by Lori Benton
“No ma’am,” he said. “I mean to go to Wakatomica.”
“But why? If it’s as you say and Jacob will be adopted soon, you must take me there first—to the Scioto towns.”
But he wouldn’t. She knew so before he spoke again.
“Listen to me. There’s a chance Falling Hawk has gone to Wakatomica himself. It might be we’ll find him there—with your boy—before ever he reaches Rain Crow. That’s worth taking the time, because I do know this: if Falling Hawk’s gone straight to the Scioto, it won’t matter if you half-kill yourself and Pippa trying to overtake him. We’ll be too late. And I have my reasons for needing to be at that council.”
Clare sat back, trying to steady her galloping heart. She recoiled from putting her trust in this man, still so strange to her—more so with every revelation. Yet he was offering his continued aid, and if she fought him every step of the way, there would come a breaking point. He would change his mind, abandon her, leave her in some dire strait among these cruel and unfathomable people. He was willing to take her to Cornstalk’s Town. Eventually. She would have to content herself with that.
And maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t need to go that far.
Clare picked up the baby and held her to a shoulder, and only then did it strike her what Mr. Ring had called her daughter.
“Her name is Philippa, Mr. Ring.”
“I know,” he said. “She looks like a Pippa to me. But if it vexes you, Missus, I’ll not speak the name.”
Clare huffed a breath, then relented. She needed him to hold the baby, which he seemed more than happy to do. “Call her what you wish,” she said, laying her daughter into his arms as her braid slipped down and bumped against his chest. “I’m going to the stream to wash.”
“You won’t fight me over going to Wakatomica?” he asked as she grabbed up her pack and started for the moon-glint on the water through the nearby trees.
“No, Mr. Ring. We’ll go first to Wakatomica.”
As if she’d ever truly had a say.
As she tramped off through the screen of foliage to the creek bank, Jeremiah held the tiny girl-child along his arm, enjoying the warm, contented weight of her, thinking about what Tall Man’s wife had said, the part he hadn’t told Clare Inglesby.
“Those ones out there, those warriors,” the young woman had whispered through the door flap. “They might not be inclined to let the woman with you go from this place unless she is not just traveling with you but is your woman. That is what some of the women are saying.”
They had made it out of Logan’s village without his having to tell that lie, to claim Clare Inglesby as his own. He still wasn’t certain what to make of the fleeting disappointment he’d felt about that as they’d shoved off in the canoe and Logan’s warriors let them go unchallenged. He glanced into the darkness, able just to make out the woman’s shape through the trees, bending over, seeing to her bathing.
How would she take to the notion?
He quailed from even asking. But if it came down to saving her life and Pippa’s, or to finding Jacob…he reckoned the woman would find a way to make peace with a lot worse things than pretending to be his wife.
Wakatomica proved a collection of villages built along the creek bearing that name. In one, the gathering Mr. Ring was keen to attend was still in progress, inside the council house—msi-kah-mi-qui, she thought he called it. Unlike the bark lodges the people lived in, this structure was log-built, some eighty feet in length. It loomed high in the village center surrounded by a broad, well-trodden ground, a little like a village square.
Though most of the men of Wakatomica were gathered in the council house, Clare’s heart still banged against her ribs at plunging into the midst of so many Indians—more than she’d faced at Logan’s Town. Gazes turned when they caught the swish of her petticoat passing between their lodges, where cook-fires burned and children played and dogs lay in the sun.
These people were Shawnees, different from the Mingos but to Clare’s eyes indistinguishable. Mostly copper-skinned—a few lighter, a few darker—their clothing a mixture of deerskins and trade cloth. Even their gazes were like those she’d endured at Yellow Creek, unwelcoming at best. As more stares followed, piling up like stones, she longed to take the baby off her back, fearing a set of hands would pluck her away and make off through the warren of bark huts as they’d plucked Jacob from the wagon.
No one molested them, however. Some called greetings to Mr. Ring.
They’d almost reached the council house when he raised his voice, addressing one of the few adult male Indians Clare had seen outside the structure. Dressed in the usual breechclout, moccasins, leggings, and shirt, this one had been squatting outside the council house but stood swiftly at their approach.
