by Lori Benton
Clare smiled briefly at the incongruous picture they made, the big Indian and her little girl. Then he looked at her with grief and weariness etched into his face and started to speak.
As the soup in the kettle began to steam, he told her of the battle. He talked of its lasting for hours, of the long, terrible back and forth of it, with the fiery woods above and below and on all sides.
“Like being engulfed in flames,” he told her. “Or a dream. That’s what it seemed like, the things we were doing to each other in the midst of such beauty. A terrible, beautiful dream.”
They’d made it through nearly to the end, he and his brothers, before Falling Hawk was wounded.
“We knew it was time for us to retreat and get our brother back to the river. That’s what we were doing when Panther-Sees-Him took a ball here.” Wolf-Alone touched his fingers briefly to his side. “I think it passed through, but I don’t know. He fell down into a hollow, but he got back on his feet. He couldn’t help support Falling Hawk, so he told me to get our brother back across the river and he would follow.”
Clare had the soup warm enough. She brought him a gourd bowl full and took Pippa from him so he could eat it. But he only stared at the food as if it didn’t register.
“Guess he thought he’d make it, or maybe he wanted me to think he would so I would go. I tried to go back, but by then nearly everyone was over the river and Cornstalk said all who could help the wounded were needed to get them back to the Scioto.”
“Could he still be alive?” she asked, pacing now with Pippa because she couldn’t stay still. “A prisoner?”
“Likely, if he lives. But there’s maybe a chance he got away.”
He didn’t sound very hopeful of it. Clare paused her pacing with her back to the table, eyes closed, and drew a steadying breath. If Jeremiah was alive, there was hope, even if he was a prisoner. What should she do? Wait here? Try to find him? Or Jacob first?
Wolf-Alone would help her find Jeremiah, she was certain, but would he help her find her son? Whichever one she went after, would she be abandoning the other forever?
How was she to choose?
“Clare,” Wolf-Alone said behind her. “What else is wrong?”
Pippa’s head was resting sleepily against her shoulder now, but Clare didn’t want to put her down yet. “Rain Crow has taken Jacob—she’s gone and no one I’ve spoken to knows where. Do you?”
“If I knew where she’d gone,” he said and held her gaze as he spoke, “I would tell you. Better, I would go and bring her back.”
She put Pippa down, settled her, and straightened, gazing into the fire. Thinking too many thoughts at once. When the silence in the lodge registered, she looked at Wolf-Alone. He was looking at her, clearly puzzled.
“What is it?”
“I am…surprised,” he said, a little warily. “You aren’t anxious about this?”
Anxious?
“Oh yes,” she said. “It’s only that I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to find Jacob. I don’t know how to find Jeremiah. I don’t even know which of those I should try first and…I suppose I’m taking a leaf out of Jeremiah’s book,” she said with no little surprise of her own. “I’m waiting for some guidance.”
She was as astonished at herself as Wolf-Alone appeared to be.
“Do you love him?” he asked her.
“What?” She blinked, taken aback by the question. “Of course I love him. He’s my son.”
Wolf-Alone’s expression didn’t alter. “That wasn’t who I meant.”
Of course it wasn’t. But she didn’t give him an answer. How could she? She longed for Jeremiah. She wanted him there with her. But was it only for need of him because of Jacob? That need had been her guiding force for as long as she’d known Jeremiah Ring. If it were gone, would she feel this longing? If she had her son, would she choose the man?
So much had happened in so short a time that her feelings were an impossible tangle. So many longings. For home. For peace. For some semblance of the life she’d had. But could a life like that include a man like Jeremiah Ring? She was almost certain he wanted a life with her. But what sort of life? He’d been Jem Ringbloom. Would he ever want to be again?
He was also Panther-Sees-Him.
What life would he choose after this? If there would be life for any of them after this.
“What is going to happen now? What will Cornstalk do?”
Wolf-Alone studied her for a moment, as if her face might give answer to the question he had asked and she had not truthfully answered, then he relented and told her what Cornstalk had said to them in the council house at Nonhelema’s Town.
