After the Thunder (25 page)

He caught her just as she reached the tall pine tree where he had nursed Taloa that day Jacob shot him. That day when Cotannah had stood over him and thanked him for calming her horse, talking and smiling and trying to make him flirt with her. That day that now seemed a hundred years past.

Sobbing, running blindly, she stumbled over the tree’s protruding roots. Before she could fall he caught her by both shoulders and spun her around into his arms.

But she was having none of it, even though her whole body trembled and her breath came in long, shuddering gasps, she pummeled at his chest with her fists and he felt every blow as a strike at his heart. Her hair came loose from its fastenings and fell in a dark curtain across her face.

He grabbed her wrists and held them down at her sides, murmuring to her, saying her name again and again, tasting its honey on his tongue while the sound of it broke away pieces of his heart. Finally, finally, she lifted her chin and shook back her hair to glare a savage warning at him.

“You had better just turn me loose! Unless you’ve chased me all this way to tell me that you’re willing to run away and live out your life somewhere that those ignorant witch-haters can’t find you, you had better let me go, Walks-With-Spirits.”

Her eyes blazed dark fire; they threatened him with merciless annihilation.

He pulled her wrists together into one of his hands and held them behind her while he brushed back her hair with the other so he could see her face. She threw her head and arched her back, jerked her arms to try to shake him loose. The tips of her breasts brushed his chest, a touch which immediately filled his whole body with agony.

“You had better just calm right down,” he growled at her. “Unless you do, I’ll hold you right here just like this until the sun comes up in the morning.”

B
ut he couldn’t. He couldn’t hold her long without taking her mouth with his, without laying her down right here on the ground.

And that was exactly what he would do if he kissed her one more time.

She bucked and arched into him again.

It took all the will he had, and all the strength, but he pulled her down with him to kneel in the thick bed of pine needles, where he could hold her a little apart from him, hold her until he could tell her what he had to say, until he could make her hear him.

“Well?” she demanded. “Will you run away?”

She was as full of life, as passionate about what she wanted as she had been the first time he’d ever seen her, she was vibrating with desires. But now he was the cause, not Tay. All the strengths, all the feelings in her, even her fury, was gathered to love him.

The thought rocked him back on his haunches, loosened his hand around her wrists. She tore her arms free and reached for him, gripped his shoulders until her fingernails cut into his flesh.

“Will you? Go away? Oh, dear God, will you, please?”

Her tear-streaked face blazed at him.

“I’ve done everything I knew to do to try to prove your innocence, but it’s no use,” she cried. “Running away is the only thing left.”

He took in a long breath and blew it out again, forced his hands flat on the mothering earth to keep them off her. She let go of him then, with her hands but not with her fierce eyes.

“No. To save my life that way would ruin it.”

“How can you say that? You don’t know for sure. Not until you try it.”

“I know that my peace would be gone if I had to be looking over my shoulder for the Lighthorse and always on the run. I’d rather have one more week on this earth in peace and harmony than many, many years of running and knowing that I broke my word and acted without honor.”

She went completely still and, for a long, long moment, knelt there like a carving made of wood. Tears welled in her eyes, and she held out her hand to him without turning her head, as a sightless person might. He took it and held it quietly in both of his.

“For the first time I truly do believe that all hope is gone,” she said, her voice breaking.

Then the passion flared again.

“Where? Where will you go for your last week?”

“Deep into the south of the Nation, to the wild and beautiful country along Blue River.”

He longed to touch her cheek, but that might make her jerk away again, or make her jump up and run away, and he couldn’t risk that. He must make her see why he had to do this or, honor or no honor, he’d never have peace again.

But when he spoke, it was to blurt out what was on the tip of his tongue.

“Cotannah, I want you with a craving that makes my body burn. I love you with a passion that tortures my heart.”

She answered with a quick intake of breath and a desperate clutching of the hand he held.

“But I must leave you for this last week because I am in such turmoil inside, my
holitopa
,” he said. “When the tears took me that day at the Sowers place, for the first time I knew how much tumult boiled deep inside me.”

“Hasn’t the work you’ve done for them helped you find peace?”

“Yes. But it hasn’t restored it, and I must find my balance again before I die.”

He spoke again, as gently as he could.

“Cotannah, you’ll understand if you’ll let yourself. I must keep my word and return on the appointed day.”

