Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

“Owl.”

  “And you have a sister? Where is she?”

  Owl sat up. “Our horse called to your horse when we passed by your camp, so I went into the trees to see, and found it. I led my sister away and came back for it.”

  The boy watched warily, as if waiting for Joseph to notice he hadn’t answered his question. Whatever the child was doing in the woods, it wasn’t going well for him. His clothes were turning to rags. His bare feet bled where the ground had torn them. Hunger was in his face.

  Joseph took his time answering. “Will you take me to your sister and this horse that is lame?”

  The boy’s jaw tightened. Clearly he was reluctant to put himself into a stranger’s hands, even one claiming kinship. Though he’d no intention of letting the boy go without first seeing this sister who couldn’t walk, Joseph gave him the dignity of appearing to make the choice for himself. “We are both Wolf Clan, young brother. It is my place to help you if I can. Will you let me?”

  Owl got to his feet, wincing as he did. Though his eyes widened when Joseph stood to his full height, he nodded his head and said, with a little more haughtiness than needful, “Hen’en. I will let you follow me to where my sister waits.”

  The boy spurned Joseph’s offer to ride and spare his feet. He strode straight backed and limping over the rocky forest ground. Behind him Joseph led the mare, by turns amused, exasperated, and impressed by such stubborn endurance. It reminded him of Burning Sky.

  It was the lame horse that announced the girl’s whereabouts, a dark bay roan, its good saddle and baggage in contrast to the bedraggled appearance of the child who claimed it. Joseph raised a brow at the boy but was more interested in the girl, tucked into an oval of tree roots at the base of a slope.

  Owl went to his sister, who had watched Joseph’s approach with eyes too big for her thin face, dark eyes that spoke of pain and suffering. A look Joseph’s heart twisted to see. The boy spoke too low for Joseph to hear, so he watched the girl’s face as she listened. Younger than Owl by several years, she showed the same evidence of mixed blood in her coloring. But where the boy’s features were molded in determined lines, already showing the man he would be, his sister’s face was delicate, her likeness to her brother no more than a wistful echo.

  “He is called Tames-His-Horse,” he heard the boy say with a shrug. “That is probably why the mare chose to stay with him.”

  Joseph managed not to smile as he tethered his horse near the roan. He approached Owl’s sister and knelt, making himself smaller and, he hoped, less intimidating. “Sekoh, young sister. I am here because your brother says you are not able to walk and that concerned me. He has not told me what you are called.”

  “Margaret Kershaw.”

  The child’s voice was thin, like the call of a wren, and went straight to Joseph’s heart. He hadn’t expected her to give an English name. “Kershaw is the name of your father?”

  “Her name is Pine Bird.” Owl stepped near, frowning at his sister, who gazed down at the soiled quilt that wrapped her. “We have no father. He’s dead.”

  Joseph asked the girl, “Which name do you wish to be called?”

  She didn’t look up. “Pine Bird?”

  “A good name,” he said. “Will you show me why it is you cannot walk?”

  Pine Bird let the quilt fall open. A pair of too-big moccasins—her brother’s, Joseph realized—were bound to her feet by strips torn from the hem of her homespun frock, over which she wore a man’s linen shirt, the wide sleeves rolled above her slender wrists. The child hiked up her tattered skirt. Joseph didn’t wince at the gash that tore the flesh below her knee in a long and ragged line, but it took effort. No bone showed in the raw wound, and the flesh around it wasn’t badly inflamed, but it needed to be cleaned and drawn together with stitches.

  “How did this happen?” He asked the question of her brother, who told the tale.

  It had happened the night of the storm. Hoping to find shelter before it burst upon them, the children had approached a cabin miles to the east, only to be halted in the yard by a man with a musket. When Owl tried to bring the horse near enough to explain their need, the man shot at them.

  “The ball grazed my sister’s leg, but she clung hard to me and didn’t fall from the saddle.”

  Joseph held the boy’s gaze. “Is my brother certain he wasn’t shot at for stealing that horse?”

  “I didn’t steal it! We found it.”

  There was, Joseph mused, no indignation so great as a thief accused when innocent. He couldn’t help prodding such bruised pride. “As you found my mare?”

