by Lori Benton
He wanted Anna Catherine. Two Hawks stared into the fire, heart wrung with longing and helplessness. And conviction. He’d told Anna Catherine he was selfish. It was true. Help me want Aubrey to be whole for his own sake, not just so my heart’s desire might be granted me.
“It is a tangled path you walk,” Ahnyero said. “But maybe I can help you to clear it. My father taught me his blacksmith trade. A trade opens doors to places a man would otherwise be shut out of.”
Two Hawks frowned. “You are saying I should become a blacksmith?”
Ahnyero started to smile, then suppressed it. “I am saying you should learn a trade that’s needed by the whites and the People. It will help you live in both worlds, to be needed in both, if that is important to you.”
“It is.” He didn’t want to stop being Oneida. Couldn’t imagine such a thing. Neither could he imagine Anna Catherine living in his world. It was not their way for a woman to leave her mother’s clan. “A man goes to live with his wife’s clan,” he murmured. It was the way it had always been. The right way, and good.
“True,” Ahnyero agreed. “But this woman has no clan.”
“She has people,” Two Hawks said. “She has a place, a calling, and a woman she loves as a mother. She has a father. And he has a trade.” Anna Catherine had had this idea. He’d been of two minds about it back in autumn, but now…his father no longer needed help to hunt.
“All those bateaux? I have seen that one who pilots his boats, Yankee Lang, with the white hair.” The scout made a sound of interest—and approval, Two Hawks thought. “Maybe that is the way for you to Aubrey’s heart, learning his—”
A sudden frigid gust had them breaking off their conversation and rising to their feet to see a group of Oneidas pushing into the crowded post, snow dusted, cheeks red with cold. One stepped forward and spoke, and because it wasn’t in English, Ahnyero left the hearth to translate for those who needed it, but Two Hawks understood the news straight from the mouth of the warrior who brought it: “We come through this snow with dark news. There was a council at Onondaga, many sachems gathered there. During that council the spotting sickness came among them like a foul breath. Many are dead of it. Some of the dead are sachems.”
As Ahnyero translated, a chill took hold of Two Hawks that had nothing to do with the wintery air let in.
“We come to tell Colonel Elmore, so he may pass the news downriver. There is mourning at Onondaga and condolence to be made. Because of this, the keepers of the Central Fire have stamped it out. It burns no more. Every man may choose as he will between the Americans and the British. That is what we have come to say.”
Choose you this day whom ye will serve. The words sliced like a snow-snake groove through Two Hawks’s mind as he led the gray mare along the drifted trail. His winter moccasins and the horse’s hooves crunched the snow. Their breath billowed on stinging air. Choose you this day…Words of a war chief bidding his people to serve Creator or something else. No more standing apart.
The Oneidas were free to choose. To fight, if it came to it. Yet all Two Hawks wanted was to reach Kanowalohale, deliver the trade goods to his mother, then fly to Anna Catherine like an arrow loosed. There would be no fighting while snow lay thick. If he was to do this thing with Aubrey—this path clearing—it must begin now, before spring brought the season back around to war.
Such absorbing thoughts distracted him. He did not hear the party of travelers until the mare alerted him with a misstep in the snow. Two Hawks steadied her, then saw the figures clustered on the trail ahead beyond a snow-laden pine. The warrior leading them had an arrow to a bowstring, pointed at Two Hawks’s chest.
With the heart in that chest kicking hard, Two Hawks held up the hand not holding the mare’s lead and gave the warrior—bundled with a furred hood drawn close about his face, like the others in the party—a gesture of greeting, and the words to go with it. The warrior, slender even under thick clothing, eased the bowstring but didn’t lower his arrow.
“You are Onyota’a:ka?” he asked in a high ringing voice. The voice of a woman.
Two Hawks advanced several steps with the horse. The woman drew taut the bowstring. He stopped. He could see now that the face framed in breeze-stirred fur was young and smooth, unquestionably female. Everything else—clothing, bearing, that pointing arrow—was that of a warrior.
“I asked a question,” she said.