“He stood there before his chiefs and warriors, some of them still with the blood on their flesh unwashed, and he said we’d failed to defeat one half of Dunmore’s army and did we now wish him to lead an attack on the other half and see if maybe we could defeat it—those of us with strength and heart left for fighting.” Wolf-Alone’s amber gaze didn’t fix on Clare as he spoke. He was seeing again that scene he’d come from witnessing in the council house. “I was near enough to see the shaking of Cornstalk’s hands as he spoke. When no one answered him, he proposed that if they still chose war, we should first kill all our women and children, then go and fight until we’d all died. That would be the kindest thing.”
Clare searched his face in alarm. “Surely not.”
“No,” Wolf-Alone was quick to agree. “He spoke in his grief, in his anger—anger with the warriors who are now showing themselves ready to seek peace from the Long Knives, but peace at such a cost! If you could have seen…”
Clare sucked in a breath, her thoughts of Jeremiah, what he might have seen, what might have been done to him. What he might even now be enduring.
“Still no one dared answer Cornstalk,” Wolf-Alone went on. “Or even meet his gaze. So he spoke of how he’d done what they wished, instead of seeking peace with the Virginia governor. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I suppose you wish me to go and do that seeking, only we will come as beggars instead of the men we were before the battle.’ ”
That was, Wolf-Alone told her, exactly what the warriors now wished. Messengers had been sent to Governor Dunmore, who was coming their way with his half of the army along the Hocking River. They could only hope this entreaty would stop him coming to battle and cause him to want to talk instead. Come to terms of peace.
But so many lives lost. So many bodies maimed, and not just on the Shawnees’ side. How many from Augusta County had gone to fight, Clare wondered. Those who had been her neighbors. And family? Had Alphus Litchfield raised a company or joined one?
“Does this mean Jacob will be freed?”
Wolf-Alone nodded. “I’m sure that’s why my sister ran. She saw this coming. Maybe someone in the army can help you if…” Pain lanced across his eyes, where Clare read the rest of the words he wouldn’t say.
If Jeremiah is dead.
It was more than grief and weariness in the face of Jeremiah’s adopted brother; it was devastation.
“He might be captured. You said that.”
“I’ll go with the chiefs to Dunmore,” Wolf-Alone said. “I’m going to learn if my brother was taken prisoner, though what I’m going to do about it if he has been…”
His gaze held Clare’s, anguished. “I’ll check first with the militia, wherever I find them camped. If he isn’t there, I’m going back to that battlefield. I’ll change my dress, my speech, whatever I need to do. I can still pass for…”
He broke off, as if grown aware of what he was saying aloud. He could pass? For what?
Wolf-Alone’s next words jarred such questions out of Clare’s mind. “I’ll take you with me, Clare. You and the baby. You need to leave this place, and maybe together we’ll find my brother yet living. Help him, if he’s a prisoner. They’ll count him a traitor.”
Which meant that even if Jeremiah had survived the battle, the Virginians would probably kill him for having fought with the Shawnees
.
Knowing now what Wolf-Alone meant to do, she knew she had to decide—between two equally impossible paths. Run blindly into the wilderness after a son she’d scant hope of finding, or march with this Indian into a camp full of his enemies on the equally scant hope Jeremiah yet lived, could be found, could be saved.
Maybe she could tell them—the army, the officers, Governor Dunmore himself if need be—that his involvement was all down to her. It was her fault Jeremiah had been in this town these many months instead of back at Fort Pitt or someplace else where he could have avoided the fighting. He’d done it for her. Given it all. Maybe even his life.
Jacob, at least, wasn’t in any immediate peril. Rain Crow cherished him. She would die before she let harm befall him.
“I’ll go with you.” The words were a wrenching to her soul. “Get me to the army. My uncle may be among them. If he is, he’ll help us.” Dazedly she began to move, gathering up her things and Pippa’s, starting to think about food for the journey, wondering why Wolf-Alone still sat at the table staring at her.
“We’re not leaving yet. We have to wait for word from Dunmore, whether he accepts Cornstalk’s offer to meet and talk.” He paused, looking into her face. “But you say you’ve an uncle in that army?”
