The girls had giggled and embraced Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa; the young men had grinned and prodded Ian knowingly in the ribs. And Ian had caught a glimpse of Sun Elk’s face, hot eyes fixed on Emily’s straight back as she walked away.
Within one moon, Sun Elk had moved into the longhouse, husband to his wife’s sister, Looking at the Sky. The sisters’ compartments were across from each other; they shared a hearth. Ian had seldom seen Sun Elk look at Emily again—but he had seen him look carefully away, too many times.
“There is a person who desires you,” he said to Emily one night. It was long past the hour of the wolf, deep night, and the longhouse slept around them. The child she carried obliged her to rise and make water; she had come back to their furs skin-chilled and with the fresh smell of pines in her hair.
“Oh? Well, why not? Everyone else is asleep.” She had stretched luxuriously and kissed him, the small bulge of her belly smooth and hard against his.
“Not me. I mean—of course this person desires you, too!” he’d said hastily, as she drew back a bit, offended. He wrapped his arms about her in quick illustration. “I mean—there is someone else.”
“Hmf.” Her voice was muffled, her breath warm against his chest. “There are many who desire me. I am very, very good with my hands.” She gave him a brief demonstration, and he gasped, causing her to chuckle with satisfaction.
Rollo, who had accompanied her outside, crawled under the bed platform and curled up in his accustomed spot, chewing noisily at an itching spot near his tail.
A little later, they lay with the furs thrown back. The hide that hung over their doorway was pulled back, so the heat of the fire could come in, and he could see the shine of light on the moist gold skin of her shoulder, where she lay turned away from him. She reached back and put one of her clever hands on his, took his palm, and pressed it against her belly. The child inside had begun to stir; he felt a soft, sudden push against his palm, and his breath stilled in his throat.
“You shouldn’t worry,” Emily said very softly. “This person desires only you.”
He had slept well.
In the morning, though, he had sat by the hearth eating cornmeal mush, and Sun Elk, who had already eaten, walked by. He stopped and looked down at Ian.
“This person dreamed about you, Wolf’s Brother.”
“Did you?” Ian said pleasantly. He felt the warmth rise up his throat, but kept his face relaxed. The Kahyen’kehaka set great store by dreams. A good dream would have everyone in the longhouse discussing it for days. The look on Sun Elk’s face didn’t indicate that his dream about Ian had been a good one.
“That dog—” He nodded at Rollo, who lay sprawled inconveniently in the doorway of Ian’s compartment, snoring. “I dreamed that it rose up over your couch, and seized you by the throat.”
That was a menacing dream. A Kahnyen’kehaka who believed such a dream might decide to kill the dog, lest it be a foretelling of ill fortune. But Ian was not—not quite—Kahnyen’kehaka.
Ian raised both brows, and went on eating. Sun Elk waited for a moment, but as Ian said nothing, eventually nodded and turned away.
“Ahkote’ohskennonton,” Ian said, calling his name. The man turned back, expectant.
“This person dreamed of you, too.” Sun Elk glanced sharply at him. Ian didn’t speak further, but let a slow and evil smile grow upon his face.
Sun Elk stared at him. He kept smiling. The other man turned away with a snort of disgust, but not before Ian had seen the faint look of unease in Sun Elk’s eyes.
“WELL, SO.” Ian took a deep breath. He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them. “Ye ken the child died, aye?”
He spoke with no emotion at all in his voice. It was that dry, controlled tone that seared her heart, and choked her so that she could do no more than nod in reply.
He couldn’t keep it up, though. He opened his mouth as though to speak, but the big, bony hands clenched suddenly on his knees, and instead, he rose abruptly to his feet.
“Aye,” he said. “Let’s go. I’ll—I’ll tell ye the rest, walking.”
And he did, his back resolutely turned, as he led her higher up the mountain, then across a narrow ridge, and down the path of a stream that fell in a series of small, enchanting waterfalls, each encircled with a mist of miniature rainbows.
Works with Her Hands had conceived again. That child was lost just after her belly began to swell with life.
“They say, the Kahnyen’kehaka,” Ian explained, his voice muffled as he shoved his way through a screen of brilliant red creeper, “that for a woman to conceive, her husband’s spirit does battle with hers, and must overcome it. If his spirit isna strong enough”—his voice came clear as he ripped a handful of creeper down, breaking the branch it hung from, and cast it viciously away—“then the child canna take root in the womb.”
After this second loss, the Medicine Society had taken the two of them to a private hut, there to sing and beat drums and to dance in huge painted masks, meant to frighten away whatever evil entities might be hampering Ian’s spirit—or unduly strengthening Emily’s.
“I wanted to laugh, seeing the masks,” Ian said. He didn’t turn round; yellow leaves spangled the shoulders of his buckskin and stuck in his hair. “They call it the Funny-Face Society, too—and for a reason. Didna do it, though.”
“I don’t . . . suppose Em-Emily laughed.” He was going so fast that she was pressed to keep up with him, though her legs were nearly as long as his own.