“Because of your honor and your peace.”

She said it tonelessly, in a strange, flat voice that tore out his insides more completely than any scream or shout of anger could have done.

“Yes. And because of the influence I can have on our people who need the strength of the traditional ways.”

She looked at him for a long, long moment, her eyes unfathomable, her face magnificently solemn.

“I’m going with you,” she said.

The calm, sure words sliced his heart open and let the love inside it spill out onto the ground.

His spirit began to soar. She wanted to go with him even if he wasn’t running away!

“You like to have a human companion, remember?”

Her hot, dark gaze was searching his, her face was pale with the force of her feelings, too pale.

“Yes, but not at such a time as this.”

If she went with him, it would make it hard, so hard
to act for the sake of honor and not of love. Why, right now, his pulse was beating so fast he could barely breathe. What choice would he make at Blue River if she begged him again to run away with her?

“At first I was devastated that you didn’t ask me to go with you,” she said. “And then I realized that it was like digging the well—you thought that this was your burden to shoulder alone. So I’m volunteering to help you.”

In that moment, in a flash of mingled happiness and despair that struck him like lightning, he knew she was right. For his sake. But he wasn’t so sure that going with him would be good for her.

It would help him immensely. He was wise enough to know he was still a flesh-and-blood man, and before he could make his peace he must get straight with the root of his unsettlement. And that was Cotannah.

He loved her so! And she loved him. It was a magic that none of Chito Humma’s teachings had taught him to make.

But going with him would only make it much harder for her when they had to part. He shook his head and spoke fast, before he even knew whether he had formed a coherent thought.

“I need to live, really live, these last few days in this world,” he said, “to take the autumn air into my lungs and feel the sun’s fingers warm on my skin.”

But I need to feel your fingers more. Being with you is now my warmth
.

She looked at him, waiting.

“I need to taste the wild muscadines tart on my tongue, I need to stand on a ridge and look away far into the blue sky, so blue it pulls a person’s breath from his body.”

You are the one who takes my breath away. And the
taste of you is all I need to feed me forever
.

He couldn’t say it though, much as he ached to do so, for it would only make her more determined to go with him.

And then, suddenly, he couldn’t say anything more, for all the words felt like lies on his lips.

She was watching him, searching his eyes by the scant moonlight that was filtering in beneath the limbs of the tree.

“I can’t let you go, Walks-With-Spirits, not until they snatch you away from me, don’t you understand? I love you.”

And I love you. I love you
.

“That is even more reason that you should stay here,” he said softly, resisting, with a bravery he didn’t know he had, the need to say the bigger truth.

“Cotannah, you understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes, but it’s my decision,” she said, speaking with a new, calm quietness. “Because I’m the one who will suffer the most when it’s over.”

That can’t be. No one could hurt more than I’m hurting right now
.

Her huge brown eyes were looking into his heart, calling to him.

His arms shook with the need to reach and hold her, his legs ached to wrap themselves around her.

Finally, he leaned forward until his knees were touching hers. He couldn’t live a minute longer without some kind of linking of their bodies—this would be the only one, he promised himself, he wouldn’t let himself touch her in any other way.

“Absolutely not. Stay here.”

She shook her head.

“During this next week, if you could make just one remark that woke me to the truth and made me take
responsibility for myself and guard myself, if being with you could teach me to sense other people’s inner spirits the way it has taught me to sense my own and yours, then you have much more to teach me.”

The simple words stopped his heart.

“I’ve been so miserable for so long, Walks-With-Spirits,” she said quietly. “Won’t you please go on teaching me how to truly live?”

His heart turned over in his chest and his blood sang with happiness.

“That’s the most seductive thing you could ever say to me,” he said slowly, trying to honestly search his heart but already knowing that he would do as she asked because it was best for both of them. “I could help you and also leave some of Chito Humma’s and Sister Hambleton’s teachings to live after me.”

“Yes.”

“That’d be the only reason to take you with me that might satisfy my conscience.”

“Good,” she said, and smiled as if she had won a great victory. “I want to gain some more freedom from the restlessness that I’m starting to conquer because if I don’t, it will kill me once you’re gone.”

His heart broke, then. “Oh, Cotannah,” he said, his chest so tight he couldn’t breathe.

