Lori Benton (36 page)

Flinging aside all but the stoutest limb, she rounded the shed. A figure stepped out, towering and broad. With a half-choked cry, she swung.

Joseph caught the limb in an upraised hand, but the tip of it raked him below the eye. He recoiled a step but didn’t let go.

“Burning Sky.”

She snatched the limb from his grasp and flung it aside, fear ebbing, anger flaring. Moonlight revealed the scratch she’d left, dark across his cheek. “What do you mean, giving me such a fright?”

“I saw you leave the cabin. When you came close, I called to you.”

“The bird call? That was you?”

His teeth in the moonlight were white when he smiled. She peered into the shed. He hadn’t come empty-handed. A few feet from his mare, a gutted deer hung from a roof pole.

“I’d have suspected you crawled off to die in a thicket somewhere if you hadn’t left us meat a few times—and I thank you for that—but now tell me where you have been. You couldn’t have taken Aram Crane away or I would have heard of it. Did you decide you had the wrong man and go off to find the right one?”

Before her flood of questions abated, he was laughing softly, deep in his throat. She was mightily tempted to hit him again.

“Aram Crane is the right man,” he told her, amusement fading. “But after what you told me about the peace talk, I wished more news of it and of Thayendanegea, so I went to that place to see what I could learn.”

“So you did go to Fort Stanwix? All that way with your wound barely healed?”

“I had good reason, and not just for learning what might happen to our people.” He was a tall shadow in the darkness, with the moon at his back. He moved closer. “Thayendanegea will come to this talk.”

“I should think so,” Willa cut in. “But how does that matter to you or me now?”

“Listen, this is how it matters. Because he comes to Fort Stanwix, I will not have to take Crane to Niagara but only as far as that fort. I can let Thayendanegea and the others take him the rest of the way. Then I can come back here to—for the children.”

She wondered briefly what he’d started to say, before her mind moved on to the children. At last he would take them away. She closed her eyes, waiting for the relief to come.

It did not come. There was only emptiness and a stirring of something like panic.

“You’ve left me to wonder about all this for weeks,” she said, hearing the scold in her voice, unable to temper it. “You might have said something before you went so that I wouldn’t have worried and wondered.”

“I am sorry,” he said, one hand coming warm around her shoulder. “You worried for me?”

The way he said it, surprised and hopeful, made her cautious.

“Of course I did. When is it to be?” she asked, though she knew the answer.

As she’d hoped, the question diverted him. His hand fell away from her. “Not until
Seskeha
is past.”

The time of freshness: August.

“That is barely more than a fortnight. What do you think will happen?”

“The Mohawks will not come back to live along the river. The Oneidas will want to stay on their lands—they have the favor of the Americans as allies, so this may be a thing that happens. But even much of their land is overrun with settlers, land takers. They would be as islands among them, even if they lived as the whites do, each man on his farm. You remember I told you Thayendanegea talks of land in Canada to resettle the Kanien’kehä:ka?”

His words fell like stones into the pool of Willa’s thoughts, stirring questions that surfaced until she skimmed off the one that truly mattered. “Do you still mean to follow Thayendanegea?”

“That depends.”

Joseph moved closer. He wore no shirt, only leggings and breechcloth. Willa felt the warmth coming off his skin. Her face was inches from the hollow of his bare throat.

“The Scotsman no longer sleeps beneath your roof?”

She was cautious again. “He went to the mountains for a time. But he has come back—to Shiloh.”

“You spoke to him. I saw you at the mill.” His dark eyes were fathomless
in the moonlight. “I was on the ridge above you. I saw you leave. You did not look pleased with him, though him you did not hit with a branch.”

“I didn’t have one to hand, or I might have.”

She saw the flash of his teeth, the slight wince as the skin across his cheekbone pulled at the scratches she’d made. She raised a hand to his face.

“I should take you in by the fire and clean that.”

Joseph put a hand over hers, pressing it to the wound. His hand covered hers completely, making her feel small and delicate, both of which she was not. “Soon,” he said.

She knew what he meant to do even before his face bent toward hers.

“Yah, Joseph.” She spoke gently but with finality, and raised a hand so that it came between their lips before they touched.

He jerked back from her. Even in the moonlight, she could see the flooding sadness in his face, like the blood that pours from a wound when the knife is pulled free.

Sorrow came down on her. But not regret. “Joseph, I will always care for you. But you are my brother.”

The ache of wanting her was thick in his voice. “What keeps us apart now? Is it our clan? Or is it
him
?”

She knew who he meant. Her mind rose up to deny it, but the words stuck in her throat.

“Answer me, Burning Sky. Or is it that you fear to love anyone again?”

She tried not to wince at that.

“You want me to go away and take those children with me.” He took her in his arms then, too swiftly for her to prevent it.

Though she stiffened at first, she sensed this time he held her as the brother who’d comforted her in a cornfield far to the north, a lifetime ago that suddenly felt like yesterday.

“Do not let fear rule your heart,” he whispered into her hair. “We are Wolf Clan, you and I. But even a wolf is not meant to walk alone.”

She stayed in the shelter of his arms for a moment, then forced herself to leave it and move beneath the shed to the hanging deer, where the smell of blood was strong.

“Come. Help me build the fires, and we will smoke this good meat you’ve brought me.”

Easing his weight off the balls of his feet, Joseph Tames-His-Horse settled his haunches on the earth and watched from a stand of pines west of the village. The clank and bang of the smithy had ceased for the day. On a bench behind the log structure, the Scotsman sat, using the last of the daylight to work. He had been at it long, but the light was fading.

