by Benton, Lori
In the circle of her arms, Jesse heaved a breath but didn’t answer at once. The horse bore them deeper into the brake.
“He’s come through worse,” he said at last, but his voice held the dread that choked her own throat tight.
They found their way out of the canebrake miles from the ridge where they’d left Cade and Catches Bears. In thickening snowfall, they traveled east, keeping to dense forest when possible, crossing streams, once a river. Already several inches of new snow blanketed the clearings. Jesse wrapped the rifle to keep its firelock dry but was too alert for threat to let it ride snug in its sling. They spent that first night shivering against a rock face near a frozen waterfall. Jesse built a screen of hemlock boughs to hold the heat of a small fire near, and Tamsen picked stone slivers from his cheek, cleaning away the blood.
“We’re some ways south of where we need to be,” he told her the next day, pausing to let the horse drink from the center of an ice-crusted stream. They were out of Cherokee territory now, near the north bank of the Nolichucky—at least he thought so. It wasn’t a place he and Cade had ever hunted. Following a river—any river—would take them in the right direction but over terrain peppered with settlements, which was both good and bad. Good, because if Tamsen needed shelter from this cold at some point, he could find it fast. Bad, because such shelter might prove harder to get out of than into, if their identities were discovered. At some point Jesse meant to pick a trail north to reach Cade’s rendezvous. How long they would wait for him there was a question Tamsen didn’t voice.
“One thing at a time,” Jesse said, reading her thoughts. “First we got to get there.”
At least the bitter cold would limit the chance of running across anyone who might admit to seeing them. Sensible folk would be inside their cabins with the chinking patched and a fire blazing. Tamsen longed to be one of them.
When they started again, Jesse adjusted the bearskin slung around his shoulders so she could bury her hands in its warmth. She pulled her hood close and clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering, wondering if she’d ever be warm again.
They gnawed on jerked meat as they rode that second day, stopping only to let the horse graze in a clearing where wind had scoured the ground bare in patches. Jesse bade her dismount and conceal herself in a stand of pine, while he stood at the end of the lead line.
Even with the pines for a windbreak, the cold bit deep. It began to snow again. Tamsen clutched her cloak tight while heavy flakes sifted down, making a shushing as they clung to dark needles all around. Flexing her toes inside her fur-lined moccasins in hope of warming them, she peered through the boughs at Jesse. He faced away from her, rifle nested in the crook of his arm, moving only to keep pace with the horse’s grazing. It was a darker horse than Jesse’s that had been shot but as hardy and used to the cold. As was Jesse. He stood as though indifferent to the elements, scanning the falling snow, turning so she caught the angle of his jaw, shadowed with a day’s beard.
What was he thinking, staring out into the snow? Fearing for Cade? Looking for pursuit? How did he bear this cold with such stoic patience?
She remembered the swimming hole and that he was raised Shawnee. “Wildcat,” she whispered. Love for him came surging to her throat as she glanced across the clearing.
Through the snow, the tree line at the far edge was an indistinct blur. Something moved against that blur, stabbing her with alarm. When she trained her gaze on the spot, whatever it was had vanished.
“Jesse,” she hissed. “Someone’s out there.”
He had his rifle raised before she’d ceased speaking. He didn’t look her way. “Where?”
“Across the clearing. Something moved.”
He shifted to see past the horse’s rump. Tamsen’s heart pounded. She wanted to edge closer to Jesse, even if it meant leaving cover, but was too frozen to lift a foot.
Movement came again, near where she’d seen it before. Jesse sighted down the rifle … as a rack of antlers lifted, emerging from the snowfall.
Jesse lowered the gun and darted her a look of relief. Her quickened heart had sent blood surging to her numb extremities. Now warmth flooded her face as well, a disconcertingly delicious feeling. If this was the price of embarrassment, she hoped a deer would jump from behind every bush to fool her now until spring.
They spent another freezing night, only to have the temperature drop even further the third day. By early afternoon, Tamsen’s feet were again benumbed, though Jesse had unrolled the bearskin to swathe them both. She huddled inside its shelter, pressed against his back. She wondered what they were meant to do come nightfall. They were exhausted, miserable, hungry, and with the temperature fallen, they’d never make it through another night in the open.
