by Lori Benton
That told him all he needed to know.
Reginald’s next thoughts came in fragments, spiked with terror, shock, and dismay. Figures moved in the firelight, erratic, bewildering. He tried to keep Stone Thrower in his sights, and William, and Two Hawks, who’d shaken off his shock and was beseeching his father, arguing with the old warrior who’d thrust the beads into his hands and left him standing there, discarded and forgotten.
A fresh slick of cold sweat washed down Reginald’s face. He had made his peace with his own death. He’d been ready to face whatever came. But not this.
Two Hawks and Stone Thrower spoke urgently to each other, but their words were in Oneida, beyond Reginald’s understanding with such tumult surrounding them.
“You needn’t have done this!” he rasped in a half shout, trying to make himself heard before this horde of angry Senecas descended upon them with more than screams. “I would have gone with them! Or died here!”
Though Two Hawks and William stood near, grasping at their father, Stone Thrower bent his full attention now to Reginald, features fierce with determination, his gaze filled with his unshielded heart. The force and fullness of it was unlike anything Reginald had ever seen—the acceptance, the urgency, the faith. The love. And not just for his sons.
“It is done,” he said to Reginald, grasping his arm with a strength unyielding. “There is no undoing it.”
Neither William nor Two Hawks had ceased their pleading for him to not do this thing. To find another way.
“My sons,” Stone Thrower said, cutting off their pleas, “if you do not take this one away now, get him safe from here, what I am doing will be for nothing and we shall all be killed this night!”
Again Stone Thrower turned the force of that luminous gaze on Reginald, looking into his eyes, strong hand gripping hard enough to bruise. “Listen to me. You must be a father to both of my sons now. Our sons. You must do this for me. For their mother. Be to me as a brother and care for my family.”
Blue-Tailed Lizard and the chief warrior were pressing close, pulling at them, wading in to separate them from their chosen captive.
“By Creator’s grace and strength you will do this!” Stone Thrower shouted to make himself heard, and despite the declaration there was a note of question in the words.
“You have my promise!” Reginald knew his voice, broken with emotion, could never carry, but saw that Stone Thrower, gaze fixed on his lips, had read the words. There was time for nothing else. Nothing else Reginald might say could matter more. He’d have promised the man his life’s blood had he asked for it, but that was a thing Stone Thrower was offering for him. For all of them. They must leave this terrible clearing, with all haste.
Two Hawks, not yet reconciled to that conclusion, reached for the blade at his belt. “Father! We will fight for you. We—”
“Do not fight!” Stone Thrower bellowed in English, perhaps for Reginald and William’s sake, perhaps so the Senecas wouldn’t know what they said, even as he was set upon by warriors with ropes to bind his wrists. “And do not seek me, my brave and faithful son! Only remember me. Remember our good God and—”
He was cuffed across the mouth and dragged backward, away from them, but they could not break the gaze that held him fast to his sons. To William he shouted, the words coming broken through bleeding lips, “I have loved you always, my bright arrow! Fly now to your mother’s heart. She has waited long for you.”
Reginald witnessed the instant Two Hawks yielded to Stone Thrower’s last command, saw the young man’s heart cleave in two as his gaze wrenched from his father’s in submission and farewell, fixing on him and William.
What followed seemed more dream to Reginald than reality. The wounding during the battle, the wearing march, the hunger, the strain of these last moments, had finally done for him. A searing pain jarred from his hip down to his knee, turning his legs to sponges. He thought he must have fallen…
Next he knew, he was moving through the darkness of a wood, supported between two sturdy young frames. He swooned again and did not rouse until the screams and shouts of Indians had fallen too far behind them to be heard.
But he would never forget the sound.
He woke on his back with his bonds loosed. Blood still caked his face, his hair. Above him stars winked through leaf-heavy branches. He could hear them talking low together, a little distance off. Stone Thrower’s sons. His sons. Grief crashed down on him, crushing as a mountain.