There. He was gathering up the tools of his trade—field sketches, brushes, paints, the shell bowl; Joseph was too far away to recognize each object, but he’d seen them often enough to know what the man required to work. The Scotsman didn’t walk to another cabin, nor to find his horse and ride away on it. He went inside the small lean- to at the back of the smithy. Soon, smoke was coming from the chimney.

Dusk was fading to twilight when another man rounded the building.

The blood in Joseph’s veins quickened. He’d watched the deserter often enough to know his build, his stride, the small habitual movements that marked him, even without light enough to show his bright hair. So absorbed had he been in watching the Scotsman, Joseph had missed the man riding into the village. Now there he was, behind the smithy emptying his bladder against a sapling tree.

Thought of sending an arrow into some vital part of the man while his breeches were undone amused him, but he did not intend to kill Crane, if he could help it. Deserting soldiers brought back living were more useful to the British than dead ones. Most of the time. And he had better be about the business, now that Burning Sky had made her choice.

Did she even know it herself? She had not answered him about the Scotsman, so perhaps she didn’t realize yet that she loved him, despite all her protesting that it was not so, that she wished only to be left alone.

If only the man had not come back.

He pushed up from his crouch and made his way to where he’d hidden the mare, emptiness in his heart where for years hope had clung. He wanted with all his being to hate the Scotsman, but the man had taken the lead ball out of his side and seen him through a fever. He’d showed Owl and Pine Bird affection and care. He was a man who took his God seriously, yet didn’t take himself with the unassailable gravity of most white men, possessing instead a self-deprecating humor Joseph could appreciate.

He might actually have liked Neil MacGregor, had Burning Sky not stood between them.

Retrieving his mare, he moved off through the forest to find a place where he might bide the night in safety. He needed to pray and make ready his spirit for what he meant soon to do.

And put into practice for himself the trust in God he had always preached to Burning Sky.

“You sure it isn’t twins, Dr. MacGregor?” Anni Keppler asked as she straightened her garments and pushed herself upright on the bed.

“As sure as I can be,” Neil said, having already admitted that he’d had little practice tending expectant mothers, even before deciding he’d rather be drawing plants than prescribing them. “I didna feel but the one head and two wee feet.”

Charles hovered at the foot of the bed. “That’s a relief. Don’t know why you came back, Doc, but I’ll be glad to have you by when Anni’s time comes.”

Almost before Neil had unrolled his blankets on the spare bunk behind the smithy, folk began trickling in for doctoring. Despite the scarcity of medicines to hand, their need filled up his days of waiting—on the Lord, on the mail, and on Willa.

When Charles stepped into the front room, leaving them momentarily alone, Anni fixed him with a knowing look. “Have you seen Willa since that day at the mill?”

Her expressive face reminded him of that first morning at Willa’s cabin, when she’d burst from the woods, eager to reunite with a friend she’d thought forever lost. “No, I havena,” he said as he helped Anni to her feet.

For more than a week now, Willa had stayed rooted to her cabin and fields. If only a letter would arrive, he’d have an excuse for riding out to her.

“I’ve wanted to ask”—Anni lowered her voice, glancing at the door and the unshuttered window—“whether that brother of hers is still about. The Mohawk, I mean.”

“She told you about him?” he asked in surprise, though the answer was obvious.

Anni’s gaze was searching. “He was meant to go away and take those children with him.”

“He was.”

“Yesterday Francis came here from Willa’s. He mentioned the children. They’re still there. I guess that means
he
is still somewhere nearby.” Anni sighed. “I told her it was dangerous. For everyone.” She crossed the room with the waddling gait of advanced pregnancy.

“They both ken the danger,” he said, remembering Joseph Tames-His-Horse lying in Willa’s cabin with a bullet in his side.

At the bedroom door, Anni paused. “Has Willa ever told you how her grandmother used to hide her books? Mrs. Mehler thought reading a waste of time, that it bred laziness. So Willa took to keeping her books on that little islet in the lake near their cabin … where she was taken.”

Neil minded the ruined copy of
Pamela
. “She told me.”

“She was stubborn even then, was Willa, and yet”—Anni frowned, as if searching for words—“she’s the nearest to a sister I ever had, and now that I have my sister back, I want to keep her. I know she’s making it hard, but if you love her, don’t give up on her.”

She’d taken him so off guard with this plea Neil couldn’t for the life of him make his jaw work to reply.

Into his silence she pressed, “Because if you do—love her, I mean—and she can be made to see what she has in you, maybe she won’t fight so hard to hold on to what doesn’t matter as much.”

Anni placed a hand on his arm. “Not that her land isn’t important, or that I want to see her lose it. It’s only that something’s broken in Willa, and instead of facing it, she’s hiding behind her anger and resolve like the walls of a fort, shutting everyone out.”

“Not broken,” he said. “Bruised, and verra badly so, but …”
A bruised reed shall he not break
.

Please
, he prayed, as he met Anni’s earnest, troubled blue eyes. “Think of all she’s lost. We went through the same war, but we at least can claim a
remnant of who we were before. Willa lost two families, two lives, utterly. All but the land.”

And Joseph
. But he didn’t say that.

“I fear what else she might lose, trying to save it.” Anni let her hand fall from his sleeve. “And I fear losing her again.”

“I willna give up on Willa,” he said. “Before God, I promise ye that. Not unless a day comes I’m sure that’s what He’s asking of me.” Even if that meant he lost everything, in the end.

Anni’s eyes shone. “Then neither will I.”

Neil followed her into the front room. The cabin door swung wide enough for a small blond head to poke in. Samuel.

“Mama? Can we come back in?”

While Charles tended the stew bubbling over the fire, Anni eased herself down at the table, rubbing at her back. “I hear your stomach gnawing your backbone from here. Come on.”