Mr. Ring wasn’t a small man, but the Indian was even taller, and younger, nearer Clare’s age. His features were angular, well-molded, but his eyes made the most striking impression, a startling amber that contrasted with his darker skin, with a daunting pair of eyebrows that soared above them like ravens’ wings. A breeze stirred the Indian’s black hair, tied in back with a hawk’s feather that twirled behind his lofty head.
He regarded her while Mr. Ring spoke to him in Shawnee. Whatever he said had the Indian pulling those fierce brows tight. He said something in reply, gave a brief nod, yet uneasiness swept Clare as Mr. Ring turned to address her at last.
“I need to go within before the council is over. Wolf-Alone will watch over you and Pippa while I’m inside.” As she glanced at the Indian, doubt surely evident, Mr. Ring added, “Wolf-Alone is also my brother.”
“How many Shawnee brothers do you have, Mr. Ring?”
He gave her a swift smile. “Just the two. Wolf-Alone was with Falling Hawk’s hunting party that came through Logan’s Town.”
Sucking in a breath at this more significant news, Clare swung her gaze back to the warrior, still regarding her with those striking eyes but giving no sign he understood a word they’d exchanged. Excitement surged, warring with panic at the thought of being left in the keeping of this fearsome being.
“Is Falling Hawk inside this…this…” She gestured impatiently at the structure looming over them, having forgotten what he’d called it.
“Msi-kah-mi-qui,” Mr. Ring said. “Wolf-Alone parted with Falling Hawk on the trail to the Scioto. Our brother went on to Cornstalk’s Town, with Jacob.”
“No!” The protest was out of her before she could stifle it.
Mr. Ring looked as if he sorely regretted mentioning Falling Hawk.
“I’ll tell you more, soon. Right now I need to be in there. It’s important, what they’re discussing. To you and me as well as to them. Some thirty chiefs and sub-chiefs are gathered. They’ve got the message I was sent to deliver. Now they’re deciding whether they’ll go to Pittsburgh or make war. It’s all but decided, so this won’t take long. I need you to stay with Wolf-Alone. Don’t leave his side.”
Giving her no chance to speak further, he caught the tall warrior’s gaze, nodded, then hurried inside the msi-kah-whatever-he’d-called-it.
Furious and impatient, Clare was on the verge of taking a step in pursuit, unmindful of anything but calling him back, when the Indian he’d left her with started speaking. His voice jarred her sensibilities enough to realize it would be a mistake—perhaps a deadly one—to follow Mr. Ring into that building full of warriors, uninvited. Warriors perhaps on the brink of war—with her people.
She drew a steadying breath, then turned to look at Wolf-Alone, who went on talking. She thought she detected concern in his tone, along with a notable wariness that matched the look in his eyes, and wondered if he’d ever been this close to a white woman before, whether she unnerved him as much as he did her.
Or he had done at first. As she drew in the air of that place, pungent with wood smoke and tanning hides, sunbaked earth and drying fish, she felt herself calming as she focused on the guttural, rolling syllables that were nonsense to her ears but appar
ently not her soul. Or maybe it was simply that she found his voice pleasantly pitched.
When at last he fell silent, her gaze shifted beyond him as she took in the crowd of small Indians that had, without her noticing, gathered near; children ranging from chunky toddlers to gangly pre-pubescents stood gawking, some craning their necks to glimpse the baby on her back.
Wolf-Alone spoke a word that scattered them, then tugged her toward the side of the council house, where a pack rested in the building’s shadow. Crouching, he removed a skin bottle from the pack and thrust it at her.
Conscious of her thirst, she took it and drank a tentative sip. Water, cool and quenching. She gulped it down.
When her thirst was slaked and she gave him back the skin, he gestured at the straps of the carrier, inviting her to remove it, to rest and tend her baby. She obeyed, though Philippa had been quiet, likely sleeping, having nursed before they reached Wakatomica.