“And this is my answer: I am Onyota’a:ka, called Two Hawks.”
If she was the one with the bow, then there were no men among them. He counted four others, all with white in the hair straggling from hoods. All carried large burdens, even the one with the bow. His heart slowed its beating and went out to them in pity.
“Where are you and these grandmothers going? Are you on your way to Oriska?” It was the village they would come to at the end of that trail, if they didn’t turn north toward the fort.
“I am leading my mother and these others to Kanowalohale,” she said, letting the bow down to rest against her thigh. “We come from Ganaghsaraga.”
“You are Tuscarora?”
She nodded. “We seek a new home.”
“In Kanowalohale? You have passed that place. Did you become confused in that snow last night?”
She had slanted brows like wings, slender and dark. They folded in at his question. Turning to the woman nearest her, she spoke words too low to hear, then handed over the bow and strode forward to meet Two Hawks where he stood, her moccasins breaking a path through the unblemished snow between them. She pushed back her hood. The sun came out of clouds to shine on her black hair. She was smaller than she’d appeared from a distance. Pretty. Or probably would be without that scowl pinching the skin between her brows.
“I come from the soldier fort at the Carrying Place,” he told her. “I know what happened at Ganaghsaraga, with Thayendanegea and the sachems there. Why have you and these grandmothers left that place?”
“Because not all at Ganaghsaraga can agree on what to do. Most of my clan chose to move west to Niagara to be farther from the Americans. But my mother fears the British more than she fears that missionary at Kanowalohale. She could not be at peace until I moved her there. These with us are all who chose to come. All of our clan not gone over to the British.”
Two Hawks peered past the young woman. Her elders looked cold, tired. Grief in their faces. “You set out yesterday? Into that blow?”
She tightened her lips, tilting her chin. “It had not begun when we left.”
Anyone with eyes could have seen it coming. He nearly said so—then reconsidered. He had attempted to outrace the storm. Had a mishap befallen him on the trail, he’d have been caught out in it too. Mishaps were hard to avoid in winter. Harder traveling with grandmothers.
“I am going to Kanowalohale with these things of my mother’s for which I’ve traded our furs.”
The girl looked him over. “Your mother? What is her clan?”
For the first time it felt like he was talking to a female. “A’no:wál—Turtle Clan.”
Interest brightened her eyes, letting Two Hawks know she wasn’t Turtle Clan. He was accustomed to such looks from young women when they learned his clan, that instant assessment of a man as brother or potential mate. Usually it meant nothing.
“Could you have hit me with that arrow?” He smiled as he spoke, hoping to lighten the encounter.
The girl did not smile back. “Yes. I could kill you with my knife. If I had to.”
His gaping at her did him no favors. Her eyes narrowed. “My father is dead. I have no uncles. For five years I have hunted. I taught myself to do it. I do well.”
She certainly brandished a hunter’s confidence. Two Hawks remembered trying to hunt for his mother during that time his father left them to live with the Senecas. Had she faced the same fears, doubts, dangers? A girl.
“Will your missionary forbid me to hunt?” she demanded now. “Will he make me plant corn instead? I will not stay where I cannot f
reely hunt.”
“Reverend Kirkland?” Two Hawks raised his brows. “I think you would not listen even if he tried to tell you such a thing. But you need not worry for that. He has o’sluni ’kéha’—his white ways—but he is a friend to the People, good in his heart.”
Her gaze weighed his words, and him. In her eyes, interest sparked again, bolder this time. Two Hawks looked away. She was pretty, and there was spirit in her. But she wasn’t Anna Catherine.
A breeze kicked up, stinging his face. It blew powdery snow off the pine, sending it across the huddled women like a veil. One called in a querulous tone, asking how long they would stand on the trail talking while old toes were freezing and old bones going stiff.
Her back to them, the girl grimaced. “Since you go to Kanowalohale, we may travel together…if you wish.”
She had her pride, this one. Hiding his amusement, he said, “I do wish it. But first, Little Sister, Náhte’ yesa:yáts—what is your name?”