“I’m only just learning from you how to feel what’s inside of other people—who is real and who isn’t,” she said. “And how to listen to the spirits inside and outside me. Help me find peace and get a balance at the core of me so that if I can’t be happy without you, I can at least be content.”

“And you think we can accomplish all that in these few days we will have?”

“Yes.”

“Then come and be my companion,” he said, “and I will teach you all I can.”

And I will love you all I dare
.

They arrived at the spot Walks-With-Spirits loved on Blue River in the middle of an autumn afternoon so radiant that it seemed they could float on the air.

“It was on a day like this one that I found this place,” he said, as they rode down into the grassy cove formed by a bend in the river, “and I stayed here through the Cold Time that year. Until then I hadn’t camped anywhere for more than two nights since I’d been in the New Nation.”

The mention of the past pierced the protective bubble of pretense that Cotannah had formed around herself during their long ride. She had deliberately thrown her whole self into taking in every sight and smell and sound of each mile to make it last longer and to make her mind fix on the present, only the present, pretending that it would last forever.

Now the ride was over and the week, their one precious week, was beginning. Once it began, it had to end. The thought consumed her for a moment, made her hands shake and her heart turn cold.

“What’s your favorite thing about being here?”

Her voice shook, too, but she steadied it and tried to push the fear away. She had to pay attention, had to memorize every word he said, every gesture, every motion of his gorgeous body so she’d be able to close her eyes and hear and see him again. Her mouth was indelibly imprinted with his kisses, she had relived them a thousand times already, and maybe her skin could even hold on to the feel of his hands, assuming, that is, that he touched her again. So far, he’d been extremely careful not to.

“The animals, I guess.”

She glanced down at Basak and Taloa, who had flanked him every step of the way.

“Is this where you found them?”

He glanced at them, too.

“Oh. No, they both came to me at the cave. I meant the ones who live here. This valley has lots of different inhabitants.”

“Maybe that’s why you stayed so long—the ones who live here relieved your loneliness.”

He shrugged, then laughed a little.

“Maybe. Cotannah, you worry more about my being lonely than I have ever thought of it.”

“Because I’ve been lonely, too, even with my family around. I feel for you because I imagine it’d be even worse to have been physically alone.”

He had led the way across the grassy space to the edge of some trees scattered across the side of a sun-kissed hill that faced the river. Now he reined in and sat quietly, looking around them in every direction, searching out every detail with his straight gaze.

Then he turned it on her.

“I didn’t know the difference then,” he said, “but I do now. Loneliness would kill me today if you were not here.”

They looked at each other for one long, still moment while those words wound themselves like twining arms around Cotannah’s aching heart. Then he held out his hand across the space between their horses.

“Welcome to Blue River.”

She put her hand in his big, warm one and leaned into his strength while she stepped down out of the saddle. When he let her go so he could dismount, too, she felt nearly as bereft as if he’d walked away.

“Are we going to camp in these trees here?” she asked.

“Yes. Here at the bottom of the hillside where the grass is thin and the ground is rocky.”

“Look out there in the valley how green the grass is underneath,” she said, going to stand beside him, “but its tops are a mist of brown forecasting what’s to come.”

She bit her lip. What’s to come she would not think about.

“You’re right,” he said, “the mist of brown is so thin it looks like the hovering sweep of a spirit hand.”

He was looking around as he had when they were still mounted, drinking in the beautiful valley with his eyes, and she must do the same. She must fix her mind on the present.

“And the yellow maples and red sweet gums are the fires the spirit hand has lit,” she said. That made him smile at her.

“You’re learning already,” he said. “Did you ever think that on a day like this it seems that everything in the world is light both ways?”

“What do you mean?”

“The air’s so bracing that it seems able to carry a rock easy as a feather or a leaf. Our bodies feel light, as if we could walk on it. And every tree and bush is so full of light for our eyes that it looks as if the sun has bent down and breathed part of itself into the leaves.”

“I’ve thought they looked like lamps,” she said, “or candlesticks with every leaf a separate candle flame.”

“I used to question Chito Humma,” he said. “When I was little, I used to believe that the trees came alive and walked around when they looked like that.”

She laughed. “I think you were right. Look at that big elm up there—I’m pretty sure it’s moving.”

He laughed and bent over and kissed her, once,
lightly, on the tip of her nose. A tingling shock ran through her.

“Now you’re making fun of me,” he said, and looked at her so intently that the heat began to rise in her blood.