by Burning Sky
“No, I havena.” Rush knew he’d been injured in the aftermath of Cherry Valley, months after he’d set out from Philadelphia, but Neil had made light of his condition. He’d admitted to the headaches, needing some reason to explain his letters being penned by other hands than his. But he hadn’t told them the worst of it. His failure to be forthcoming had been a mistake.
Call it what it is. A lie of omission. For all his talk to Willa of trust, he was the one fallen short in that regard. He’d feared his fellow Society members would see him as damaged goods, unfit for the task they’d sent him to accomplish. In striving to protect his dream, he’d come to the brink of having it snatched from him.
“Mea culpa,” he murmured, turning to the lean-to’s tiny clay-and-wattle hearth to dish up the stewed rabbit he’d heated for his supper.
As he ladled the stew onto a tin plate, memory of the bear in his path returned with clarity. In that moment he’d known beyond doubt what he was meant to do. What the Almighty spoke to him on that mountainside hadn’t changed. That Willa might never return his love, never want him as he did her, didn’t alter the act of service that love asked of him now. Not stay this time. But go.
He turned from the hearth as MacNab rose to make for his own table. “I’ve decided a thing, Gavan. Come morning—”
A shadow in the open doorway checked him.
“Mister Neil,” Goodenough said in greeting. “I see I’ve interrupted supper.”
THIRTY
I’m on my way to Miss Anni’s,” Goodenough said, “but wanted to stop in and tell you, in case you see Miss Willa afore she or I do. They fixed a date for that land auction. The Colonel got it in a letter from that fella poked around here back in spring with his maps and deeds.”
Wendell Stoltz. The assessor for the commissioners of confiscation.
“He’s heading back this way soon,” Goodenough added.
Neil swallowed past a knotted throat. “When is it to be?”
“Middle of September, the sixteenth, I think it is.”
Less than three weeks away. If he’d needed confirmation, he had it. “Right, then.” He leaned over the table, palms flat. “There’s a thing I must do, and I must leave Shiloh to do it.”
If Willa had a hope of gaining the proof she needed to save her land, then he must go to Albany and find Tilda Fruehauf—apparently alive and willing to communicate—and let the consequences shake themselves out as they may.
Goodenough looked less than pleased. “Seem like you just come back, saying leaving was a mistake. Where you aiming to go now, Mister Neil?”
“ ’Tis best I dinna say.” The fewer who kent his business, the longer he’d have before Richard Waring deduced where he’d gone and why. “But there’s a concern I have in going. ’Tis Anni. I’ve every reason to think she’ll carry to term, or verra near it, but if she doesna, and I’m not by—”
Goodenough held up a hand. “I’m here. And there’s Miss Leda. It’ll be all right, and if it ain’t, not much can be done even if you were here, is there?”
Her dark eyes defied him to offer argument or platitude. He’d none to give and less experience birthing bairns than she, in any case. “There’s a thing more I must ask of ye. Both of ye,” he said, turning to include MacNab. “Speak of my leaving to no one.”
“Ye’ve my word,” MacNab said without question.
Goodenough eyed him, less certain. “Folk gonna notice soon enough.”
“Aye. Still, I’m asking you. Please.”
Goodenough heaved a sigh. “All right, Mister Neil. If that’s how you want it.”
“That’s how it has to be.” He saw in her eyes she caught the difference and didn’t know whether to be glad or worried. The last thing he wanted was for Waring—father or son—to get wind of his absence any sooner than was necessary. He was tempted to explain his journey to Goodenough, but word was far more likely to reach Willa in so doing, and he didn’t want to make a promise to Willa he mightn’t be able to keep.
There was one thing he needed to say to her, however. Once Goodenough took her leave, he asked Gavan MacNab to help him say it.
Neil folded the letter and sealed it with a candle’s drippings. Not only had MacNab penned it for him, he’d agreed to ride to the cabin and see the letter into Willa’s hands. Unavoidably privy to its contents, the man had been unable to hide his sympathy, which Neil pretended not to see.
