Jessie's War (Civil War Steam) (20 page)

She stayed quiet, listening
to the sounds of the horses as they trod over the frozen ground.

“This marriage can’t be
legally binding,” Luke offered after a long period of quiet. “There was no
license and the marriage wasn’t recorded anywhere. Neither of us actually
agreed to anything. Once we’re away from here, who’s to say anything ever
happened?”

She attempted nonchalance,
though her emotions were as raw as a skinned knee. “Me. Grandfather. My tribe.”
She paused for a moment. “My ancestors.”

“Your ancestors?”

“If Grandfather says it’s
their will we’re married, then we’re married,” she said. “I’ll not go against
them.”

“I thought you said you weren’t
superstitious.”

She released bitter laughter
into a biting winter wind. “I’m not. Superstition implies an irrational belief
not based on reason or knowledge. Based on that criterion, I’m not
superstitious at all. I dare you to defy Ewepu So’wina’.”

“And die for it? I don’t
think so.”

The way he said the words
told her still didn’t understand, despite his reluctance to confront her
grandfather, and she didn’t expect him to. They may have grown up together, but
they were from different worlds. Only she had one foot in her father’s and one
foot in her mother’s and would never be fully accepted by either of them.

For some reason, he seemed to
be accepted by both.

“The only way out of this is
to have Grandfather nullify the marriage.”

“Would he do that?” Luke
asked.

“Don’t sound too eager,
Bradshaw.” She squared her shoulders as she prepared to ask the question that
had been plaguing her from the moment he’d stepped through her door. “You got
some woman waiting for you?”

This time, when she wondered
if he had found some
proper
woman to
call “wife,” she acknowledged—if only to herself—that she cared if
he had.

The pale clouds clinging to
the peaks seemed to fascinate him. “No,” he said, his voice low and quiet. “You
are my one and only wife, if that’s any consolation.”

Relief sang through her. “Don’t
be nasty. I don’t want to be married to you any more than you want to be
married to me.”

“Wasn’t trying to be nasty.”
He let the words hang between them for a long time, and for a change, she had
nothing to say. “What about you? You have a man waiting for you?”

“Wouldn’t be here with you if
I did, but you’d know this if you’d kept in touch.” In a rush, the words
bubbled out of her before she had a chance to stop them. “What
happened
to you? I wrote you every day
for six years. I wrote to you even after my letters went unanswered for over a
year, even after my father and Hiram said you must have died at Bear Creek. I
still wrote to you after several of my letters came back marked
addressee unknown
. I wrote…” Her voice
broke and she stopped short.

I
wrote love letters to a ghost who wasn’t dead.

She’d poured so much pain
into those letters. At first, she’d kept them light, thinking he might be alive
out there somewhere and may read them one day. But as time wore on, and she
didn’t hear from him, she’d told him everything. She told him about her fears
for the future, how much she missed her mother and Gideon. How much she missed
him
.

Luke pushed his hat up on his
head and rubbed the scar running through his eyebrow. His Adam’s apple bobbed,
and his lips tightened. He cleared his throat, opened his mouth to speak, and
cleared his throat again.

“I never wanted to hurt you,
Jessie,” he said. “It’s complicated. I’d explain it to you, but…”

“I wouldn’t understand,” she
filled in. Of course things were complicated—she had seen the map of
scars on his back.

“No, I think you’d
understand. I don’t think you’d agree, but I think you’d understand.”

The knot in her throat
portended tears, much like the wind whipping through the valley portended snow.
The coming storm was inevitable.

“What happened to you, Luke?”

His shoulders dropped. “Jessie…”
he began.

“I’m not asking you to
explain what happened to us. That’s... past,” she said, her voice fading. “I
want to know what happened to
you
. I
saw your scars, your mechanized leg. I want you to tell me what happened to
you.”

I
want the details, so I can understand why there can be no
us.

He blinked several times
fast. “The leg is an excellent piece of work. My friend designed it. There’s
not another in the world. Not sure there ever will be.”

“I want to know how you got
it.”

“Why do you care?” His tone
was cautious.

She couldn’t find it within
herself to answer.

He regarded her for a long
time, his expression a study in bland neutrality. Inhaling deeply, he gestured
to the badge pinned to his chest. “You know what I am.”

“Special Services, you mean?”

“Yeah. Do you know what we
do?”

“I take it you’re a bit more
than a local sheriff.” He inclined his head to acknowledge her words. “Hiram
said you were a spy. Espionage, sabotage, murder.”

The muscle in his cheek
worked as he ground his teeth together. “Special Services isn’t just spies and
espionage. We’re the investigative branch of the army. Within the Service,
there are several divisions, and we each have our own responsibilities. I got
recruited directly from military service into the intelligence division.” Luke’s
cheeks colored, though Jessie got the impression it wasn’t from the cold. “I
showed a certain talent for acquisitions.”

Acquisitions
. She almost laughed. Luke had always
been a thief. After all, they’d met when he’d been caught stealing meat pies
off her mother’s counter. He’d been eight at the time. The same age as Jessie’s
brother.

Her mother had taken pity on
him and offered him the food, then forced him to take a bath and gave him some
of her brother’s clothes. Like a stray dog, he’d kept coming back until he
became one of them. Until the house didn’t feel right unless he was in it.

Jessie’s family may have been
the only ones in town safe from Luke’s sticky fingers, unless she counted her
heart among the things he’d stolen.