Sometime later the horse beneath her stopped, jarring her awake to the most bone-aching cold she’d never known. She’d missed the sun’s setting. Barely a hint of gray showed the massive, snow-dusted trees spreading away on every side. She must have dozed for hours, clinging to Jesse in her sleep. Her back and rump screamed with soreness, and her ankles were too stiff to bend.
“What?” she managed through cold-chapped lips.
Jesse, apparently not frozen with cold, got a leg over the horse’s withers and slid to the ground. He tried to hand her the reins, but her fingers wouldn’t grasp them. He led her forward and hitched the horse to a bare-limbed sapling.
“A cabin’s yonder, through the trees.”
She made out a wall of hewn logs, a snowy roof, a zigzagging line of rails. Wood smoke tainted the air. No glimpse of firelight. The window, if there was one, was shuttered.
“Are you g-going to ask f-f-for shelter?” Her voice stuttered and slurred, as if she’d drunk too much hard cider. Oh, what she’d give now for some cider, spiced with cloves and warmed with a poker red from the hearth. What she’d give for a hearth …
“Can’t risk it.” Jesse’s low voice snatched her back from the edge of a lovely dream. “Aim to see if there’s a barn we can shelter in. Bide here.”
Before she could muster protest, he’d slipped away. The horse rocked her, shifting uneasily, as miserable as she. She looked down at the snowy ground and wondered how she’d ever reach it.
Of a sudden Jesse was back.
“Cowshed’s empty.” His breath billowed as he untied the reins. “Reckon they lost their stock, else Sevier’s militia’s been by to requisition.”
She wanted a fire, not a cold, deserted shed.
Jesse put a hand on her knee. She felt the pressure of it through leggings, cloak, and snow-crusted bearskin, yet the sensation seemed removed from her, as if she watched from a distance. “Can you get down? Best we come at it on foot.”
A plan formed in her mind. Once off the horse, she’d run for the cabin, hollering for help. For warmth. The idea overwhelmed her with yearning. Only one problem. She couldn’t bring her leg up to swing it across the horse. She was stranded, all her joints frozen.
Jesse pulled her, bearskin and all, off her shifting perch. He steadied her, then turned to lead them, whereupon she crumpled at his feet. Her legs might have ended at the knee for all she could feel them.
“Should’ve left m-me on the h-horse,” she murmured as he bent to hoist her up again. “Now you’ll have to c-carry me.”
Grunting, he scooped her into his arms. She turned her face into his neck, felt his lean cheek against her brow, rough-whiskered. “Like a bride over the threshold, eh?”
“A b-bride with cold f-f-feet.”
He led the horse inside and loosed it while he set her down in a strew of hay, cold and prickly. The wind ceased when Jesse shut the door, closing them in. The weight of the bearskin came down on her, as did the scent of old manure, thick and stale. The blowing of the horse as it found the hay sounded in her ear. Very near her ear.
“Don’t let the horse eat my hair,” she murmured, too near sleep to turn her head.
Jesse’s breath brushed her cheek, warm enough to make he
r shiver. “Your hair’s inside your cloak, sweetheart. The horse can’t get it.”
His body came around her. He found her hands and chaffed them between his own, until something resembling feeling prickled back into her flesh. Then he moved to her feet.
“So much for my plot to reach the fire,” she tried to say, but she might only have dreamt it.
For a time Jesse resisted the images that spiraled through his thoughts, holding them at bay. Instead, he focused on the physical, on those parts of him most chilled—those not touching Tamsen—and the horse that had eaten its fill and stood dozing near enough he could reach out and grasp a fetlock. He listened for noises beyond the shed. All was quiet. No reason the inhabitants of yon cabin should venture out on such a night. Not to an empty cowshed.
When such distractions lost their power, he set his thoughts on Thunder-Going’s people, praying for each by name. Especially Bears. Had Cade gotten him to safety? Did he live? Did either of them live?
He had no fitting words to pray for his pa, only groans that tore through him with gutting pain. The Almighty heard those, Cade himself had assured him when, still a boy, Jesse’d grieved hard for a dog he’d briefly loved. God spoke that tongue, as He did all others.