“Just one thing, Gavan,” Neil said. “I’m certain Aram Crane’s watching that road, expecting me to go to Willa.”
The smith’s gaze sharpened. “Need I expect trouble out o’ him?”
“I’ll not put it past the man,” Neil said, already turning his attention to provisioning the journey east. In brief he explained about the letter gone missing and why he was leaving for Albany—and why it needed to be in secret. “I mean to leave as soon after nightfall as I can slip away unseen.”
Gavan’s black brows drew low. “I ken Willa’s been waitin’ for word from back east, something that might be o’ help to her—and the contrary to Waring. Even supposing he stole the letter, ye dinna think he’d do anythin’ worse to thwart her, do ye?”
Anything and everything, Neil thought.
“I’m asking you to trust me, Gavan—and take care. If the road past the mill is watched tomorrow, dinna go. Wait. But the soonest you can take it safely, I’d be obliged.”
He picked his slow way along Black Kettle Creek, beneath a moonless sky, then south on a broader track from the point where the creek emptied into the West Canada, flowing down to the Mohawk River, but it wasn’t until a few miles north of German Flats, with the sky beginning to gray, that he kent he was being tracked. While no more than the occasional snapped twig had struck him as anything other than normal nocturnal forest sounds, Seamus had sensed a presence, swiveling long black ears to catch at sounds beyond Neil’s hearing.
Little he could do about it save press on. A chill settled in his bones as he rode. A mist rose off the broad creek, hanging low in the bordering woods as dawn’s gray flushed rose gold. He welcomed the rising sun, not only in hope of catching a glimpse of the rider he was all but certain was keeping pace with him; he’d ridden the past hour with his bladder full and needed badly to find cover in which to stop.
The sun was spilling its liquid light through the trees when he could stand the discomfort no longer. He drew Seamus to a halt and scanned the track behind, which rose to a slight crest, blackly wooded either side, and deserted. Quickly he dismounted.
In the seconds it took him to do so, a rider had materialized in the road behind him, his horse turned sideways as if frozen in the act of crossing, a pale horse gleaming like marble, the mist coiling around its hooves.
Neil took a step toward Seamus, heart knocking like a fist. Then he stopped.
The man on the pale horse would have been immensely tall on his feet, but it wasn’t Richard Waring, whom Neil had feared had followed him. It was Joseph Tames-His-Horse.
As shock and fear subsided, Neil’s impulse was to close the distance between himself and Willa’s clan brother, tell him where he was bound, what he hoped to accomplish, until it struck him that such a mission might be the last thing the man would want to see succeed. Was that why he’d followed him? To prevent his reaching Albany?
But no, he couldn’t ken what Neil was doing. No one did, save MacNab, and he couldn’t have taken his letter to Willa so soon.
Again he nearly started forward, but something in the way Joseph sat his horse, straight and aloof, held him back. Though it was a coin’s toss whether it was reproach or approval he read in that bearing, he couldn’t look away from the power of the Indian’s stare.
Look away, or move.
Was this what the hypnotizing stare of a snake felt like to a field mouse? The thought almost made him smile.
The spell was broken as Joseph raised a hand, laying it flat against the place where Neil had cut out the musket ball and stitched the smooth brown flesh together
again. Beyond the forest, the sun sent its light spearing down through tree and mist, to glint on Joseph’s glossy hair as he dipped his head at Neil. Without visible gesture, he turned the spotted mare back into the trees. In an instant he was gone, leaving no more sign than a wind’s rustle where the leaves shivered in his wake.
Had it been Godspeed, then? Or good riddance?
Neil couldn’t say, though he thought there had been gratitude in the gesture.
With his heart thudding in his chest, he saw to his business, swung back into the saddle, and turned Seamus’s nose into the rising sun.
THIRTY-ONE
Experience warned him to clip its wings, but despite his efforts, hope once again soared in the chest of Joseph Tames-His-Horse, higher with every mile he’d trailed the Scotsman away from Shiloh. He had not expected the man to leave, not after he returned so soon from his wilderness wanderings. This time he’d gone south toward the white settlements, not north into the mountains. Could it be he wasn’t coming back? Had Burning Sky rebuffed him one too many times?