“Most likely. Alphus Litchfield. He holds the rank of captain. Do you know what that means, captain?”
“I know,” he said. “Maybe you and I don’t need to wait then. I can take you to him and—”
There came a scuff of moccasins in the dirt beyond the door-hide, a boy’s voice calling Wolf-Alone’s name. Before the warrior could respond, Wildcat ducked into the lodge.
“Listening, were you?” Wolf-Alone asked, still speaking English.
“Yes!” the boy replied, arms crossed over his narrow chest. “I go with you, see army?”
“No,” Wolf-Alone said. “You won’t.”
The boy’s gaze narrowed. “You say no, I follow.”
Wolf-Alone stood and crossed to the boy, who stared up with defiant eyes. “You mustn’t follow. Stay back here at the town.”
“I not fear Long Knives!”
“You should fear.”
Hurt twisted the boy’s features. “You take Clare-wife. Why not me?”
Wolf-Alone’s fierce brows soared. “Do you know what those Long Knives would do if they set eyes on you?”
The boy thrust out his chest, one hand falling to the small tomahawk at his waist. “Run and hide for fear!”
For all the anxiety of the past days, Clare felt the urge to laugh.
Wolf-Alone didn’t. “Don’t be foolish. They’ll take you away from me. From the People. They’ll think I’m bringing you, a captive, back to them.”
“I’m no captive. No one is taking me!”
“The soldiers won’t believe that. So you must stay.” The boy held his stance but with pleading eyes. Wolf-Alone placed his big hand on Wildcat’s shoulder. “Listen. I won’t be gone long, but I must see if my brother lives. And I must take her to him, to help him, if he does.”
“Panther-Sees-Him,” the boy said, turning at last to address Clare, regret in his gaze. “I am sorry Clare-wife.”
She crossed to the boy and wrapped him in a hug. Far from spurning the motherly gesture, Wildcat clung to her, but when he backed away, Wolf-Alone put his hand on the boy’s head. There was something changed in his expression, in the set of those fierce brows. His gaze still held grief, but something in it had lifted, some weight gone off him.
“When I come back,” he said, “when there is peace and all is settled, we’ll go hunting, you and me and your father. Falling Hawk too, if he is well. We will make it a long hunt, many days. But only if you stay now.”
Clare watched the boy wrestle with this offering, weighing it, finally deciding it was a compromise he could accept.
“All right,” Wildcat said. He turned to Clare and grinned. “Good-bye, Clare-wife. I hope for you to find your husband still living.”
She’d bid Wildcat good-bye and he’d gone out of the lodge before she remembered Jeremiah wasn’t her husband. How used to the idea of it she’d grown. She turned to look at Wolf-Alone, watching the swaying hide across the doorway.
“Hunting?”
Wolf-Alone shifted his gaze to her. “It is likely Dunmore will demand all our white children back if a peace treaty is signed—not just your Jacob—even those who have lived all their lives with us. I’ll need to get him away for a while.”
“You mean to hide him,” Clare said. “Yet you were willing Jeremiah and I take him, even knowing we’d have left the Shawnees.”
“Only if I fell in battle,” Wolf-Alone reminded her. “I didn’t fall.”
She stared at the man, attempting to fathom the workings of his mind. He wasn’t like other Indians in his thinking, yet he wasn’t like a white man either. He was a man apart, as his name suggested. Even more so than Jeremiah, it seemed. “Will you ever tell me what it is that ties you to that boy?”
Wolf-Alone held her gaze. “He’s mine.”
Clare needed a second to absorb that. “Yours? What do you mean? Not…your son?”
“He is not my son,” Wolf-Alone said and almost smiled at her. “But still he is mine. And that is all I’m going to say about it, Clare-wife,” he added, using Wildcat’s name for her. “It’s more than I’ve ever told anyone. Be content with it.”