For the first time, the girl seemed aware of her rudeness. The color in her face deepened as she replied, “I am She-Strikes-The-Water, daughter of the Deer Clan.”
8
February 1777
Schenectady
All right, Anna. The Ten Broecks are an hour’s ride down the Albany Road, so I’m away.”
Lost in thought, Anna straightened from the hearth in Lydia’s kitchen, where she’d been stirring syrups set to brew. She’d the vague impression Lydia had spoken but was caught off guard by the sight of her cloaked and standing at the door to the snowy back garden. “Oh…you’re going?”
“Yes,” Lydia said with slow exaggeration. “I am.”
“All right. I’ll visit Charlotte Stuhler later, see whether she’s resting as you prescribed.” Anna heard the dullness in her voice—like February, cold and desperate for spring. Mentioning Charlotte Stuhler hadn’t helped. Charlotte was Anna’s age, contentedly married and expecting her second child before the month was out.
It was quiet in the kitchen crowded with jars and bundled herbs, pungent with the brewing syrups. Lydia hesitated in the doorway, studying her with concern.
“You can go, Lydia. I’m fine.”
“How I wish that were so,” Lydia said but didn’t press. “Expect me home by supper.”
Anna nodded, then widened her eyes when Lydia still didn’t budge. “Go.”
Though it seemed by conscious effort, Lydia smiled and swept out the door, leaving Anna to push along against the tide of loneliness that waited each morning to engulf her. Loneliness and worry.
Two Hawks. She’d relived their last moments together in the barn until the memories were polished as beads. Was he safe? Warm? Thinking of her?
She asked herself those same questions of William, though from a different frame of heart.
She knew Papa was safe and warm. What he thought about these days—besides the bateaux he was crafting for General Schuyler’s northern army—was anyone’s guess. Anna grieved over the distance grown between them that winter, a chasm of hurt, frustration, and thus far fruitless hoping on her part. Though she’d seen Papa in town, and at Lydia’s, on many occasions, all her efforts to engage him in conversation about Two Hawks had been stubbornly thwarted. Papa seemed determined to forget William’s twin existed, much less that they desired to marry. If only Two Hawks had done as she’d hoped he would back in autumn and asked Papa to be his apprentice…
She was still chasing that thought, and dipping out one of the syrups into a clay jar, when a thud at the back door made her drop the vessel. It shattered on the hearth, spattering syrup across the bricks and the hem of her petticoat.
Leaving the mess, she went to the door. “Lydia? Did you forget—”
The door swung inward. Two Hawks stood before her, clad in a long winter shirt, breath ghosting on the air. “Anna Catherine, I’ve come to—”
“I know!” she all but shouted, and with her heart unfolding like a flower in her chest—spring at last—drew him into the house and shut the door.
He laughed as he touched her with hands chilled from the cold. “What do you know?”
“You’re going to try.” She grabbed his hands and pressed them between hers, trying to warm them. She felt the smile straining her face, felt her whole being ablaze with joy. “With Papa, on the Binne Kill. Aren’t you?”
His smile for her was blinding as the sun. “If he will have me. Yes.”
She gave up trying to warm his hands and threw her arms around him. His thick woolen shirt was cold enough to make her shiver. She pulled back to drink in his face. “Stone Thrower? How is he?”
“Strong now. Well mended.”
“And Good Voice?”
“She is also well.” Two Hawks touched a fingertip to her cheek, then leaned down and kissed her. His lips warmed as she melted her mouth against his. Abruptly he pulled back. “Lydia?”
“Gone. Until supper.”
Awareness of their solitude rose between them, delicious and terrifying. Almost tentatively he kissed her again. Then with growing urgency. The longing of the past months wrapped her like cords. She didn’t want him ever to let her go, but too soon he wrenched from the embrace.
“Bear’s Heart, I must not be here.” He turned toward the door. Leaving her.
“No!” She caught his arm and clung. “We’ll be all right. I won’t even touch you.” She released him and backed away. “Two Hawks, I promise. Just don’t go.”