“No,” he said, and uttered a short, bitter laugh himself. “She didna.”
She had gone into the medicine hut beside him silent and gray, but had come out with a peaceful face, and reached for him in their bed that night with love. For three months, they had made love with tenderness and ardor. For another three, they had made love with a sense of increasing desperation.
“And then she missed her courses again.”
He had at once ceased his attentions, terrified of causing a further mishap. Emily had moved slowly and carefully, no longer going into the fields to work, but staying in the longhouse, working, always working, with her hands. Weaving, grinding, carving, boring beads of shell for wampum, hands moving ceaselessly, to compensate for the waiting stillness of her body.
“Her sister went to the fields. It’s the women who do, ken?” He paused to slash an outreaching brier with his knife, tossing the severed branch out of the way so it wouldn’t snap back and hit Brianna in the face.
“Looking at the Sky brought us food. All the women did, but her most of all. She was a sweet lass, Karònya.”
There was a slight catch in his voice at this, the first in his harsh recitation of facts.
“What happened to her?” Brianna hastened her step a little as they came out onto the top of a grass-covered bank, so that she drew up nearly even with him. He slowed a little, but didn’t turn to look at her—kept his face forward, chin raised as though confronting enemies.
“Taken.” Looking at the Sky had been in the habit of staying later in the fields than the other women, gathering extra corn or squash for her sister and Ian, though she had a child of her own by then. One evening, she did not return to the longhouse, and when the villagers had gone out to search for her, neither she nor the child was anywhere to be found. They had vanished, leaving only one pale moccasin behind, tangled in the squash vines at the edge of a field.
“Abenaki,” Ian said tersely. “We found the sign next day; it was full dark before we began to search in earnest.”
It had been a long night searching, followed by a week of the same—a week of growing fear and emptiness—and Ian had returned to his wife’s hearth at dawn on the seventh day, to learn that she had miscarried once more.
He paused. He was sweating freely from walking so fast, and wiped a sleeve across his chin. Brianna could feel the sweat trickling down her own back, dampening the hunting shirt, but disregarded it. She touched his back, very gently, but said nothing.
He heaved a deep sigh, almost of relief, she thought—perhaps that the dreadful tale was nearly done.
“We tried a bit longer,” he said, back to the matter-of-fact tone. “Emily and I. But the heart had gone out of her. She didna trust me any longer. And . . . Ahkote’ohskennonton was there. He ate at our hearth. And he watched her. She began to look back.”
Ian had been shaping wood for a bow one day, concentrating on the flow of the grain beneath his knife, trying to see those things in the swirls that Emily saw, to hear the voice of the tree, as she had told him. It wasn’t the tree that spoke behind him, though.
“Grandson,” said a dry old voice, lightly ironic.
He dropped the knife, narrowly missing his own foot, and swung round, bow in hand. Tewaktenyonh stood six feet away, one eyebrow lifted in amusement at having sneaked up on him unheard.
“Grandmother,” he said, and nodded in wry acknowledgment of her skill. Ancient she might be, but no one moved more softly. Hence her reputation; the children of the village lived in respectful dread of her, having heard that she could vanish into air, only to rematerialize in some distant spot, right before the guilty eyes of evil-doers.
“Come with me, Wolf’s Brother,” she said, and turned away, not waiting for his response. None was expected.
She was already out of sight by the time he had laid the half-made bow under a bush, taken up his fallen knife, and whistled for Rollo, but he caught her up with no difficulty.
She had led him away from the village, through the forest, to the head of a deer trail. There she had given him a bag of salt and an armlet of wampum and bade him go.
“And you went?” Brianna asked, after a long moment of silence. “Just—like that?”
“Just like that,” he said, and looked at her for the first time since they had left their campsite that morning. His face was gaunt, hollow with memories. Sweat gleamed on his cheekbones, but he was so pale that the dotted lines of his tattoos stood out sharp—perforations, lines along which his face might come apart.
She swallowed a few times before she could speak, but managed a tone much like his own when she did.
“Is it much farther?” she asked. “Where we’re going?”
“No,” he said softly. “We’re nearly there.” And turned to walk again before her.
HALF AN HOUR LATER, they had reached a place where the stream cut deep between its banks, widening into a small gorge. Silver birch and hobblebush grew thick, sprouting from the rocky walls, smooth-skinned roots twisting through the stones like fingers clawing at the earth.
The notion gave Brianna a slight prickle at the neck. The waterfalls were far above them now, and the noise of the water had lessened, the creek talking to itself as it purled over rocks and shushed through mats of cress and duckweed.
She thought the going might be easier above, on the lip of the gorge, but Ian led her down into it without hesitation, and she followed likewise, scrambling over the tumble of boulders and tree roots, hampered by her long gun. Rollo, scorning this clumsy exertion, plunged into the creek, which was several feet deep, and swam, ears clamped back against his head so that he looked like a giant otter.