OCTOBER 24
SCIOTO TRAIL
The prisoner was struggling to maintain the pace Colonel Andrew Lewis had set. He’d struggled since they’d left that flaming, bloody point of land between the rivers and crossed the Ohio days ago, heading north into Indian territory. Alphus Litchfield had all the while kept the man in his sights, a pace or two ahead, bearing witness to every stumble and wince, and while his rifle wasn’t exactly trained on Ring’s back, he’d held it ready in case the man made a break for the entangling wood that edged the trail—however unlikely. Ring was exhausted, his wound healing badly for all the marching. In truth Alphus hadn’t expected him to make it as far as he had.
Dressed in breeches and a shirt scrounged from among the company, the man looked a deal more like the Virginian he claimed still to be and less like the Shawnee Alphus was inclined to believe he’d become. That he’d been a Virginian, once upon a time, was true enough, though he’d gone by the name Jem Ringbloom then.
Not that the man admitted to it. Not while Alphus tended his wound. Not while he’d been interrogated by Colonel Lewis. Not in the days since, in camp or on the march.
But as the swelling in his face had subsided, his features jarred Alphus’s memory clear; he’d known the man years back, had wondered along with everyone within fifty miles of Staunton what happened to him and his young wife after Indians carried her off and he went after to get her back.
Was it ten years ago? Longer?
He’d found the Indians, clear enough—and become one. With one foot still in the white world. One of the messengers running between Colonel Lewis and Governor Dunmore, a fellow called Simon Girty, had confirmed the man was known to the Indian agents at Fort Pitt as Jeremiah Ring. Known, respected, and valued for what he was.
What the Shawnees called him Alphus hadn’t asked. He didn’t need the man’s story. He needed one thing from him—the safe return of his niece and her children. Preferably before the army Colonel Lewis was leading fast toward the Scioto, where Ring claimed to have left Clare, reached those towns and she was placed in mortal danger.
It had taken surprisingly little effort to convince Colonel Lewis to let Ring accompany the army north, while the rest of the wounded remained behind at Point Pleasant with a garrison building a stockade. The colonel’s brother, Charles, had died of his battle wounds. The grief-stricken Colonel Lewis was distracted by his desire to strike at the Shawnees in retaliation; as long as Alphus took responsibility for the prisoner, the pair could come along and find his missing niece and her children.
There would be no finding Philip, months in
his grave on a mountainside between Redstone and Wheeling. Ring had told Alphus how he’d found the man’s mutilated body—one of Logan’s casualties—then Clare in her desperate need, one child abducted, another making its advent.
“Merciful Lord,” Alphus had uttered, pausing in wrapping a linen bandage low around his prisoner’s torso.
He’d sent Geordie away, not wanting the lad to hear what passed between himself and Ring concerning Clare. For a flicker of an instant he’d felt gratitude for the traitor whose blood stained his hands.
He’d squelched that feeling smart-like. Whatever else the man had done, he’d fought against his own, no easy mountain of guilt to get around.
While he worked on Ring, the man had surfaced in and out of consciousness. Each time those dark eyes fluttered open, Alphus had been ready with questions.
“Why’d you think it was that Mingo, Logan, who killed Philip?”
“Did Clare press you to take her across the Ohio after Jacob, or was that your notion?”
“Why didn’t you take the boy back from whomever adopted him and give him to his mother and be done with it?”
Ring refused to answer until he’d first bargained those answers, his knowledge of Clare’s whereabouts, and his ability to bring her away from the Shawnees, in exchange for his life.
“Let me get her safe to you. Let me live that long. Then do with me as you will.”
In no wise sure the man was in earnest about his disregard for life—or the devotion to Clare his words implied—but needing to know what he knew, Alphus had struck that deal.
Give him his due, Ring had answered every question about Clare put to him and seemed to have done so forthrightly, but Alphus couldn’t be sure. Ring might be a skillful liar, able to read men and give them what they wanted—or feign to—having straddled two worlds for so many years.
Of course he’d have suspected as much no matter what the man said, but he sensed Ring was holding something back concerning Clare. It seemed he’d done a great service for his niece, but that just might be the shine he was putting on things. Clare might have another tale to tell. Surely Ring hadn’t done it all out of the kindness of his heart. What had been in it for him?