More consuming to his heart, more pressing to his mind, was another question. Did his going mean that he, Joseph, might yet have a chance to woo her back to the People?
That was the hope he tried to push down, to cover with the heavy stone of duty. No matter how things may have changed between Burning Sky and the Scotsman, there was still the deserter to deal with. And that deserter was behaving strangely.
For the past days, Crane had taken to hanging about the village, which was how Joseph came to observe Neil MacGregor’s going. But as he did not know what prompted the Scotsman’s departure, he did not know why Crane had changed his habits, why he seemed intent on lingering by the mill each day, as though he waited for something, or someone, to pass. Not until the sun had set did he mount his horse and return along the track that led west of the village to the stable and pastures of the big stone house, where before he’d spent the majority of his time, tending to the horses there.
Joseph sat in concealment on a ridge north of the mill, watching the track just above the structure where it curved away eastward toward Burning Sky’s distant fields. The sun had dipped behind the hills to the west. Daylight was dimming. He bent his head to peer through the laurel thicket that concealed him, and there went the deserter, swinging into the saddle and leaving the mill yard, headed back along the short but lonely stretch of track to the people called Waring, who had taken him in as groom.
Do it now, half of Joseph’s mind urged. Do not let him reach his place of refuge this night. Take the man and be gone with him to Fort Stanwix.
The other half of his mind had the whole of his heart on its side, and was shouting louder—as it had since the Scotsman left. Go to her, it was saying. See if she has changed her mind about being Burning Sky.
That half of his mind won the battle. If Crane was at the mill again on the morrow, Joseph would take him at this hour, on his homeward journey. If all went as he hoped—oh, those sprouting wings hope had—Burning Sky and the children would be waiting for him, secured away from the village, when he brought the deserter along, and they would all leave this place together.
He did not go by the woodland track but kept it in sight as he made a slower way threading his horse through timber and brush. He wasn’t far past the turn the track took above the mill when the thudding of hooves alerted him to a rider’s approach. He slid from the mare’s back to stroke her muzzle and keep her quiet. His own heart thumped a beat of alarm, and the place in his side the ball had torn pulled with a prickling ache, as if in warning. Had he been seen again?
He waited, eyes fixed on the brush that screened the track, which showed as a lighter patch beyond the darkening woods, a stone’s throw away. He didn’t see the horse, but the disembodied head and shoulders of its rider passed through a break in the brush with the up-and-down motion of an easy trot.
A face in profile. Bushy black hair tailed below a hat. Broad shoulders. Heavy arms and chest.
The deserter wasn’t the only Shiloh man Joseph had come to recognize on site. It was the smith, the one the Scotsman had lodged with. The man rode with purpose, though not with haste.
Joseph knew of no one else living out that way. Only Burning Sky. Why would the smith be going to see her? An errand for the Scotsman?
He grasped a fistful of mane, ready to mount up again, annoyed as much as curious. He would have to wait until the man left her cabin before he could speak to Burning Sky. He’d tensed to swing onto the horse’s back when he heard another rider coming along behind the smith. This one was moving fast.
Joseph shifted to where he could see the track, in time to glimpse the passing rider. Despite the swiftness of it, despite the failing light, he knew this horseman with more surety than he had the first. Aram Crane hadn’t ridden home but doubled back to the track above the mill.
Was it the smith he’d been waiting for all this time?
Hearing a shout, then a scuffling of hooves as if both horses had paused, Joseph swung onto the mare, excitement singing through his blood. He was almost to the edge of the darkening woods when one of the riders came racing back toward the village.
Crane was past him when Joseph crashed the mare through the wooded strip, kicked her into a gallop on the open track, and tugged the tomahawk from his sash. Crane slowed and wheeled his horse. Joseph glimpsed wild eyes in a white face too startled to cry out, before he struck with the flat of the blade, a blow to the head measured to daze, not kill.
