Lori Benton (9 page)

Kneeling in the dark beside Neil’s pallet—Joseph smelling of balsam fir and the smoke of fires, and the clean musky scent that was his own—she wanted to lean into Joseph’s chest, feel his arms enfold her, but resisted the need.

Her words were barely audible. “How did you find me?”

He spoke softly too. “I saw the trail sign you left. It was not hard to guess where you were bound. Not Niagara.”

Niagara, the fort in the west by the Great Falling Water, where so many had fled to shelter under the clipped wings of the British who led them to ruin in the war that shattered the Longhouse people—Mohawks, Oneidas, Tuscaroras, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas—and scattered the Great Council Fire that had burned for centuries. Where the beleaguered
remnant of her northern village had gone as well, being too few to sustain themselves. Where she might be, had the man beside her now been a few weeks quicker in returning.

Crouched in the dark beside a sick white man in a cabin far from the life they’d known together, Joseph Tames-His-Horse still read her soul. “Why did you come here? The Kanien’kehá:ka washed this life from your blood.”

“Not from my memory.” Not from her heart. Not Papa, Mama …

“It is not good. This is not the place for you.”

Because it was dark, because she did not look at him, she found she could speak with truth. “I think there is no place for me.”

“Burning Sky.” Joseph hesitated, but she knew what he longed to say. That wherever he was, she would always have a place. The words hovered between them, unspoken.

“Here I am called Willa Obenchain.” She took Joseph’s hand, urging him up. “Let us leave him to rest.”

Joseph had a white mare, cinnamon-spotted and tall. In the cabin yard he relieved it of its burdens, and his bow and quiver, and hobbled it to forage, while Willa put wood on the fire. They sat on the covered porch, in the light from the doorway, breathing in the night and the smell of waking earth.

She looked at him, to find him looking back at her. He had changed, yes, but there was still the scar above his left eyebrow where a child’s stray arrow had nicked him, a year after her adoption. It had bled profusely, that small gash. She’d staunched it with a pad of rabbit skin, while his dark eyes teased her through a mask of scarlet, as if the fuss she made was worth the wound’s sting.

She wanted to drink in his face, craved its familiarity, its strength, but in it as well lived memories that swelled the grief in her chest. She raised her chin and stared at the stars gathered thick above the ridges to the north.

“The man who was your husband made a good death. This was told to me. I did not see it.”

Willa glanced aside to see Joseph staring not at the stars, but still at her. She’d known of Kingfisher’s passing for a year and more. As best she could reckon it, having pieced together the accounts that made their way back to their remote village, he’d died the spring their second child was born, in a raid against the Long Knives, somewhere in Pennsylvania.

“He never saw his youngest daughter. In this world.”

A sound caught in Joseph’s throat—of sorrow, not surprise. He’d been to the village. He’d seen the ashes. “Then they are together?”

“Both of my daughters are with him.” She-Goes-Singing, her firstborn. Sweet Rain, her tiny one … Willa clenched her teeth to control the swift scald of tears. “It was the spotting sickness. Smallpox.”

Joseph raised a hand to her cheek, knuckles brushing her unblemished skin. “But it did not touch you. Who was left to mourn with you? To make condolence?”

The words were like arms seeking to hold her. Grief clawed her throat tight. He waited while she made her voice strong. “The others all left for Niagara—Bear Clan, Turtle, the few left of Wolf. I bid them go. Enough had sickened. I stayed to care for my children and the others too sick to travel. When it was over, I mourned alone, then I burned the lodges to thaw the ground, and put them in the earth.”

Joseph groaned, leaning into her until their shoulders pressed together, but it was too much to contain. She heaved herself off the porch and faced him.

By clan tradition, he was the one who should provide the condolence she had not received. He was Wolf Clan, her brother, though they did not share a drop of blood. Should she ask it, he was obligated to bring her captives to replace those she’d lost—as she had once replaced another for the Mohawk woman who became her mother. But all was changed now. It was no longer reasonable to expect such a thing, even if her heart cried out for it. She’d left the Kanien’kehá:ka. Yet she had not found her white parents. She was adrift between two lives, unable to grieve. Unable to hope.

“Why did you wait so long to come back?” They’d been speaking in the language of her adopted people, but now she spoke in English, and it made the question jarring. Joseph flinched but remained as he was, powerful body folded on the cabin step, watching her with pain in his eyes.

“For many moons, I did not know your husband was no longer with you.”

She understood. When Thayendanegea came among them, recruiting warriors to help the British fight the colonists, Joseph had gone with him in no small part because she had accepted Kingfisher as her husband. Thinking Kingfisher still living, Joseph would not have returned.

“After the fighting ended,” he went on, “I was given other work to do, and I did it.”

“What work?”

“Hunting deserters for the British Army,” he said, falling back into the language of the People.

She stared at him. “Deserters?”

“The forts around the lakes are undermanned. The redcoat officers send trackers to bring back those who desert. So now I hunt men I once fought beside.”

He said it without pride.

It was chilly in the yard. Willa hugged her arms to her ribs. “Why would you do this work?”

This time Joseph did not flinch. “They pay me well to do it, and I have a family with bellies to fill. There are thousands of our people at Niagara, living poor and hungry all around the fort, waiting for the British to find places for them. Game is hard to find and so are men to hunt what game there is. If I have learned a thing, then it is this: war does not end when bows and guns and cannons are put away.”

“True,” she said, her heart wrenched for all the Longhouse people and the remnant of her own village, living in such misery and uncertainty. “It does not.”

His expression softened, as if he regretted his words. “I meant to come back to you. I always meant to do that. But I did not mean to come empty-handed. Tracking these soldiers takes time. Longer if they reach a settlement, find a place among the Long Knives.”