  The boy glared, unabashed. “The roan wasn’t tied in a camp. It was wandering, just as you see. It lost a shoe before we found it, and I made it carry us fast from that cabin where my sister was shot. Now the horse limps and can be no use to us.” Words tumbled from the boy, borne of a desperation he’d struggled to hide. “If you give us your mare, I will give you the roan and all that it carries—if you get a new shoe soon, I’m sure it will be well. A barebacked horse for a horse with saddle and bags, that is a good trade.”

  Amused by this brazen attempt to trade for a horse he’d failed to steal, Joseph set aside the issue for the moment. “Have you people living near who can dress this wound? If so, you should take your sister to them.”

  Owl opened his mouth, then glanced at his sister. The girl was looking between them, not admitting to the hope Joseph read in her eyes. A hope as fragile as sparrows’ eggs.

  “There’s no one,” Owl said. “When soldiers killed our parents, white neighbors took us in so we didn’t starve, but they did not want us. They let their children call us dirty Indians and treat us bad. We’re going to our mother’s people, and we will not be dirty among them.”

  Joseph pressed his mouth tight, saddened and angered by the children’s plight, but he contained his feelings. “Do you know where these people are?”

  Owl pointed west.

  Joseph sighed. “Listen, brother. Our people are living in many places since the war and not living well. Do you know the names of your Wolf Clan uncles? A grandmother? An aunt?”

  It took further coaxing, but at last he had from the boy the full truth. Owl didn’t know where his mother’s Mohawk clan had lived before the war, much less where they had gone since.

  “Our father took our mother to live in a town on the Hudson River. He made her speak white and dress white.” Their mother had tried to teach them her language and given them names of the People, but they couldn’t remember hearing her speak the names of her kin. “But we are Wolf Clan. It comes from the mother. We know that much.” Owl stood, feet planted in defiance, as if daring Joseph to disagree.

  Joseph sat back on his heels, thinking. The boy was right, as far as it went. A child was born to his mother’s clan. Perhaps someone at Niagara would take in these children if their kin could not be found. But the boy could have no idea the distance they had to travel or how hard it would prove to outwit the traders at the posts where they must go to look, men who would deceive and misuse them. Owl might have it in him to survive it, but the girl? He couldn’t send her down such a treacherous path.

  Joseph sent up a silent petition that the boy would prove as sensible as he was brave. “I cannot give you a sound horse for a lame one.” He raised a hand before Owl could protest. “Listen. Here is a thing for you to think about. I, too, have a sister. It is for her I hunt. I have a deer, left at the place you found my mare.” He hoped this was still true. He hadn’t liked leaving the meat, but there had been nothing to do but hide it in the tamaracks and hope no predator found it before he retrieved his horse. “I will feed you both and in the morning take you to my sister. She will tend this wound. When your sister can travel again, you can decide what to do.”

  Owl crouched beside his sister, indecision in the set of his lips. Joseph had seen the longing in Pine Bird’s eyes, but knew that to press too hard might harden her brother to his course and make what must happen next more difficul
t.

  Joseph stood. “I will look at your horse now. You and your sister think on what I have said.”

  The roan shied a little as Joseph approached. It was a gelding, and by its trappings and the amount of gear it bore, it was a white man’s horse. He stroked its head, then moved around the animal until he found the shoeless hoof. He removed a stone embedded in the soft tissue, but the hoof appeared sound, no cracks or bruising. He found no evidence of strain or swelling in the leg. But the boy was right. It must be reshod or it would go lame.

  Movement made him turn to see the boy on his feet, his unhappy face resolved. “We’ll go with you to your sister and be glad if she can make my sister’s leg well. But if we don’t like her, we must be allowed to go.”

  Joseph no longer suppressed the urge to smile. “This thing you have chosen makes my heart glad. And do not worry. You will like my sister.”

  Though Willa’s fingers proved long of memory, an hour’s writing had cramped her hand. On this second evening of taking up a goose quill—unlike the first practice turn—Neil MacGregor had spread his drawings across the table. One by one she’d added the notations he had long carried in his memory. It was start-and-stop work. Often he began speaking, only to halt her so he could rephrase his words.