She was surprised to find the baby awake, eyes wide as if in astonishment at all she’d seen these past few moments. It struck Clare then that the only life her daughter, less than a fortnight old, had ever experienced was traveling the wilderness on her mother’s back.
Wolf-Alone sat with his back against the log wall of the council house, legs bent, long thighs exposed between the tops of his leggings and the tail of his shirt. Leaving the baby in the carrier for now, propped against the wall in its shade, Clare sat with the pack between her and the Indian and tried not to stare at him. Instead she watched those outside the nearest wegiwas, searching for a fair head though she knew it was useless. Jacob had never come there.
Disappointment was crushing. She wiped angrily at tears she couldn’t suppress, wanting to rock herself and groan.
“How long can I bear this?”
Realizing Mr. Ring’s brother could hear her, even if he couldn’t understand, she glanced aside to find the Indian studying her. He said nothing though, and she looked away, going back to scanning bark huts—helpless to do otherwise—and drew in a breath sharp with astonishment and wonder.
The child was playing in the dirt across the village center, outside a wegiwa no different from those surrounding it. A child half-naked like most, but this one with skin and hair too pale to be an Indian. Much too pale.
She caught but a glimpse before the child was swept up by a Shawnee woman who’d noticed her staring. The woman carried the child out of sight behind a rack of meat strips suspended over a smoky fire. But a glimpse was all Clare needed. With a sound in her throat half whimper, half growl, she was on her feet in a scramble of petticoats, convinced Wolf-Alone was wrong about Falling Hawk or else had lied to Mr. Ring about it. Or Mr. Ring had lied to her.
Jacob was here.
She ran, aiming for the spot where the woman and child had vanished. “Jacob!” The name tore from her, wrenching her chest.
She was vaguely aware of her Indian guard’s wordless exclamation of surprise. She was keenly aware of the Indian women straightening from their fires, alerted to her swift approach. Some snatched their own children close. Others moved to bar her way. Clare dodged their grasping hands, slapping and thrusting away those she couldn’t elude, saw the woman bearing Jacob deeper into the village, and hurtled after her, lunging and barreling past crowding bodies, screaming all the while for Jacob, that he might know she was coming, she was near.
Darting between bark lodges, she caught another glimpse of Jacob riding the woman’s hip, feet dangling, bare and dirty. The woman’s long black hair swished like a curtain as she vanished between yet more wegiwas.
Clare ran harder, ignoring the pinch in her side. She burst again from between huts, nearly tripping over a basket of fish fresh from the nearby creek. Beside it on a woven mat sat an ancient Indian woman, a wrinkled bundle of brown sticks capped in wisps of white. Clare barely noticed her, for the woman holding Jacob had turned at bay. She was young, her copper-brown skin a stark contrast to Jacob’s. His head was pressed into the woman’s shoulder, blond hair obscuring his face. The woman’s was set in defiance. She pulled back her lip and loosed a stream of angry gibberish.
Clare slowed her approach, wary as if confronting a snarling dog. “Jacob? Darling, it’s Mama. Jacob, look at me!”
The woman swung Jacob to the ground and thrust him behind her, ready to battle over his keeping. Jacob cowered for an instant, then peeked out from behind the woman’s skirt, eyes wide with terror.
Blue eyes.
Clare stopped short, noting for the first time the cut of the child’s clothing—a skirt like the woman’s that wrapped and tied at the waist. And the length of that pale hair, longer than Jacob’s had been. And the small, snubbed features, too delicate for a boy’s. The child was a girl.
It seemed to Clare the earth tilted beneath her feet.
Not Jacob. The truth swelled to encompass her thwarted purpose; courage fled, and rage with it, as beneath her breastbone surged the first awareness of her peril.
It came too late.
The first blow landed between her shoulders, sending her sprawling into the reach of the woman she’d pursued. The woman grabbed her, fingers pinching. A slap landed across Clare’s face before she staggered several paces. Somehow she stayed on her feet, whirling to face her attacker.