“William,” he called, hoarse, feeble, urgent.
The voices stilled, but William didn’t come. His brother did, touching him gently in the dark. “He is with us. Safe. We make a litter to carry you to Kanowalohale. Anna Catherine and Lydia are there, with my mother.”
Lydia and his dear girl…so near? Another mystery to unravel.
Two Hawks was still speaking, shock and grief shredding his voice, but Reginald couldn’t make out the words. His chest felt as though it would rupture, torn between sorrow and joy. Stone Thrower had gone to an unspeakable death, but the lad his Anna loved was safe and whole. And so, at long last, was William.
William couldn’t bear the sight of those shadowed figures, his brother bending over Reginald Aubrey. He’d heard the man call to him weakly, but he couldn’t answer. Not now with his father, so briefly restored to him, lost, before ever he could be truly known. He stepped away into the deeper darkness of the forest, too stunned yet to grieve or to rage—or to face Reginald Aubrey. He wasn’t ready. He didn’t know what he meant to say. He needed…
A stick cracked behind him. They were a mile at least from that dreadful clearing, a mile through dark woods, and he’d thought they hadn’t been followed, that they’d been allowed to leave as the old warrior had decreed.
Whirling, William raised his hands in time to grasp a figure coming at him, eyes catching a swift glint of starlight. Instinctively he clutched at what his hands found in the dark, half fending off attack, half restraining escape: slim shoulders and a long silky braid that brushed his arm.
“It is me, Strikes-The-Water.”
William felt a new shock sizzle through him. “It’s you?”
“Ah.” Her breath stirred against his throat. “He-Is-Taken.”
He relaxed his hold but didn’t let go. He’d held her only with his eyes—and that briefly—until now. “What are you doing here?”
“Finding you.”
Small, strong hands gripped his waist. For one startling instant, William nearly yielded to the wild urge to clutch her tight against him—for need of something, someone, to cling to lest he spiral away on the tide of grief even now surging up against the thin barrier of shock.
Then his brother called to him, alarm in his voice.
“Where is Stone Thrower?” the girl asked, pulling away from him.
“He isn’t coming—but I’m glad you have.” Though his voice broke, William took Strikes-The-Water by the hand and led her into starlight.
45
August 14, 1777
Kanowalohale
Grief hung like a smoke pall over Kanowalohale, which was crowded now with refugees; Oriska lay in ashes, its people scattered—those who’d survived its destruction.
Since she housed guests already, Good Voice hadn’t taken any of Oriska’s homeless into her lodge, but under her arbor on that gray afternoon, Anna was helping Two Hawks’s mother and Lydia sort through garments, blankets, and provisions collected from many to share with those who’d lost all but their lives and the clothes on their backs.
It was two days since the town from which the warriors had gone to fight with General Herkimer’s militia had been attacked in retribution. Many of those warriors were still away to the west, harassing St. Leger’s besieging forces at Fort Stanwix. When the attack came, it was old men, women, and children who bore its brunt. Some of the attackers had been rangers under Colonel Butler, but dozens more were Haudenosaunee—Mohawk warriors led by Joseph Brant. White or red, they’d shown the Oneida people n
o mercy.
It was almost too much to bear, so close on the heels of the battle and its aftermath. As many as five hundred militiamen and Oneidas had been slain in the ambuscade, their bodies scattered over miles of wooded ravines, scalped and horrifically despoiled. The sheer number of dead was staggering to Anna’s soul, yet they’d been warriors, soldiers, men who’d chosen to fight. Oriska had been a slaughter of the helpless, perpetrated by those once counted brothers. She couldn’t imagine the heaviness of heart Good Voice and the people around her were feeling now. Her prayers for them mingled with her constant petitions for Papa, Two Hawks, William, Stone Thrower, none of whom had yet returned. The days passed, grinding by in an agony of waiting, one eye on the trees for fear Brant would turn his vengeful gaze toward Kanowalohale next. Those warriors not away fighting ranged around the town, watching every approach.
