by Burning Sky
A straight-backed warrior queen, braced for battle.
“Boudicca in the flesh.”
She raised a brow, and he realized he’d spoken the name of the ancient Celtic queen aloud.
“Anni chose well,” he said quickly. “That color suits you, if ye dinna mind my saying.”
Her expression softened minutely. “It must do.”
To the gown she added the bone-handled knife, attached to its corded sheath passed around her neck so it hung between her breasts, distracting from respectability, but adding to the overall martial effect. Neil watched as she hoisted her capacious basket and secured its tumpline across her brow.
He kent he was gaping at her—in admiration, though his staring was discomfiting her. Forcing himself to look away, he clapped his hat on his head and took up his satchel. “Ready?”
She took up her musket and headed for the porch. Neil followed her out to the yard, where the air held the tang of fresh-cut wood.
Cap sprang from the porch and circled his knees while Willa paused to speak with the Indian, who heaved the ax into the chopping block to listen. With his shirt sleeves turned up over corded forearms and an indecent amount of thigh bared by breechcloth and leggings, he took in Willa’s words with a grave face. They spoke too low to overhear, though once the Indian cast him a narrowed glance, then cupped a hand on Willa’s shoulder and bent to speak into her ear. It was so nigh an embrace Neil looked away.
“Hen’en,” he heard Willa say—a tad sharpish—then she was striding past him toward the track, gripping the musket that rode her shoulder. Cap trotted after her.
The Indian’s gaze followed as well, black eyes above the shelf of his cheekbones intense, inscrutable. The eyes turned on Neil, who’d hesitated in the yard. The Indian closed the space between them in a few strides.
“They will not look kindly on her in that place. But she will go. See no one touches her.”
Neil took an involuntary step back. “Aye, I mean to do so.”
The Indian drilled him with a look, then turned his back and went to take up the ax.
From down the track, Cap barked, impatient with Neil’s dawdling.
He had to trot to catch Willa, striding on as though she cared not whether he followed. “How far did ye say was this settlement?”
She glanced aside. “An hour’s walk when I was a girl.”
“An hour’s walk at this pace? I’d make it a dozen miles then.”
She huffed through her nose and said, “More like three,” but didn’t slow her stride. At least he felt well enough to match it. That was something, after another headache the night before.
It was a promising day, the sky an unmarred blue, the sun still low over the eastern tree line, taking the edge off the chill. Passing the near field, Neil noted the amount of ground Willa had turned in a few short days. The woman worked like two men.
“It is not enough,” she said, apparently reading his thoughts.
“Enough for what?”
“To survive the winter and not starve before I can plant again next spring.”
For a plan, it was straightforward enough. She might even manage it, provided she was let alone to see it through. Yet the amount of fallow ground surrounding them held potential for more than bare survival. He was tempted to pause and stoop for a handful of soil. It was surprisingly dark where turned and looked neither stony nor heavy with clay. A rich, well-drained field, begging for plow and team. Neil could see stretching out to the south more bottomland acres waiting to be cleared.
Little wonder Waring coveted it.
“I mean to help in the fields, soon as my wrist can bear it.” Though he’d rewrapped and splinted it, he’d left off the sling, hoping to draw less attention to the injury. “If I canna dig, I can maybe plant.”
Willa said nothing to his offer. He tried another. “I can tote that musket for you.”
Whatever the Indian had said to agitate her, she seemed to have finally walked it off. She slowed her pace. “You could not fire it should the need arise. Not with only one hand.”
“True,” he said, thinking that with the arrival of her imminently capable-looking clan brother, she must think she’d all the help she needed. And protection. The Indian was a match for Waring physically. Whether in brutality … He’d rather not have occasion to learn.