Attackers. She was nearly surrounded now by Indian women, young and old, some clutching sticks, menacing as they neared, some scolding her in their incomprehensible tongue. Dark, hostile eyes condemned her, labeled her all manner of names that needed no interpretation. Intruder. Threat. Enemy. Face stinging, a throbbing between her shoulder blades, Clare backed away in the only direction that remained unbarred by angry Indians, toward a gap between two wegiwas behind her.
She didn’t dare turn her back. “Please, I didn’t mean…I thought…I’m sorry! I thought she was mine.”
No abatement of hostility showed in their faces. She looked again at the youngest of the women closing in on her, those with babies in their arms, and blanched in horror. Philippa.
She’d rushed off and left her baby in the keeping of a warrior she didn’t know, in the middle of a people who habitually stole white children—had stolen Jacob.
Panic coiled around her mind, freezing her in place. Help me. Oh, help me find her.
The woman nearest her, that tiny, wrinkled bundle of sticks that had been sitting by the fish, raised a club in fingers like gnarled roots and screeched with a force of astonishing power, a sound as blood-chilling as a war cry.
Clare turned and blindly ran, taking whatever path looked least obstructed, least barred, least defended, but knew almost at once she was lost. Lost in a warren of wegiwas that looked identical.
She slowed her steps, gaze darting, seeking anything familiar. Children cried out in surprise at sight of her, some in fear, others in curiosity. It didn’t seem the women who had chased her were hard on her heels, but others were emerging from their homes to see what the commotion was about.
Her mind latched onto the only source of guidance she could produce: the image of the council house, tallest structure in the village. If she could spot it, she might yet find her way back to its relative safety.
No longer running for fear of attracting further pursuit, she kept moving steadily, drenched in the sweat of fear, trying to look as if she knew where she was going so no one would attempt to stop her. At last she glimpsed the council house rising above the lodges ahead. Keeping that structure in her sights, ignoring all who spoke to her, at last she broke into the cleared ground at the village center. The council house was before her, the back of it at least, but all around it milled the lithe and intimidating figures of warriors.
She’d no choice but to head toward them, though many had caught sight of her and stopped in their tracks to stare.
Knowing she’d never pick Wolf-Alone out of that crowd, she searched instead for Jeremiah Ring as she swerved to avoid as many as she could, making for the side of the structure where she’d left her baby, refusing to look into those frigh
tening faces and thus failing to notice the tall warrior who turned the corner of the council house nearest her—until her nose collided with his hard, blue-shirted chest.
Enveloped in a miasma of musky bear oil, male sweat, and pungent pipe smoke, she tried to step back. A hard grip clamped her arm, imprisoning her. With pain exploding in her bumped nose, she tried to yank her arm free but in vain.
Clearly by his choice, the warrior released her. When he remained in her path she jerked her gaze up to meet his. The sight of her had surprised him, but surprise was fading now, leaving the Indian’s dark eyes cold, dead of feeling, as if she were no more than a beetle he’d as soon crush under his foot.
Or maybe not so dead. There was something in those eyes to be read, rising up like a dark shape approaching the still surface of a pool.
Hatred. Clare’s knees nearly buckled under its force.
The Indian’s hand fell to the hilt of a tomahawk shoved through his waist sash, fingers curling around it as if they itched to pull it free. This was alarming enough. Then Clare’s gaze fastened on what hung beside the tomahawk. A man’s scalp, blonder than her own.
Philip’s scalp.
Logan. With the blood rushing in her ears, she looked into the hard face of the warrior, too stunned to scream, seeing what must have been Philip’s last sight on earth, those hate-filled eyes looking at her as if he knew exactly who she was.
She wanted to run, to flee this monster who had murdered her husband, yet she couldn’t move.
The Indian’s lips pulled back from strong white teeth, not in a smile.
“I would take that golden scalp off your skull,” he said in perfect English, “and hang it with this one at my belt, if one I swore never to harm had not this hour claimed you.”
A clammy chill washed over Clare. Her vision tunneled. She was going to faint, in the midst of all these warriors, at the feet of this one who wanted very much to kill her.
“Clare.” An arm as solid as a young oak tree was suddenly around her waist. Then her legs were moving though she could but half-feel them for the numbness washing down her.