  “Aye,” he said after such a pause. “Begin with this: ‘The petal’s shadings impart a liveliness to the whole, being of a luminous pink.’ ” He waited for her to write that much, then went on. “ ‘When an insect alights upon the blossom cups, the stamens, which are fit into pockets in the petals, rise and powder it with pollen.’ ”

  Beautiful as were his drawings, it was the glimpse into Neil MacGregor’s mind Willa found most absorbing. She dipped the quill and penned his words below the colorful likeness of bog laurel.

  When last she’d turned to look, he’d been bending to place a pine knot onto the sinking flames in the hearth, using his uninjured left hand. Now she sensed him standing right behind her, blocking the fire’s warmth.

  “Ye’re doing well.”

  She poised the quill above the small glass inkwell. “You can tell?”

  His soft, self-deprecating laughter was another kind of warmth. “I dinna see any blotches or crossings out. Will ye read back to me what we’ve managed so far?”

  She did so, and he pronounced it good.

  “It is not so good.”

  Leaning his left arm on the table, he frowned at the page. “Why d’ye say that?”

  She reached for a drawing that bore descriptions made before the injury that robbed him of the ability and placed it alongside the one on which she labored. “Your writing was much finer. Look. Mine is like the scratches chickens make in dirt.”

  He laughed again. “Dinna be hard on yourself. Ye havena held a quill in what, twelve years? You’re doing bonnily.”

  Now she tried not to laugh. “Bonnily?”

  “I mean, you’re doing fine.”

  The candle on the table illumined his eyes—and his relief at finally getting these words out of his head and onto paper. Willa found she could not meet his gaze and looked instead at his injured arm. He’d wrapped it fresh but without the splints. The binding kept the wrist immobile, leaving his fingers free. She reached to touch them where they lay upon the table. “It is healing well, your arm?”

  His fingers jerked beneath hers. His face had gained some color since she found him, but not enough to hide the red suffusing it now. She pulled her hand away.

  “Faster than expected. Perhaps ’twas only sprained.” His gaze on her seemed suddenly intense, before he blinked and looked away. “Aye, then. Where was I?”

  Again she read the last words she’d set down, and with a creased brow, Neil MacGregor strode the cabin floor. He seemed better able to order his thoughts while on his feet. During an unusually long silence, Willa watched him pace. She’d never troubled to notice how he moved. He had a certain grace about him, as one at home in his skin. For all that he’d seemed strange before, the first white man she’d come near in years, he wasn’t an ill-made man.

  Just now he was dressed in shirtsleeves tucked into his breeches, and though the shirt was loose fitted, she could tell his belly was flat, his shoulders wide in proportion. She’d thought him rather slight of build. Next to men like Joseph or Richard, perhaps he was. Yet he was taller than her by a little, and while his lines were lean—her gaze dropped down his straight thighs to the curve of his stockinged calves—he did have some muscle to him. He was, she realized with a frisson of physical memory, the very height and build of the man she’d called husband. She knew exactly how their bodies would mold together, should they ever—

  Across the cabin Neil MacGregor turned, retracing his steps toward her. The face emerging into the fire’s light was as different from Kingfisher’s as one man could be from another. Yet it was a pleasing face. He had a good jaw on him, and no one could say his eyes were anything but beautiful—blue as a sky-reflecting lake, rimmed in black lashes below brows strongly marked. His hair always seemed in need of a comb, as if he’d run his hands through it, forgetting it was tied back, but the shorter wisps that curled over his scarred brow were pretty enough for a woman to envy. And he had a kind mouth, with lips shaped for smiling.

  They were not smiling now, nor pressed together in thought. A prickle of heat washed across Willa’s face. Neil MacGregor had stopped his pacing and spoken at last, and she hadn’t heard a word of it. Now he was looking at her in the way she had looked at him. At her hair, her eyes, her mouth.

  “Willa?”

  She’d never heard him say her name in such a way, low and husky. It made her belly tighten with a flutter both pleasurable and panicking. She looked quickly at the drawing before her, cheeks blazing. “I am sorry. Say again … that last part you were saying.”