At the end of his groans, the images still beckoned, drawing him to look … to wonder at the toy that spun away from him across a puncheon floor, its defection provoking him to squawk in protest and reach stubby fingers for the … twirly-top. That was its name. A much larger hand reached down, stopped the toy midflight, and put it back into his greedy fingers. It made him happy, though it was a crude, homemade thing, the ridges of its whittling rippled to the touch.
Was it his? From before?
Lord, let me finally remember. He concentrated, giving himself over to the memory—if that’s what it was—mining it for detail. The hand that had fetched the twirly-top was a man’s, work-roughened, smelling of … deerskins. And there was a hearth. He could almost feel the heat on his face. That buzz and rumble beyond its crackle … the cadence of voices. A man’s and a woman’s.
His heart skittered a beat, jolting something through his bones that felt like recognition. If only he could see them. He couldn’t make this memory-child turn its head, look up at their faces. Jesse, he willed one of them to say. Only that was wrong. He hadn’t been Jesse to them.
“Say my name. Say something.”
He came to himself blinking in the dark and cold, stunned at what had transpired. The twirly-top … the reaching hand … Was it a true memory at last of his life before the Shawnees? Or was it only that those warriors had told the tale of finding him so often—described what remained of the cabin, the things they found there—that he’d merely stitched together a crazy quilt of secondhand memories into something resembling whole cloth?
Maybe so. Because the hand that had grabbed the renegade top and given it back to him hadn’t been a white man’s hand. Against the tender skin of his own pudgy fist, it had been brown as an Indian’s.
Jesse jerked his head up, alert. Somewhere beyond the shed, hooves crunched the snow. The horse snorted awake. He rose to calm the animal before it did something foolish like whinny in greeting. Tamsen stirred at his absence but didn’t wake. He went to the shed door, heard the chink of harness, the blow of horses. More than one. From the cabin came the muffled bark of a dog—thank the Almighty it was inside—then a thud like a musket’s butt against a door.
He was half out of the shed before he wondered if he should wake Tamsen, make a run for it in the dark. If it was Kincaid, Parrish, there wasn’t a moment to lose. If not … the night was brutal cold. He didn’t want to force her out into it unless he must.
Someone opened the cabin door. Voices rose.
Jesse eased the shed door shut and crept around the structure, ducking along the gap between it and a woodpile blanketed in snow, the dog making racket enough to cover his footfalls. The snowfall had tapered to a flurry. He edged around to the corner of the shed, far enough to see across the cabin yard.
There were five of them, bundled for riding in bitter cold. Four mounted men with baggage heaped behind their saddles, and a fifth, dismounted. The latter was speaking with a blanket-wrapped man who barred the doorway, thrusting out a smoky pine torch as if to ward off the nocturnal visitors. Behind him the spill of firelight showed the lithe shape of the collie still barking its head off.
“My shed’s empty, thanks to Sevier,” the man was saying in a tone devoid of neighborliness. “You boys done took my mule weeks back. Now ye want more?”
The man fronting him spoke over the racket. “Militia’s got John Tipton’s house under siege. Tipton’s harboring property belonging to Governor Sevier—and upward of forty-five Carolina troops holed up with him. I’ve authority to requisition for the Franklin men waiting him out.”
“Hush yer noise!” the farmer shouted, turning on the dog and a wailing child that had joined the din.
Jesse felt the news run like ice through his limbs. It had been hard to judge distances with the falling snow, so many detours. They were farther east than he’d reckoned. How nigh the besieged Tipton home? He didn’t know this region well.
The farmer gave the militiaman on his doorstep no ground. “Sevier’s property? Back-owed taxes to Carolina more’n like. But Franklin ain’t getting no more help from me. I got no more to give.”
“You’ve a cow,” said the man on his porch.
Panic seized Jesse at the thought of Tamsen lying asleep in the shed, but the farmer stoutly denied the assertion.
“Do not.”
One of the riders in the yard spoke up. “I can smell it from here, Cap’n. He’s got it in the cabin.”
