seemed so far away. Was it only two years since she’d picked bluebells in the fields outside Dublin? Two years ... or two hundred years?

“I always swore I’d never marry,” she murmured. “And now ...”

But could there be a marriage without a priest?

The voice of her conscience rose hotly.
For a Catholic there can be no marriage not blessed by Holy Church.

What if she conceived a child from this night’s pleasure? Not only born without a name, but born with copper skin and eyes like a fallen angel ... What was it they called them? Half-breed. Her child—a half-breed bastard.

Fiona hugged herself tightly and rocked back and forth. Wolf Shadow said he loved her. He’d promised to keep her safe. In his powerful arms she’d felt protected. Could he be different from other men? Could she trust him?

And if she could trust him, could she ever make a life for herself and her children among these savage tribes? Could she cast away her old life? Her Catholic faith ...

She dashed away her tears. “This is my wedding night,” she murmured stubbornly. “I will be happy ... I will.”

I
t was not Wolf Shadow but Moonfeather who woke Fiona in late morning. “Sister,” the peace woman called softly in English. “Sister, be ye awake?”

Fiona sat up and rubbed her eyes. By the time she was thinking clearly, Moonfeather was striking a flint to rekindle the fire.

“Ye must learn to tend your own fire,” Moonfeather admonished gently. “It be bad luck to let a fire pit grow cold while someone is living in the wigwam.” She offered a tentative smile. “Nay verra bad luck for such a newly made Shawnee
equiwa,
I be certain.” She motioned toward a bowl of cornmeal mush. “I’ve brought ye breakfast.”

Fiona took a deep breath. “Wolf Shadow says you claim to be my half sister. Prove it.”

Moonfeather added cedar shavings to the feeble sparks and blew on them. When they flared, she fed the new flame with dry twigs. Not until a strong blaze took hold of branches as thick as her thumb did she meet Fiona’s demanding gaze. “Cameron Stewart—our father—says the Irish are all fire and spit.” She dusted off her hands with a quick motion and reached inside the neckline of her fringed shirt to pull forth a golden amulet nearly identical to Fiona’s.

Goose bumps rose on Fiona’s arms as her eyes took in what her mind refused to accept. Her fingers clutched her own amulet. She knew every incised line, every curve in the pattern.

The Shawnee peace woman held out her own keepsake, and Fiona took it with trembling hands. Fiona’s teeth chattered as she brought the two pieces together. Her breath came in uneven gasps as her mind fought to accept the unacceptable.

“They be not exactly alike,” Moonfeather said. “Mine is shaped like an arrowhead without the stem. Yours is rectangular and contains half of the Eye.”

Fiona swallowed hard. The two sections fit together perfectly, the ancient pattern gleaming as brightly as the day it had been completed by some artist whose bones had turned to dust centuries before Saint Patrick set foot on Ireland’s green shore. “He ... he has the rest? Your ... our f-father.” The word was alien to her, almost too difficult to say. “Cameron Stewart,” she went on in a rush. “Does he have the rest of the necklace?”

“Aye.” Moonfeather chuckled. “Nay, not really. He did have it. I saw it whole when I was a bairn. He cut my piece away with a wee dirk. ‘Twas held with golden wire, ye see. There are four sections that make up the necklace. He had it from his mother, and she from hers—back into the mists of time. ’Tis called the Eye of Mist, did ye ken that?”

Fiona’s senses reeled, and once more she was seized with the feeling that this was all some dream. How could this stately Indian woman be her sister? Fiona glanced down at her own fair, freckled arm. Moonfeather’s skin was the color of clover honey, and her beautiful, almond eyes as black as the stones on Galway’s shore. “He abandoned my mother,” said Fiona.

“He says not.”

“He’s a liar.”

Moonfeather reached for her amulet. “Nay, sister. Cameron Stewart, the Earl of Dunnkell, is many things, but he doesna lie. He swore to me that he loved your mother dearly. He says you are the very image of her.”

“In looks, perhaps. But I’m not the fool for a man’s honey-coated words that she was. Did he tell you he loved your mother too?”

“I know he did. My earliest memories are of them laughing together. There was love in my parents’ home.”

“It seems he fmds loving women easy.”

Moonfeather nodded. “Aye,” she said with a faint smile, “but if a man has a weakness, I can think of worse.”