  After a moment he repeated the words she’d missed. This time she didn’t let her mind, or her eyes, stray from the task at hand.

  FOURTEEN

  Cap’s barking brought them rushing from the cabin, abandoning the remains of a midday meal. First to reach the porch, Neil halted so abruptly Willa ran into him, jabbing him with the butt of the musket she’d snatched up. He barely noticed for his astonishment at the sight that greeted him in the yard. The Indian had returned, leading his spotted mare, upon which two children rode. Tied to the mare’s saddle was another horse—his horse.

  “Seamus!” The gelding shot its ears forward and strode to the reach of its lead, yanking the mare sideways. Neil came down off the porch and took the horse by the bridle. “Where did ye find the wee gomeral? Is he sound?”

  He ran his hands over warm, familiar horseflesh, finding scratches on chest and flanks and legs, some healed, some fresh. New scuffs to the saddle. A stain that looked like blood. But the bags were there, if battered, and to his relief, still wrapped in canvas was his plant press and the small field desk, though obviously it had been unwrapped by inquisitive hands; the knots in the bindings were clumsily retied.

  Still, if it contained all it once had … there need be no returning to Philadelphia. No humiliation. No defeat.

  “Yah, Joseph!” Willa suddenly exclaimed. “You were meant to be getting meat for me. That is all.”

  With his soul sending up silent hallelujahs to the Almighty for this restoration, this miraculous reprieve, Neil had paid scant heed to the rising voices nearby. Joseph had taken the children off his horse, and Willa had put aside her musket and come to stand before the Indian, her face gone a bloodless white.

  “Their parents are lost to them. They have no white kin to take them in.” Joseph’s tone was reasoning. “They wish to find our people, but the girl is—”

  Willa took a step back, shaking her head. “You must find some other way.”

  Frowning, Neil moved to peer around the wall of horseflesh to better see the children, black haired and grubby, clasping each other with skinny arms while Cap sniffed at their knees. Glaring at Joseph Tames-His-Horse, the older of the pair, a boy, spoke a ho
t stream of words Neil recognized as Mohawk.

  Joseph turned to him. “I have not lied to you. She is one of the People. Our sister.”

  The girl, dressed in what suspiciously resembled his own spare shirt, turned her face to Neil—a small face marked with suffering. As her dark eyes met his, something tugged at his heart, making him want to gather her in comforting arms.

  The boy dropped his scowl to the collie, sniffing at the girl’s skirt. With a muttered oath, he kicked the dog.

  “Hey, now,” Neil began, just as the girl’s small face crumpled and she slumped against the boy, who grabbed her to keep her from falling.

  Neil moved swiftly, catching the girl as she slipped from the boy’s grasp, bending low to support her. She’d fainted—he felt the sag of her full weight, slight as it was, and his knees met the ground as she sprawled across his lap. The impact jarred his injured wrist, but he hardly heeded it. There was only the dirty little face fallen limp against his chest, and the child’s ragged skirt rucked up to bare a wound deeply scored from calve to ankle, broken open and bleeding.

  The girl roused almost at once, looking up at him with eyes full of pain. His heart wrenched again. “ ’Twill be all right, lass. We’ll see to it. Ye’re safe with us.”

  Willa stood as if rooted, face set and white. He looked a wordless plea at her and saw in her eyes a battle being waged.

  Whatever the conflict, she put it aside and with a jerk of her chin said, “Bring her inside.” She strode past him toward the cabin but halted at the door. “Wait. The light is better on the porch. You will need light, yes? I will bring a quilt.”

  He held the injured girl propped across a knee until Willa returned and spread the quilt from her loft pallet between the door and the steps. Joseph lifted the child from Neil’s arms, careful of her bloodied leg, and carried her to the quilt.

  Neil knelt beside her, while the boy hunkered at her shoulder, distrustful eyes on him. “What will you do to my sister? She’s only seven. You can see she’s afraid.”

  Not the only one, Neil guessed, though the boy was putting up a brave, if belligerent, front. “I’m going to see to this wound. With a bit of help.”