They left the cleared land and passed into dense woods. The track curved away from the line of ridges, edging toward the south. The noise of the creek reached them through the trees. And lofty trees they were: soaring pine, sugar maples—some bearing scars of past tapping—beech, oak, hornbeam, and elm, many of prodigious girth. Here and there, dogwood was in bloom, a delicate mist of white among the darker trunks. Cornus florida. And was that Aster acuminatus in the open spot beyond that rotting blowdown? He’d started toward it before he caught himself, gave a shrug, and sent his eyes roaming elsewhere.
“Have you any near neighbors,” he asked, “or is it all forest betwixt you and Shiloh?”
“I have been gone twelve years,” Willa said, “so we will have to see. But before, this track led only to Papa’s farm, upstream on Black Kettle, east and a little north of Shiloh. West and south of Shiloh, there were more farms, but this part of the woods is Papa’s land. Or was. See there?” She pointed to a stand of the scarred maples. “There is where we made sugar, at winter’s end when the sap began to run. I am too late for it, this year.”
He glanced at her, hearing the sadness in her voice, but her face was carefully composed.
A woodpecker, startled at their coming, exploded into bobbing flight through the upper branches. A squirrel darted across the track ahead; Cap was away after it. Neil didn’t bother to call him back.
They walked in silence through wooded gloom speared only occasionally by a clever shaft of sunlight, until without preamble Willa said, “You have no need to fear him.”
The forest shade snuffed the copper in her hair, but the spark in her eyes made up for it.
He knew who she meant. “I’m not afraid.” When her mouth flattened, he confessed, “I was startled, aye. But I see you trust the man.”
“But you do not?”
Willa halted so abruptly Neil strode beyond her several steps before turning. Her gaze went to his forehead.
“Is it only his brown skin you distrust? If so, put your mind at ease. Joseph is a Christian. It was he who opened my eyes to the gospel. Yes—mine, odd and ugly as they are. I knew of God from a child, but I never knew Him.” She fisted one hand over her heart, where the straps of gun and knife and carrying basket crossed. “Joseph gave me hope when I despaired and friendship when I thought myself friendless. I have seen the scar you hide beneath your hair, and I know what made it. But Joseph did not put it there. He is no threat to you. He’s a threat only to—”
She clamped her lips shut, but Neil had seen what lay at the heart of this passionate defense. Not offense at what she perceived he thought of Indians, but fear for Joseph.
He searched her eyes, their difference muted in the dimness, and in them found full understanding of what he’d heard the night before and what had made him look away by the woodpile while they spoke. Clan brother or no, the Indian was in love with Willa, and she was troubled by it. Because she loved him in that way as well? Or because she did not?
“I see,” he said.
Willa frowned at his scrutiny. “Joseph Tames-His-Horse is a man you would do well to count a friend. As he is to me. That is all I have to say.”
She’d been too blunt with her words. Every stride that took her farther along the track drove the knowledge deeper, but the silence had lengthened far past the time she should have spoken of it. Soon enough her fear for Joseph crowded out this small shame. If anyone from the settlement discovered his presence … She should tell Neil MacGregor not to speak of him, but thought of the settlement stole the words. The track ran closer to Black Kettle Creek now. Its clear waters chattered over the stones in its bed. At a bend in the tra
ck, Willa glimpsed a timbered roof rising beyond a brow of land—the gristmill, straddling the creek halfway down the slope beyond.
“Seems we’ve arrived,” Neil said, breaking the silence.
She halted where the track began its descent. She could see the mill and the land widening below it, cleared back to the hillsides to accommodate the settlement strewn along Black Kettle’s western bank. Among the Mohawks, hers had been a traditional village where people still lived mostly in longhouses. She had not seen so many square log structures all together for many years.
Neil paused beside her. His dog had not returned to them, and she was glad. It might have barked and revealed their presence, and she did not know whether she meant to go forward another step. The stays beneath the borrowed gown constricted her ribs. Besides the fact that they were not made for her and fitted ill, she’d forgotten the feel of English clothing and did not like it now. She did not like the fear tearing through her. For a paralyzing second, she was certain Joseph was right. She was no longer meant for this life.
