Lori Benton (48 page)

“Burning Sky.”

Willa caught that breath at the sound of her name, but the voice that spoke it sent relief washing over her.

She was smiling when she turned.

At the edge of what remained of her cornfield, looping the reins of his spotted mare around a beech sapling, was Joseph Tames-His-Horse, still whole, though marred by the fresh scars from his fight. Willa all but ran to him.

She hadn’t yet shed tears for Joseph. They came now as his arms went around her. His chest was strong and warm beneath his bloodstained shirt. Her heart opened to him, her brother. “I feared I wouldn’t see you again.”

Joseph pulled her tight against him, almost crushing. She was glad, for it told her he wasn’t badly hurt. Too soon he put his hands on her shoulders and put her from him so he could look into her face. “I would not leave you without a word.”

“Even if half of Shiloh was after your neck?”

Joseph raised a brow—the one that didn’t have a cut slicing through it. “Are they?”

Willa grimaced through her smile, hurting to see him wounded. His eye at least was open again, the swelling subsided, though under it the skin was dark with bruising. “You won’t be hunted. Not by Colonel Waring. But he says you must never return.”

Joseph stared beyond her to the ravaged field. “I will go for now because I must. I make no promise about never returning.”

His gaze fell to her face, sorrowed, and she knew that it would be a long time before she saw him again.

The column of his throat convulsed as he touched her face. “We met in a cornfield. Now we part in one.”

Willa’s throat was too tight to speak. There was a second horse, saddled, tied to Joseph’s mare. With a small jolt of surprise, she found her voice. “Aram Crane—did you find him? Is that his horse?”

“I found him, and that is his horse. I plan to keep it for my troubles. But him, I let go.”

“You let him go? Why? Will you go after him again?”

Instead of explaining immediately, Joseph unlaced a bag behind his mare’s saddle and withdrew a letter, battered and creased. “If I am to hunt meat for my family before the winter, then I must return to them. There is no more time for tracking men. But here is a thing I found among that man’s belongings. It was meant for you.”

Frowning, she took the letter from Joseph’s hand. “Aram Crane had a letter for me?”

The corner of Joseph’s bruised mouth drew in. “He was not meant to have it. I think it was given to the smith to bring to you, and maybe it was that man who also penned it, but the words are—”

“Neil MacGregor’s?” she interrupted, having already made out the name of the sender. Fingers trembling, she unfolded the single page. It wasn’t a long missive—far too brief, when her heart craved a book of his words—but she devoured it with an eagerness she was helpless to conceal.

She read the words again, grateful for them, comforted by them yet pierced with regret that she had denied such a man her love. Her heart
underscored what were surely his last words to her with a silent and belated amen, though she puzzled over that last line. What
doings
did he mean? His leaving? She couldn’t be angry with him over that. She’d been so certain she wanted to walk her path alone, had bent all her will toward making Neil believe it.

But the heart is more courageous than the mind, and sometimes wiser.

When at last she looked up, Joseph’s strong brown face swam in her tears. She blinked them away and saw the hurting in his eyes too.

“You love him,” he said.

“Not well enough. Not soon enough. He is gone away.” Gone, and expecting her to be angry with him. “And now you must go,” she said, looking into her brother’s eyes and suddenly remembering something that had taken place beyond the confines of her own troubles. “The council at Fort Stanwix. I never yet heard about it. Did you go there?”

“I did not, but I spoke with some who did.” Joseph told her briefly about the peace treaty, how nothing much had been settled and that there was to be another soon, this time with the chiefs of the Continental Congress. “Much will be decided then, I think, about where all the Longhouse nations will be allowed to live, here or in a new place. As for me, I will take my mother and sister and go where Thayendanegea sees fit to settle us. Perhaps,” he added with a faint wryness, “I will make tables for all my Wolf Clan sisters who do not think to bring them on the journey.”

Willa tried to smile. She would need another table now. And a cabin to put it in. But Joseph would not be the one to make it.

He seemed to have the same thought as she. “You have a village now, hen’en? They will care for you, if you let them.”

“I know. Colonel Waring will let me stay under his roof as long as I have need.” Which might be a long time, since in a matter of days she would lose even the dirt beneath her feet.

Joseph drew breath to speak, just as somewhere in the still-standing
corn behind Willa came a giggle, a shushing, then a volley of whispers. Willa glanced behind her. Matthew and Maggie Kershaw peered from the golden stalks.

“I am ready to take them now.” Joseph nodded toward their poorly concealed audience, then to his extra horse. “If that is still what you wish.”

“It’s not what
we
wish!” The boy came first out of hiding, face set in a familiar, stubborn firmness. His sister followed on his heels, fleet and graceful as a fawn, her face hopeful, open to every sling and arrow the world—or Willa—might yet fling at her.

The sight of them made something warm and full press up against her heart; it nudged against the emptiness Neil MacGregor should have filled, taking up a little of its room, and because all she could do was stand there and let herself feel it—so glad for it, so glad—it was left to Joseph to speak.

“What is this you are saying, young brother? As I remember it, you spoke different words the day I met you and your sister.”

“Hen’en,” the boy said. “That is true. But we didn’t know
your
sister then. You said we would like her, and we do.”

Maggie pulled her lower lip between her teeth, nodding agreement.

Willa put a hand on both their heads and laughed, mostly so she wouldn’t cry. “That is good, for I like you. Both of you.”