“I brought her in out th’ cold!” the farmer thundered. “My wife’s done lost her milk, and the least’un ain’t weaned. You’d take the milk out’n my baby’s mouth?”
Silence. Then, “Have you aught in the smokehouse to spare?”
“Empty.”
The captain nodded to one of the riders, who turned his horse toward the side yard. The farmer shut the cabin door and hurried out with his torch. “I’ll fetch ye a ham—and hope you choke on it.”
The man had shut the dog inside. Jesse drew back into shadow as the farmer passed with his torch not a dozen feet away, trudging through unmarked snow to a smokehouse behind the cabin, returning with the promised ham, cursing under his breath as he passed.
“Keep your worthless Franklin paper,” Jesse heard him grumble seconds later. “Just git!”
Saddle leather creaked. Hooves crunched the snow. Jesse heard the farmer’s boots clomp onto his porch, where he paused to offer a parting shot. “If Tipton’s got a lick o’ sense, he’ll pick off ever’ last one of ye from the comfort of his upstairs winders!”
The cabin door opened, loosing the chorus of baby, dog, and bawling cow. Then it shut with a bang, and the inside bar slammed down.
Jesse waited till he could no longer hear the riders, then returned to Tamsen, feeling like a rabbit diving head first into its hole. Not that the shed was much refuge. She was his refuge, he realized as he flung an arm over her for their mutual warmth, comforted by the sound of her breathing while his mind sorted through what he’d overheard.
Sevier had Tipton’s house surrounded. Something about stolen property … or was it taxes? He supposed it depended on which side of the great divide of Franklin one stood.
Slaves. He remembered Cade telling them that slaves had been taken from Sevier—Tipton forcibly levying a North Carolina tax. So, Sevier hadn’t let such an affront go unanswered. No surprise there.
Other things his pa had said came back to him in snatches. Things about Ambrose Kincaid. The way his pa had talked, it seemed he knew the man, knew what he’d do if he caught them. But how could that be?
Jesse dozed, once hearing riders pass again. Franklinites patrolling the roads to Tipton’s farm? Or a more personal threat? He wished he knew how far it was to Tipton’s.
Hounded by
enemies. Hemmed by fractious neighbors. Somehow, between them, he had to get his wife north to the Holston, in hopes Cade was still alive to meet them.
The slamming of the cabin door had him springing out of the hay, jerked from sleep, thoughts spinning with memories of Franklin militia and barking dogs and men determined to take his wife and see him hanged for murder.
Tamsen sat up, face pale and creased in the gray of dawn.
“Jesse?” She gave a startled yelp as he pulled her to her feet, no more than half-awake.
“We have to go.” He snatched up the bearskin, flung it over the horse, then cupped his hands to help her mount. He checked the priming of his rifle, then slung it over his shoulder. Cutting short the horse’s feeding on the hay Tamsen had vacated, he led it from the shed. Tamsen ducked to clear the doorway as the farmer came striding around the shed to his woodpile, carrying rifle and ax.
The man halted, gaping. “Who in tarnation—?”
Jesse was running before the man could collect himself. When they’d cleared the woodpile, he thrust the reins at Tamsen and vaulted onto the horse behind her, grabbing his rifle to keep it from slinging off his shoulder.
“Where do I go?” Tamsen’s hood fell back, and her hair, loosed from its braid, streamed in his face.
“Take to the wood.” Jesse held to her with his hands and the horse with his knees, frantic to keep them both astride.
A shot cracked. The ball struck a tree beyond them, shattering bark across the snow. Before the farmer could reload, they’d put too many trees between them to make a target. Jesse had her slow the horse, fearing a tumble now more than a shot in the back. He looked ahead through the lifting gray, scouting the snowy wood.
“See that fallen oak? It’s pointing north. That’s the way we got to go.” And fast, he thought, as the snowfall thickened around them again.
It took every scrap of concentration Tamsen possessed to pick a path through the maze of trees and stumps and outcrop stones obscured by the slanting snow. Cold stung her eyes, blurring her vision further. At first the sound, a distant crackling, barely registered. It was Jesse, behind her, who drew attention to the noise. “Gunfire. Tamsen—hold up.”