Across a pile of garments, Lydia fingered a pair of tiny moccasins, staring at them as if unseeing. Thunder rumbled in the distance, snapping her head up. She met Anna’s gaze, then glanced past her toward the village beyond Good Voice’s arbor, blue eyes searching, hoping…
Hope faded, once again deferred.
Anna had stopped watching the lanes and paths, aching to see familiar figures rounding a lodge, striding toward them. It hurt too much. At first they’d spent hours talking of the men, but no more. Now there was only waiting.
Thunder again. They were too far away to hear the great guns at the fort, but the muffled noise made Anna think of those men still trapped inside it. Daniel Clear Day had made it safely out of Oriska just before the attack to bring them news of the ongoing siege. Of Strikes-The-Water, who’d gone after the men, there had come no word. The girl was another worry stretching Anna’s nerves.
She placed a calico blouse on a pile designated for women and met Good Voice’s gaze, noting she’d stopped sorting garments and simply sat, hands resting on the mound of her belly. She caught Anna’s gaze. “I must go tend that stew.” Maneuvering herself up off the ground, Good Voice rose and went inside to see to food for which none of them had appetite to eat.
“Anna?” Lydia was holding up a deerskin tunic heavy with smoked fringe. “A girl’s dress? Or a shirt for a boy?”
“Girl, I think.” Anna rummaged in the heap of clothing for another item.
“Anna?” Sighing, Anna looked up again, but this time Lydia didn’t have a garment in hand. She was gazing past Anna, into the town, a furrow carved between her brows an instant before those brows shot high, the eyes beneath them springing wide. She reached across the clothing to grip Anna’s arm. “Anna—look!”
She knew what Lydia had seen, yet she couldn’t move. Her neck and limbs were locked tight. Her heart was banging, her blood rushing, commanding: Get up. Even when her body obeyed, it felt like pushing through deep water to rise to her feet. Lydia was already up and gone from the arbor. Anna heard her glad cry and knew that Papa, at least, was alive. It gave her strength to turn.
Then she was moving toward them, filling her eyes with the sight of them coming down the lane between the lodges. Papa led the way, clad in filthy shirt and breeches. Her heart soared, rejoiced, even as she saw he limped badly, moving with the aid of a stick crutch. But he was walking and whole, if battered. Lydia reached him and threw her arms around him, and so Anna looked beyond to…
“William!” Anna passed by Papa and Lydia locked in an embrace that permitted no other as yet and stopped in front of William. He gazed down at her, drinking her in with eyes so like his mother’s. Eyes full of relief, pain, hope…and sorrow. She touched his face, which needed shaving. He grasped her hand and kissed it. She said words of forgiveness because the first that tumbled out of his mouth were words asking for the same—though forgiveness for what exactly she didn’t catch and really did it matter now?
“Oh, William. You’re here. You’re safe.” She embraced him. He kissed the top of her head. And then he was there, the one her heart longed for above all others. “Two Hawks.”
She pulled out of William’s embrace and stood before his brother, who’d been there all along watching her with his twin and smiling, dark eyes alight for her alone, a light of love and promise.
“Bear’s Heart,” he said. “Here you are.”
She walked into his arms, not caring who saw or what they thought of it, and as those arms closed around her, all grief and fear were, for a few blissful moments, swallowed up in joy.
Thunder grumbled overhead, a feeble echo of the comprehension striking a current through William’s frame, the first thing to cut through the veil of his grief in all the days it had taken them to reach this place his Oneida family called home. On one side of him, Lydia and Reginald embraced, in their faces a relief that for the moment banished the accumulated wounds of the past days. The surprise William felt at seeing them thus was eclipsed by sight of his sister wrapped in the arms of this brown-skinned, shaved-headed, bare-chested warrior twin of his. Anna’s brow against his brother’s chest, his brother’s hand splayed across the back of her head, pressing her close, a look on his face as if he was breathing fully for the first time since William laid eyes on him.