Fiona held the two pieces of the charm together. The gold seemed to give off a strange tingling; the sensation of heat had returned, stronger than ever. It seemed to her as if the necklace was a living thing, pulsing with life—keeping time with the beat of her own heart.

“Ye feel the power, don’t ye?” Moonfeather said.

Reluctantly, Fiona surrendered her sister’s part of the Eye of Mist. “I’m so confused I don’t know what to think,” she admitted. “Next I’ll be seeing leprechauns.” Her green eyes darkened. “I do know that I hate my father,” she said. “I’ve hated him all my life.”

“Aye,” her sister replied, putting her necklace over her head and tucking it back inside her shirt. “For many years I thought I hated him too. He left my mother when I was five. But hate destroys the hater. ‘Tis a nasty growth that eats inside ye, ’til your eyes canna see the beauty of the world.”

“Stewart’s lucky I don’t find a gun and shoot him.”

“Fash ye, little sister, ye be as fierce as any Seneca.” She motioned toward the bowl of mush. “Eat. An empty stomach in the morning only makes one cross as a badger.”

Realizing that she was starving, Fiona accepted the invitation and began to eat. The porridge seemed flat without salt or sugar, but it was hot and filling.

“We are truly sisters,” Moonfeather said. “Sisters of clan as well as blood. Ye should know something more—we nay be alone. Cameron Stewart is a lusty man. We have another—”

“An English sister. Yes, Wolf Shadow told me. But an unexpected father and a Shawnee sister are quite enough for one week. It’s a lot to accept, and I’ve no love for the English. She and I would take one look at each other and both run like hell the other way.”

Moonfeather looked amused. “She has a name, this English sister of ours. ’Tis—”

“I don’t want to know,” Fiona insisted. “I don’t care who she is. She’s rich, and English, and far away. I don’t give a tinker’s damn for her. I wish her no bad cess, but she’s nothing to me. A stranger. Best it stay that way.”

“And me?”

Fiona licked the last of the mush off the wooden spoon. “You’re bossy, and you talk funny for an Indian.”

Moonfeather laughed, a sound like tinkling bells. “Aye, I’ll grant ye that. My husband says so often.”

“But I think I like you anyway.”

“And I think I like ye, for all your ill manners.” Fiona’s temper flared. “What’s wrong with my manners?”

“ ’Tis nay your fault, younger sister. Ye were nay born Shawnee. Among our people, ’tis verra wrong to interrupt another, and rude to show disrespect to an elder sister.”

“You’re angry with me because of Wolf Shadow, aren’t you?” Fiona set the bowl on a flat rock and stood up. “You don’t want me to be with him.”

“I want what is best for my people,” Moonfeather replied, “and for Wolf Shadow and for you—although I be certain ye willna believe that.” She got to her feet. “The council is over. Roquette and his men left before dawn. Already many of the tribes are breaking camp.”

“What did the council decide? Are they going to form the alliance as Wolf Shadow wants?”

Moonfeather laughed. “Ye dinna ken the Shawnee and Delaware at all. This was not a council to decide; this was a council to decide about deciding.” She folded her arms across her chest and shrugged. “Who can say what our people will do? Each man and woman will return home and talk to his own clan. In a few months, the tribes will elect representatives to meet at a real High Council fire. Then we shall see what comes of all this.”

“I do care for him, you know,” Fiona admitted. “Wolf Shadow ... I do care for him deeply.”

“Aye, I see that ye do.” Moonfeather grew serious. “Our shaman be different from other men. If ye betray him—ever—he willna forgive ye. He is the light of the Shawnee. If ye hurt him or my people, I willna forgive ye either.” She hesitated. “Cameron ... our father wishes to see ye before he returns to Annapolis. Can ye not find it in your heart to speak with him?”

“We have nothing to say to each other.”

“He searched for your mother. He offered a great reward.”

“So he says.”

“Whose word do you believe?”

“My mother lies in a pauper’s grave. What words can mend that?”

“ ’Twas your grandsire’s sin. He swore you both were dead when Cameron came to fetch ye to England.”

“Lies on top of lies.”

“ ’Tis old anger speaking through your mouth, sister. Think on it, and you’ll realize truth when ye hear it. Cameron was wed to an Englishwoman. He went home to England to make a place for your mother. When he came back, ye both were lost to him.”

“You weren’t there. You know only what he tells you,” Fiona flung back.