His head was bent. He lifted it and looked at her. “I do not know, now I see you again, if I can promise.”
She was shaking. “I ached so badly to see you. Now here you are—and I’m aching even worse.”
“And I,” he said.
Such raw and honest words. The moment held them suspended—until their gazes caught and something about it all struck them as funny and they both fell to laughing. It shattered the tension.
“Please stay,” she said.
They sat at the table—on opposite sides. Two Hawks for the first time looked around the kitchen and spotted the broken jar. “Did I startle you, make you do that?”
“The syrups!” She jumped up to move them from the heat, found a linen pad to collect the pottery shards, then scrubbed up the spill. She needed to bottle the syrups but could hardly think straight with Two Hawks sitting there watching her.
“Are you hungry?” She turned toward the back of the kitchen, to the alcove where they kept their food stores. “Let me feed you. Then you can tell me everything.”
The crooked grin he gave her threatened to melt her into a puddle of syrup. “Everything? That will take time.”
She laughed again—how long since she’d laughed? It felt glorious. “Just all you’ve seen and done since I saw you last, and especially…what made you decide to come back? Let’s start with that.”
Lydia thought it odd, what could trigger memories. On her return from the Ten Broecks, a doe had bounded across the snow-patched road ahead and vanished into the pines. It caused her placid horse no more than an ear twitch but sent her back in time with such clarity she might have sworn Jacob rode beside her, red hair blazing in the winter sun. The very thing had happened the second year of their marriage, on that stretch of road. Another doe. Another lifetime.
She was still thinking of her late husband when she reached her gabled house inside Schenectady’s stockade, with its stable in back.
At twenty-one she’d married her father’s longtime apprentice, though she hadn’t felt for Jacob van Bergen the love he’d had for her. He’d understood that. For her, theirs was a marriage of friendship and convenience. He’d offered her a continued presence in her father’s apothecary shop, until such time as children were born, children that never came. She’d spoken her vows with eyes open, aware she was making a commitment of the will, but to Lydia’s surprise, her heart had followed. She’d grown to care deeply for Jacob. He’d known that, too, before his death.
As she dismounted and opened the stable, Lydia was grat
eful to harbor no regrets concerning Jacob, save that his promising life had been cut short. But his death had made it possible for her, after a true and proper mourning, to at last open her heart to a longing she’d denied herself since a girl: her love for Reginald Aubrey, who was free now to love her back.
Or should be.
She led the horse inside the stable, startled to find William’s gray mare occupying the extra stall. William. Then she remembered in whose possession she’d last seen the horse.
It wasn’t William who had come.
She tended her mare and hurried to the house.
In the kitchen the hearth blazed. Bottled syrups lined the bricks. At the table Anna and Two Hawks sat, hands clasped over the boards, brown fingers and white entwined. Their hands sprang apart as she shut the door, pushing out the cold.
“Lydia.” Anna stood, rocking the bench on the flagstones. “I haven’t started supper. Two Hawks arrived…We’ve been talking.”
“I see.” Lydia set her medical case on the table and greeted the young man with a smile. He’d stood with Anna, tall and sleekly muscled in his Indian garb, disconcerting her still with his face so like—and unlike—William’s, as if the same bold features had been twice sculpted, one hewn in marble, the other cast in bronze.
As Anna wrangled supper from their pantry, Lydia asked, “Have you just arrived?”
“In the morning,” he said. “I wanted to come into the town when the streets were quiet.”
Had he and Anna been together the day long? Lydia turned to look at Anna. “How is Charlotte Stuhler?”
Anna halted, clutching a round of bread. “Oh no. I forgot about Charlotte.”
“Who is this one forgotten?” Two Hawks asked.
Anna put the bread on the table, a knife beside it. “She’s expecting a babe soon. I meant to check on her today. I’ll go first thing in the morning.” She chewed her lip in indecision before blurting, “We had so much to talk about, Lydia. Two Hawks has come to ask Papa to apprentice him at the Binne Kill. He wants to learn the boat-building craft.”