William’s mind swam and stuttered, floundering to deny what he was seeing, but there could be no misinterpreting. This was more than friendship, more than brotherly affection. They were in love—deeply, unassailably—and he’d had no notion of it.
That was no one’s fault but his own. With Reginald Aubrey initially unable to walk, coupled with the necessity of avoiding bands of raiding Senecas and Mohawks ranging over the countryside, the return journey had been an agonizingly slow one, their every step weighted not only by one father’s inert form but grief for the other father, left behind to the mercy of his enemies. Then they’d reached Oriska to find it smoldering in ruin. Bodies in the ashes. Strikes-The-Water had been the one to turn over every dead woman to see their ravaged faces. None, thank the Almighty, had been the ones they sought.
Strikes-The-Water. Her presence had made the past days bearable. She spoke English, but not well. As they journeyed, he’d spent an inordinate amount of time with her, teaching her more of it—she wanted to learn, she was bright, and lovely, and attentive, and as long as he was talking to her he needn’t speak to Reginald Aubrey, or even overmuch to his brother.
But Strikes-The-Water wasn’t there to distract him now. She’d gone to see her mother as soon as they’d arrived. That thought sent another jolt through William. His mother was here, somewhere. And she was going to have to learn what her husband had sacrificed for him, for Two Hawks, and for the man who had shattered all their lives.
Turning, he caught his brother watching him, still with an arm around Anna, whose face bore the stunned shock of comprehension and the welling up of sorrow. Two Hawks must have whispered to her of their great loss, but in his brother’s eyes now he read compassion, a seeming understanding of his sense of dislocation.
And something else. Was it eagerness?
Two Hawks held out a hand, beckoning. “Look, Brother. One is coming now to greet you.”
But William had looked past them already and seen her, a woman with fair hair braided, dressed in a simple skirt and tunic, coming down the path from a nearby lodge. She was staring at him as if, for the moment, none other existed. She had one fist pressed to her breastbone, against the hollow above a belly high and round with…pregnancy?
He looked again at Two Hawks, whose jaw was set so hard he knew his brother had anticipated this moment as intensely—maybe more so—than had he. Two Hawks’s lips quivered over his words as he said, “Here is she who once carried us together as she now carries one she is certain will be our sister. She has waited long to see you—”
His voice cracked, and he swallowed to recover it. “Here is our mother, Good Voice of the Turtle Clan, also called Elizabeth.”
William wasn’t aware of taking the steps that closed the distance between them, only that when he began to move she halted, waiting for him to come to her. She wa
sn’t young of course—up close he could see the fine lines that fanned from her eyes and bracketed her mouth, the strands of white woven like frost through her hair. But she was handsome, had no doubt been beautiful once. He had never seen her before, of that he was certain, yet she was disconcertingly familiar, for he was seeing in her features an echo of his own and his brother’s—the curve of her lips, the shape of her chin, the set of her eyes and their hue, the arch of her brows. She was tall and would be slender if not for the expected child.
No one had seen fit to mention that. Until now. He was overcome.
So was she. Tears shimmered in her eyes, spilling down her cheeks. They reached for each other, hands clasping—fingers twining, squeezing hard as throats tightened. A moment thus, and the woman called Good Voice pulled one work-worn hand free and with it cupped William’s face. Then she pulled his head down to rest upon her shoulder, her hand behind his head.
She was crooning under her breath.
William breathed in the scent of his mother and said that he was sorry, unable to articulate why he said it, that it was for her grief, her loss—the loss she’d borne for his lifetime, the loss she was about to begin bearing. He was weeping when, against his hair, she said, “I see your father is not returned with you, and I can think of only one reason that should be.”
“I am sorry,” he said yet again, still embracing her. “My father…He gave his life for us.” He could say no more, nothing of that wrenching choice Stone Thrower made, speaking truth to those warriors when he might have lied and saved himself, or of the Senecas howling for his blood as they left him.