She could hear the millstones grinding, their rotor wheel fed by the falls over which the structure was built. It was the mill of her childhood, miraculously intact. How often had she stood outside it as a girl, giggling with Anni, waiting for Papa’s corn to be ground?
She trembled to see it now.
“I’m guessing the mill’s friendly ground,” Neil said. “Anni’s husband runs it, aye? Shall we stop there first?”
She gulped air like a drowning person. “Yes.” She took a step forward but halted when Neil’s fingers curled around her arm, warm through her linen sleeve.
“Never call them ugly.”
“What?”
“Your eyes,” he said. “They’re unusual, aye. Extraordinary even, but verra beautiful, and I’m sure I’ll ne’er see their like again.”
Neil MacGregor’s startling remark retreated to the back of Willa’s mind when, after they’d descended the final slope, two men emerged from the gristmill’s doorway, so engaged in conversation they nearly collided with her in the yard.
“Sorry, there!” said the younger of the two, a mild-faced man with dark blond hair bound in a queue, stepping back and bumping his companion instead.
The second man was shorter, with grizzled red hair that hung down his back in a thin tail. A battered hat shaded a face as bearded as Neil MacGregor’s had become. The man stared at Willa, taking her in from the basket’s tumpline across her brow to the beaded moccasins showing beneath the too-short hem of her petticoat. He did not seem to like what he saw. She shifted her attention back to the blond man, who had looked nowhere but at her face.
“You’ll be Willa Obenchain,” that man said, speaking to be heard above the mill noise, “or my memory’s shot. Don’t know as you’ll remember me, Charles Keppler.”
“Obenchain?” The red-whiskered man uttered her name with an accent that, though faint, told her he was not born to the Dutch or Germans or anyone else settled long on the frontier. He was from the east. Maybe even British born. He stepped back a pace, as if to distance himself from her. “She’s the one the savages carried off?”
Willa’s heart bumped hard, but she ignored the man, and his question. “You are Anni’s Charles,” she said to the other.
“The very one,” Charles Keppler said. “And here’s Anni coming from the house now, unless my ears play me false.”
Above the falls’ rumble, Willa heard her name called. She looked upslope beyond the mill, to see Anni on the path from a cabin east of the creek, set on a promontory overlooking the settlement. Two small figures bobbed behind her.
The sight caught at her heart.
“And you, sir?” Charles was saying. “MacGregor, isn’t it?” He noticed the splint and bindings showing below Neil’s coat sleeve, preventing a handshake. “Anni related your misadventures. I hope we can be of help outfitting you again for your travels.” Charles turned to introduce the second man. “Aram Crane, my father-in-law’s groom. The Colonel’s already building up another stable of horses.”
This last was directed at Willa, who remembered the fine herd of horses Anni’s father once owned. But Aram Crane bristled at it.
“No easy task after the red devils drove off the last lot. Good horseflesh gone to fill thieving bellies.”
More than his words, the man’s narrowed, raking eyes made Willa’s face burn, as if he blamed her for the loss. She thought it best to go on ignoring him, but Neil MacGregor was of a different mind.
“D’ye rob a man of all he has, then rebuke him for stealing so he doesna starve? They’ve children to feed too, I’d reckon.”
After their exchange on the road, it was not a thing Willa had expected him to say.
Crane was not pleased to hear it. Beneath his hat, his nose was high bridged and narrow, his jaw hung low and thrusting. Or perhaps his stance, belligerent and disdainful, made it seem so. “You’ll be one of those, then, taking up with squaws … when they offer?”
Neil took a step toward the man, looking as if he wanted to strike the mouth now sneering at him, but Charles was quick to raise a hand. “Aram, be civil. You’ve no grudge against these two.”
“Not yet, I don’t.” Crane relaxed his stance, the hardness in his eyes easing off like a rifle hammer grudgingly let down. “But don’t tell me we owe the Mohawks anything. I was at Cherry Valley—and other places, all through the war. I could tell you about the children Brant and his savages butchered. Whose fault is it if theirs are hungry now?”