“Yeah, I know, it’s ironic I
would get paid for doing the one thing that got me in so much trouble before.”
He grinned. “Anyway, I’m part of an information gathering team. Sometimes, we
work witness and dignitary protection, but mostly we find things to use against
the Rebs. Weapons. Information. People. All kinds of things. And we try to make
sure our stuff doesn’t fall into enemy hands.”

“Like Pop’s invention.”

He nodded. “Among other
things, yeah.”

She gestured to his leg. “Seems
like a dangerous line of work.”

“It can be. That’s why agents
in my division are carefully chosen.” The finality in his tone told her he didn’t
intend to offer more.

“What happened to your leg?”

He studied the hills for a
long time. “Got myself into a spot of trouble a few months back. It might have
healed on its own, but something came up and I had to get back in the field, so
I had the docs take it. Rather than being strapped to a desk for years—or
maybe permanently—I was able to get back out in six months.”

Had
the docs take it? What kind of man would do that for the sake of a job?

“You were that certain it
would work?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“But you did it anyway?”

“Yep.”

“It couldn’t wait?”

Luke stared straight ahead,
and the pain in his eyes told her more than his words ever could. “The job
waited for as long as it could. If someone else could have taken over, I would
have let him. I didn’t have much of a choice.”

“Did it hurt as bad as they
say?” She had seen mechanized limbs before, but only on the miners, and never
one attached between two pieces of living flesh. The mechanic legs she had seen
never worked as well as the real thing, the joints neither as fast nor as
fluid. This concept of an artificial leg attached between a real knee and a
real ankle was genius. Though his limp became more pronounced as the day wore
on, he didn’t move like a man with an artificial limb.

His eyes were wary. “Yeah.
Still does.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m not.”

The stranglehold grief held
on her throat tightened. “I hope it was worth it.”

“It was.” He gave her a long
look. “Look, Jess, about the letters… It’s not that I didn’t want to write.”

Jessie studied the mountains,
the brightness of those snow-covered hills, the darkness of the water and the
clarity of the sky. Focused her attention on her grandfather’s village rising
in the distance.

“I’m not asking you to
explain.”

He shifted in his saddle
uneasily. “I know you’re not.” A fleeting smile ghosted his lips. “Maybe that’s
why I’m so damn on edge. We’re so good at fighting that when we’re not, I keep
waiting for the next disaster.”

“I’m pretty certain things
can’t get much worse for you, Bradshaw. You’re married to a harpy.”

He turned surprised eyes in
her direction and burst out laughing.

She didn’t miss the spark of
real joy in his eyes. She caught herself smiling and didn’t bother to suppress
it.

“Careful, Jess. If you keep
teasing me, it might lead me to think you don’t hate me as much as you say you
do.” His silvery eyes glinted with amusement. He gestured up to her grandfather
and Cheveyo. “Look, I’ve got to go back up to them. I promised your grandfather
I’d ride with him, and something tells me I’d better obey him. You’re all right
back here?”

“As right as rain,” she
responded. “No need to worry about me. I’m not going anywhere.”

He turned his horse away from
Jessie to catch up with her cousin and her grandfather. He was but a few
lengths in front of her when he turned back to her.

“Me neither,” he said softly.

It was a promise. One that
turned her inside out as joy—real joy, a thing so foreign she could
barely tolerate it—sang through her.

She had gotten so used to the
bite of pain its absence actually hurt worse.

He spurred his horse and left
her staring at his back.

* * * *

A few hours later, they
reached the winter camp. The tribe as she remembered it had always been
relatively small, so she was surprised to see what amounted to a small city,
with several dozen wikiups stretching in every direction, most of them hugging
the river where it met the lake. Beyond the village, pillars of tufa rose from
the dark water, and steam from nearby hot springs ascended into the bright sky.

Jessie sat
alone on the banks, watching the water tumble over the rocks on its way toward
the lake. After a few moments of being still and quiet, a large trout dashed
through the reeds, its tail thrashing in the water, its scales glinting in the
pale light. Throughout the day, the snow had continued to melt, leaving the
mountains covered in white, and the valley brown and frozen. The scent of
juniper and sage filled the air instead of sulfur and smoke, the clouds in the
sky brilliant white against an azure sky.

There was
freedom in the quiet, in the heart of this land.

She heard
rustling behind her and she didn’t turn, but she was unsurprised to hear her
grandfather’s voice.

“Here you are.”
He paused for a moment. The touch he didn’t quite give her was like a whisper
of wind. “You’re looking in the wrong direction, Granddaughter. You always have
been.”

Jessie turned
toward where Luke stood with Cheveyo amid a cluster of barren cottonwood trees.
Cheveyo said something, and Luke laughed. He’d always been so quick to
laughter. In so many ways, he was the boy she remembered and loved.

In so many
ways, he was a stranger.

“I don’t know
what you’re talking about.”

Grandfather’s smile
was both haunting and sad. “I think you do. You always do things your way. You
fail to see what’s right in front of you.” Bending down, he picked up a piece
of old wood and scraped a trench in the sandy bank of the river. “Looking at
the mirage in the distance, you fail to see the water in front of you. Death is
in the distance. Life is at your feet.” He motioned back to the torn ground, to
the water welling up.

“I’m not some
desert metaphor, Grandfather.”

He smiled like
he had when Jessie had been a small child and been too stubborn to recognize
the importance of what he said.

That one small
action infuriated her. She didn’t need him or his tribal wisdom anymore.

“Everything is.
Life can be found in this desert. So can death. I wonder, which one will you
choose?”

“You should
tell fortunes. You’d make a killing.” Before the words had even left her mouth,
she regretted them.