A smile tugged the girl’s lip free of her teeth. “We want to adopt you.”

Willa blinked and her lips parted, but she didn’t speak, uncertain she’d heard what she thought she had.

The boy turned on his sister, annoyed. “That’s not how we were going to say it.”

“It is! We want her for our mother.”

“I know.” Matthew sighed, and with color mounting in his face addressed Willa. “We know how it’s done, adopting, and there’s the creek for the washing—but we thought maybe that part isn’t needed because we’re all Wolf Clan already. We don’t have to go to Niagara to find our people. We don’t
want
to go. We want to stay and be your children.”

When Willa was again struck speechless—this time by the emotion swelling in her throat—Joseph inserted gently, “Perhaps you should have begun by asking this woman if she wishes to be your mother.”

Had it not been so touching, the boy’s surprise and chagrin would have made Willa laugh again. He might have been flustered by this turn, but his sister leaped the gap in their plan as nimbly as the deer she resembled.

“Will you?” she asked, twining small fingers with Willa’s. “Be our mother?”

Willa’s knees hit the ground, and she gathered them into her arms. “I would be honored to be the mother of such brave and good children.” As she knew she had been in her heart, even before the night of the fire.

Blinking back tears, she let them go and rose, catching Joseph’s eye. He was happy for her, but this was hurting him as well; leaving was in his eyes.

“Say your farewells to Joseph,” she told her children. “Then you may take my knife and go cut those last pumpkins. We will take them to Goodenough, who might be persuaded to let us make a mess of her kitchen—and a few pies.”

Pies from the last pumpkins she would ever grow on her papa’s land.

With joy and grief she watched Joseph and the children embrace, before they hurried off to do as she asked, already arguing about who would do the cutting.

“It is good, my sister,” Joseph said. “It is part of what my heart hoped for you.”

But not the whole. As she turned back to him, the enormity of what she had agreed to fell on Willa with crushing weight.

“How will I provide for them with no land?”

She told him then how she was to lose her farm, with no way found to stop it even though Richard wouldn’t be the one to own it. But Joseph only smiled.

“Remember what the Scotsman wrote to you, about trust? He speaks wisdom.”

Willa touched the bodice of her jacket where she had tucked Neil’s letter. Joseph pretended not to see that and moved away from her to untie the reins of his horse.

She followed, saying quickly, “I haven’t thanked you for saving me and the children, the night of the fire.”

He paused with the reins in his hands and looked at her, his eyes deep with love. “What sort of man would I be, if I did not do such a thing for my sister?”

“Not the man I know you to be,” she said, and the tears came again, without shame. “I will always be thanking you, Joseph, in my thoughts, in my heart. Remember that.” She took his hand in hers. With her other she traced a fingertip across his jutting cheekbone, where the tight bronze skin had been broken by Richard’s fist.

Joseph took both her hands in his. “And you remember this: you will not be alone, Burning Sky … Willa,” he amended. “ ‘A bruised reed …’ ”

“ ‘Shall he not break,’ ” she finished, though it hurt to say the words. “I know. I am never truly alone.”

Joseph started to shake his head, as if she’d misunderstood him. Instead he put his hand on her shoulder, leaned close and kissed her mouth. “I go,” he said. Then he turned the horses and walked away from her without looking back.

Joseph Tames-His-Horse did not look back until he’d climbed the ridge north of Willa’s land and paused below the crest in a stand of yellowing poplar. Smoke still hovered thin over the clearing where the cabin had stood. The wind had been strangely calm since the night of the fire, as if the earth itself held its breath, waiting.

It was a hard thing, perhaps the hardest he’d ever done, sitting his
horse beneath the poplars and watching his sister’s tiny figure moving far below, poking through the ashes of her home, looking lost and forsaken, though in truth she was neither. There was nothing left to do or say, and he knew that he must go, yet he struggled with himself. Something still held him motionless too, watching, waiting.

It was some moments before movement on the track that led to Shiloh drew his gaze, and the breath went out of him in a sigh like the breeze that finally stirred, quivering the yellow leaves above his head, ruffling the mare’s long mane, stirring the clearing’s pall.

There were three of them coming up the track, all on horseback. Joseph knew them for men who carry news of import. It was clear in the set of their shoulders as they rode, and though the distance was far, he had seen one of them often enough to put a name to him now.

He touched the place at his side that still sometimes pained him and thought,
So be it
. And then, reluctantly,
Awiyo
.

It is good.

Even so, Joseph Tames-His-Horse did not wish to see more. He looked a last time on the distant figure among the ashes, unaware of the future bearing down on her, and sent his voice to her softly on the wind. “Do not be afraid of what is coming, my sister.”

With the press of a knee, he turned the mare along a game trail that threaded up to the crest of the ridge, the deserter’s horse following, and there he paused. He didn’t look behind him again but forward, over many trails to where a new land beckoned, where the People waited, in need of all their warriors to sustain them.

He clicked his tongue to the mare and rode down to meet them.

With the children busy among the pumpkins, the collie at their heels, Willa had wandered up to the yard, though there was no use in sifting yet again through the cabin’s remains. Not a charred beam was left unturned or drift of ash unstirred, perchance it hid some small salvageable thing. She simply wasn’t ready to turn her back on her past yet again and return homeless to Shiloh.

Soon the auction would be held in German Flats. Soon a stranger would put his name to her land.