“Nay, Irish, ’tis the Eye of Mist that shaped your fate. Ye know the legend, do ye not? Ye know the blessing and the curse we who possess the amulets carry with us?”

“Superstition. Old wives tales.”

“Do ye ken the legend?”

“Yes ... yes, my mother told me. She said that the curse is that you will be taken from your family and friends to a far-off land.”

“Have ye not been taken to that land, Fiona?”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” she lied.

“And the blessing?”

Fiona shook her head. “More nonsense.”

“Nay, not nonsense, but magic.” Moonfeather’s dark eyes reflected the flickering flames of the campfire. “The blessing is that ye will be granted one wish.” Her voice took on a hushed tone. “Whatever ye ask ye shall have—even unto the power of life and death. Remember that, sister. Brand those words into your heart. Never forget. For the day will come when ye will need that blessing. It did for me, and I swear to ye that the amulet possesses a power far beyond anything ye can imagine.”

Fiona frowned. “I’m a physician. I believe in what I can see and touch.”

“The Eye of Mist came to ye from your Scottish grandmother. She believed, and the part of you that is from her believes. Deny it all ye please. Ye ha’ kept the amulet safe all your life. Ye didna sell it, not when ye were sore in need. Ye ken the power, little sister, even if ye willna admit so to yourself. ’Tis the Eye of Mist that has brought us together, ’tis the Eye of Mist that gave us back a father we thought lost.”

“To hell with him, I say,” Fiona muttered between clenched teeth.

Moonfeather made a clicking noise with her tongue. “So be it. But ye are verra young yet. In time, ye may think differently.” She clasped her hands together. “I have a favor to ask of ye—no, nothing to do with Cameron. It is Kitate, my son ... your nephew. It is the time of his manhood ceremony, and Wolf Shadow is his guide. My son follows the shaman trail.”

“But I thought your husband was English,” Fiona said. “He doesn’t care that his son studies such pagan practices?”

“Kitate is the son of my first husband, not Cami’s father,” Moonfeather explained. “Kitate is Shawnee through and through.” For a moment her composure vanished, and Fiona saw only the face of an anxious mother. “I trust Wolf Shadow, of course, but Kitate is my only son. The manhood trials are dangerous, and he is, after all, only thirteen.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Wolf Shadow will take you away for a while into the mountains to be alone. It is our way. You are newly husband and wife, and it is only right that you have time together. But when my son comes, show him a woman’s kindness. He’s a good boy. He’s honest and brave. If you give him a chance, you’ll see what a special man he can be.”

“He’s hardly spoken a word to me.”

Moonfeather nodded. “Aye. That is why I ask your patience with him. He is a boy. He idolizes Wolf Shadow, and he fears you will keep him from his mission.”

“You want me to befriend him?”

“If ye can. If ye can’t, just don’t make an enemy of him.”

“I’ll do my best to keep the peace between us.” Fiona promised.

“Thank you.” Moonfeather turned toward the doorway.

Timothy O‘Brian appeared. “Mistress Fiona. I’d speak to you. Fergive my bargin’ in so, but—”

“Ye shouldn’t be here,” Moonfeather warned.

“ ’Tis dangerous.” She glanced back at Fiona.

“No, it’s all right,” she said. “I treated Timothy’s hand. I’ll see him.”

Moonfeather looked unconvinced. “ ’Tis not good, his being here. Wolf Shadow will—”

“I said he can stay,” Fiona replied.

Moonfeather shrugged. “As ye will, sister. I bid ye farewell. Until we meet again.” With a nod, she hurried out of the wigwam.

“I mean t’ cause ye no harm,” O’Brian said. He looked around the hut and lowered his voice. “If ye want to escape, I’m yer man. Hell take ’em all, if I’ll leave a colleen here among these savages.”

“It’s not like that,” Fiona said. “I’m not a prisoner.”

“Ye can’t be wife to such as him,” the Irishman said. “Ye’re a white woman.”

“Wolf Shadow is a good man.”

“He’s an Injun.”

“Thank you for your concern, but I don’t need—”

“Cameron Stewart will help ye, do ye but ask ‘im. He swings a lot of weight back in the Colony. I doubt even these heathens would want to go agin’ him.”

Fiona shook her head. “No. I want nothing from Stewart.”

O‘Brian took hold of her arm. “Think about what ye’re doin’. I seen white women after they been with the savages a few years. Ye’ll have half-breed babes hangin’ on ye. Ye’ll be old afore yer time.”