Crane landed on the dusty track and did not move.
Grasping the reins of the man’s horse, Joseph slid down to settle the quivering creature, then slung his prisoner across its saddle, bound him, and led both horses off the track to the woods’ edge.
He paused to look down the road for sign of the smith but couldn’t see far in the gathering twilight. Nothing stirred on the track. He’d taken his quarry in near silence. No doubt the smith was already halfway to Burning Sky’s cabin.
He’d also taken his quarry on impulse and was now revising his plans. He wouldn’t take Crane to Burning Sky or risk lingering near Shiloh where the man could be aided or rescued, and so was more than ever certain his earlier journey to Fort Stanwix had been wise. The Scotsman was gone. The deserter was in custody. And now Thayendanegea was near. Joseph would ride straight to Fort Stanwix and give the deserter over to his war chief, if Thayendanegea was amenable—and there was little doubt in Joseph’s mind that he would be.
Then he would return and do all in his power to persuade Willa Obenchain to leave this place, come back to the People, be Burning Sky again. Forever.
For the first time since he found her with the Scotsman in her cabin, Joseph dared to believe it could happen that way.
Before the next dawn, a snag in the hasty capture of Crane made itself apparent. Having decided to take the deserter to Fort Stanwix in hope of catching the Mohawk delegation before they returned to Niagara, Joseph found himself forced to hunt to feed him. Many miles west of Shiloh, he left the deserter tied to a tree, taking both horses and Crane’s shoes as precautions against escape.
In the gray before sunrise, as the last ribbon of pink faded from the brightening eastern sky, he set out, pausing beneath a beech tree to swallow a few shriveled huckleberries—all that remained of his provisions. He was still leaning against the smooth trunk when a line of turkeys ambled into view.
Forgoing the rifle for silence’s sake, he spent three arrows and gained two hens before the birds scattered. As he retrieved the third arrow, through his mind flashed the image of himself thrusting it through the neck of his prisoner. He was meant to return Crane alive or dead. Dead was more tempting than it had been one sleep ago.
Once Crane regained his senses after his capture and was made to understand his situation, Joseph had halted the horses long enough to set him upright in the saddle, securing him with hands bound, ankles tied beneath the horse’s belly, another rope at his neck, which Joseph held like a leash.<
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“Good dog.” He’d been unable to resist giving Crane’s knee a pat, grinning as the man cursed him roundly and jerked in a futile attempt at a kick.
“Folk in Shiloh know about you.” Crane glared in the moonlight as Joseph swung onto his mare and gave lead reins and neck rope a tug. Crane grunted at the pull, coughed, and spat. “They know you’ve been skulking about. Important folk. Colonel Waring, for one.”
The deserter had taken pains to alter his speech. He sounded less an Englishman now than he did the people he’d attempted to hide among, though Joseph knew he’d been born in a place called Birmingham, over the great water in England.
He kept his tone light. “And the big yellow-haired one?”
“Was it you he shot?” Crane was silent for a time, obviously thinking, then said, “And I can guess who it was patched you up again—that Scotsman who’s been hanging around Shiloh all summer.”
Joseph made no answer to that.
“It’s known who gave you shelter too. That’s going to count against her with most, along with those half breeds she’s still got under her roof.”
Burning Sky. A coldness congealed in Joseph’s belly. He kept his gaze ahead as he picked his way through the wooded dark, brushing aside clinging webs and trailing boughs.
“She is no concern to you.”
“I suspect she is to you, though.” Crane’s voice, rising above the crackle and thud of hooves, held suggestion, and veiled threat. “Listen now … You and I could come to an agreement, one of benefit to us both.”
Joseph’s belly clenched around the cold knot. “You come along peaceful, and I do not cave in your skull. That is the agreement between you and me.”
“There’s something I need to do east of here and—”
“East of here?” Joseph cut in placidly. “You have no food for a journey. You carry a musket, one small satchel. You are lying.”
“That’s your doing. I was headed back to Waring’s place. That cook of theirs was meant to be putting up provisions for me.”