The spit dried in Willa’s mouth as she sought for something to say that would not make matters worse.
Neil MacGregor startled her by stepping boldly up to Aram Crane, then removing his hat. The noise of the falls was too great to hear, but she was certain he spoke to Crane, whose gaze darted to Neil’s hairline. He was showing the man his scar.
The look in Crane’s eyes shifted from wariness to surprise, then … something sharper.
Without a word, the man stepped back from Neil, nodded curtly, then spun on a heel and headed down the track, leaving Willa stunned by what she’d last seen, or thought she’d seen, in his eyes before he strode away. But what could have caused the man to look at Neil MacGregor with fear?
Charles Keppler’s brows tightened, frowning at Neil, who watched Crane retreat before he set his hat on his head and turned back to them.
“Willa!” Anni had arrived, having descended the path and passed through the mill that served the family as a footbridge into town.
Willa tried to shake off the unnerving encounter as another round of introductions was made for the benefit of Anni’s twins, Samuel and Samantha, five years old and both as towheaded as Anni had been as a child. The boy hung back, but the girl, barefoot in a calico frock, looked at Willa with a frank curiosity.
“Did you really live wild with them Injuns up north?” Samantha asked in a high, clear voice. “And why are you wearing that strap across your forehead?”
A maternal hand clamped over her mouth, too late. Anni’s face went pink with mortification. “Little pitchers … heard what didn’t concern them.”
Everyone seemed poised as if on needle points, awaiting her reaction. After Aram Crane’s undisguised loathing, this innocent inquisition felt benign, apart from the wringing of her heart. Images of another girl, black haired and browner skinned, swam in her vision. Goes-Singing. Not as she’d last seen her, spotted with sores, face drawn with suffering, but curious and full of life, like Anni’s daughter.
She pushed down grief and wrestled her face into a smile. “I did so, little one, yes, but they are not wild. They live in towns, most of them, as you do. This basket I wear is the kind they use when they have more to carry than they can hold in their hands, or are traveling a long distance. You see?”
She shrugged out of the basket and set it on the ground. The girl stepped close. Her brother came near. Both peered within.
“It’s empty,” Samantha protested, sounding exactly like Anni at
her age.
“I mean to fill it at the trading store,” Willa said, somehow finding another smile for the child, even as tears pricked her eyes. “Maybe you would like to help me? Both of you?” When the children nodded with enthusiasm, she looked to Anni, suddenly wondering. “Is there still a store?”
It was clear in Anni’s eyes; she knew Willa had been thinking of her own children—her half-Indian children. Anni’s expression was torn between compassion and a repulsion that perhaps she could not help. Willa swallowed, but the grief going down met anger coming up and lodged in her throat like a stone.
“The British tried to burn it, but it’s still standing,” Anni said, a little too brightly. “Old Maeve Keegan’s still there. Well, in and out,” she added, with a tap to her forehead. “Her son keeps the store now. There’s linen—mostly homespun but not all—and caps.”
Willa glanced at Anni’s covered head. Even Samantha wore a tiny ruffled cap over her pale braids. “I never did like them much,” she said, then looked down the slope to the cluster of cabins and log structures. “How many have come back?”
“Between Loyalists decamping and then Oriskany …” Anni looked at her with uncertain eyes, but Willa held her gaze, not wanting her to shy away from the truth of things. “More than half the neighbors you’d remember are dead, many of the rest gone back east. But it’s early days. More may return.”
When they do, Willa thought, and have finished filling up this place again, then what? Will their children move west after the People who have gone that way, like Joseph’s sister and mother and thousands more? Or would peace between her two peoples finally come now? Her two peoples …
Such thoughts found no place to settle in her heart, so she did not speak them aloud. Instead, she reached through a slit in her petticoat to the leather pouch Joseph gave her, hung on a cord at her waist. She extended a handful of coins to Anni. “For the gown and the rest.”