An Indian would be a fool to walk openly into such a settlement if he valued his life. Even one such as Joseph, who could pass as Oneida—the tribe that had broken from the rest of the Longhouse people and allied themselves with the colonists in the war. With a creeping chill, Willa thought of Richard’s hatred, of Anni’s haunted eyes, and glanced around at the darkness. Were they watched even now? Then something else Joseph said registered and gripped her heart tight.

“You have a family? Do you mean a wife and children?”

Joseph held her gaze. “My father and uncles are gone. I speak of my mother, my sister and her children.”

She remembered his mother and sister well, though they had moved to another village shortly after Joseph rode to war. The news should not have eased that clenching of her heart when she thought he might have found a wife at last. There should not be such a clenching. It was unfair of her to begrudge him loving elsewhere.

“Thayendanegea has promised them fields to sow,” Joseph continued. “But until it is settled between the sachems and the Canadians, I am the one left to hunt or trade for them.”

“Or track deserters.” She paced to the side of the porch and back, hoping he had not seen the confusion in her heart showing on her face. “How many such men have you tracked?”

His eyes caught the light from the cabin as they followed her. “Four. I have brought in three living.”

“And the fourth?”

“I am on that trail now.”

“Then why have you come here?” She returned to the porch and sat beside him. From the corner of her eye, she watched his hands, resting on
his knees. They were large and lean, with fingers strong and brown. She had always thought them beautiful.

“Because I saw you in a dream,” he said.

The urge to smile overcame Willa. “Of course you did.”

It was a dream that had brought him to her in the first place, after all, so many years ago.

Arriving home to Canada after three years at the Oneida town of Kanowalohale, where he had embraced the teachings of the missionary there, Samuel Kirkland, Joseph had not found his family eager to embrace his newfound love for the white man’s God—at least not his insistence that being a Christian meant more than obeying rules. “It is about the heart and knowing the voice of the Great Good God in your spirit,” he’d told them in his newborn fervor. “It is by grace we are saved. By His goodness, not our own.”

His mother’s brother had been particularly displeased, angry with Joseph’s father for having sent him to the Oneidas. After that disappointing homecoming, Joseph had gone to the women’s fields to think and pray, and there he’d found her, hiding among the cornstalks, hunched among the squash vines that shaded their ground, three months adopted, miserably homesick, and crying her heart out. She had bolted to her feet at sight of him.

He was taller than any Indian she had seen, and so lean he had looked like a giant heron standing there with one foot raised to take a step, gazing at her with brows shot high. Mindful of her tear-streaked face, her greased and braided hair, the hateful deerskin clothing she wore, she had raised her chin to him and said, “What do you want? I suppose you’ve killed something and want me to skin it for you. Well, I won’t! You killed it—skin it yourself!”

In her defiance she spoke English, not expecting to be understood. She suspected some of the women, including the one who called herself her mother, spoke some English, but all she earned was disapproving silence if
she spoke anything but their heathen tongue—and once, from a warrior, a cuff on the head. She expected as much now and braced herself for it.

The tall young Indian put his foot down. His eyebrows lowered like the wings of a blackbird settling. Beneath them his dark eyes shone. “You are her,” he said, in a voice unexpectedly resonant for his gangly build. “At least the hair is right. Had I a rag, I would wash your grubby face and be sure.”

She stared, mouth flung wide. He’d spoken English—heavily accented, but clearly understandable
English
. The sound of it made her knees buckle. She sat down hard among the squashes.

The tall Indian stepped gracefully through the bean-entwined cornstalks, trampling not so much as a leaf. He knelt and put a hand on her long skinny arm.

“Please,” she said, fearing she’d imagined it. “Say that again.”

“That your face needs washing?” His eyes met hers, and widened. “One brown, one green. You are her.”

What did he mean? Had he been spying on her?

“I haven’t seen
you
.” She wiped at her eyes, hating the weakness of her tears, hating the eyes themselves with their contrary colors the Mohawks said made her special. And she wiped them to get a better look at this Indian. Most of her time with the Mohawks had been spent among women. Their men’s faces still looked much alike to her, grim and fierce and ugly. But she would have remembered this one. He wasn’t so ugly, not too grim … and he was so tall. She was nearly fifteen now, getting taller by the day, but he’d towered over her when they both stood. Now he smiled, and the smile did something very agreeable to his not-so-ugly face.

“You have not seen me because I have been in the south, with my father’s people. I had a dream while I was with them. In that dream I saw you.”

Despite her misery, she began to be interested. “How could you have dreamed about me?”

Instead of answering, he asked, as if it was of greatest importance, “What clan has adopted you?”

“No cla—” She broke off with a sigh. He could ask anyone about that horrible day the women took her to the river, stripped her and scrubbed her roughly with sand and water, to cleanse away her white blood. Then they dressed her in Indian clothes and marched her into a longhouse where they fed her and petted her and called her
daughter … sister
.

“Okwhaho,”
she said bitterly.

The Indian’s face lost some of its color, as if her answer dismayed him. She found herself perversely insulted by his reaction.

“Is there something wrong with being Wolf Clan?”

“No … no. Only I thought it would be Turtle, or Bear.” Despite his words, he was still frowning. “Do not be offended. I am Wolf Clan, your … brother.” He looked at her with the strangest mingling of warmth and confusion in his dark eyes. “What name were you given?”

Loathe to make the hateful sounds, she said, “Burning Sky.”

He held out his hand, like her father—her
real
father, Papa—would have greeted another man at the mill. It seemed an outlandish gesture for an Indian to make here in the middle of a cornfield, wherever in the world this might be, so it must have been because he smiled again, or had carried on this entire conversation in English, that she slipped her hand into his. His grip was warm, encompassing. And to her great surprise, steadying.