After the Thunder (23 page)

Her heart gave a quick, hard beat. Would he, could he, finally tell her something that would help save Walks-With-Spirits?

“Yes,” she said breathlessly. “Oh, yes. I won’t tell.”

“Well, then.”

He bent his head so he could speak low in her ear, as if dozens of eavesdroppers surrounded them.

“I know for a fact that Olmun supplied the money for Jacob’s third of our three-way business partnership,” he said. “Jacob didn’t want it known because he liked to appear independent, but it’s true.”

For an instant she looked at him in dismay. Everyone knew that, it was no secret at all! But she bit her lip before she said so—maybe he knew other things about Jacob that he would eventually tell her.

“I promise you I won’t breathe it to a soul.”

His face took on a mournful expression.

“Our new mercantile was extremely important to Jacob. He wouldn’t have risked losing his place in it by betraying his father to connect himself somehow with the Boomers.”

“You’re probably right, Mr. Phillips,” she said encouragingly.

“Peter,” he said, “please do call me Peter, my dear.”

So she did, and she kept him smiling and strolling through the grounds with her until the early dusk had begun to fall and the voices of the others who were
sitting on the porch, as they often did after supper, drifted out to them.

“We must go in,” he said, “as it’s unseemly of me to keep you out alone after dark, but before we do, I have one private word of advice, dear Cotannah.”

She stopped still to listen.

“I’m fond of you, Cotannah, and I’d hate to see you hurt. Don’t invest your fine heart in trying to save the shaman, my dear, because there’s probably nothing anyone can do.”

He laid his hand over hers.

“He must have killed Jacob with his curse, my darling girl—the Judges of your people have found that he did.” He paused significantly. “After all, there wasn’t a wound or a mark on Jacob’s body and he was young and healthy and strong, so how else could he have died?”

“I don’t know,” she said, biting her tongue to keep from saying anything else.

She mustn’t alienate Phillips, not yet. He was the only person who had been close to Jacob that she had a prayer of questioning, and he might eventually say something that would help her and Walks-With-Spirits.

“A young woman like you should be filling her pretty head with thoughts of frocks and flowers and beaux.”

She bit her lip to hold in a sharp reply. He might help her yet, she told herself. He might help her yet.

“But, you see, I feel a certain responsibility in this case,” she said softly, giving him a pleading look, “even though it was Jacob’s behavior that caused the famous fight that ended with the curse. I’m sure you understand.”

“I do,” he said, holding her gaze with his blue eyes that gleamed hard like marbles in the dim light, “and I admire you for it.”

She looked at him trustingly and waited.

He took her hands in both of his and she prayed he wouldn’t feel the impulse running through her body to pull back from him.

“Promise me that you will think carefully about what I’ve said. How could a normal, regular human being kill a healthy young man without a weapon? It’s got to be the curse that did it, Cotannah. There’s no other explanation.”

He frowned at her in the dimming, dusky light.

“Don’t be running around this countryside alone,” he said. “Promise me that, too. Lots of people hate the witch, you know, and everyone knows you’re his friend.”

“All right. Thank you, Peter. Thank you very much.”

Her heart was hammering in her chest as they began walking back toward the house and the gathering on the porch. She had not accomplished anything with this little charade—not one bit more than with the long ride to the
Star
and to Greentree’s Crossing.

Walks-With-Spirits held on to the low branch of the tree that sheltered him in its shadow, pressed his hand around it until the rough bark’s pattern imprinted itself in the skin of his palm. It did no good, though. The bitter feeling of jealousy ripped him loose and he clicked his tongue to Basak and Taloa, the three of them started walking through the gloomy dusk toward Cotannah.

Phillips was taking her to the house, to Tay and Emily and their guests. Therefore, the older man wouldn’t be alone with her anymore. However, knowing that didn’t slow him one bit. It didn’t lessen the strange, intense disquiet in his spirit and in his body that had gripped him, sharp as eagle’s talons, the minute he had come into sight of the two of them strolling and talking alone
in the dusk. How dare the old lecher hold both her hands in his!

He walked up behind them, heard Phillips say, “… so I never knew of any real enemy Jacob might have made …”

At that moment Cotannah sensed his presence and whirled to look behind her. She laughed, a light, tinkling sound of delight.

“Shadow!” she cried. “I should’ve known it was you.”

Phillips turned, too.

“What the
hell
are you doing, Boy,” he shouted, “trying to scare us to death? Lord! You’re sneaky enough to be a killer, that’s for damn sure …”

A thrill of mean satisfaction ran through Walks-With-Spirits.

“Didn’t you hear me coming? Are you having trouble with your hearing, Old Man?”

“No! Who could hear you? And you’d better take those animals out of here before they hurt somebody!”

And Phillips raved on, talking only to himself now.

For Cotannah was looking at Walks-With-Spirits with her huge dark eyes luminous in the purple twilight, and he was looking at her. His heart began to beat against the cage of his ribs like a rabbit in a snare.

He had been aching to run to them and wrench them apart since he saw Cotannah looking up at the man and his head bent close to hers. Now it was as if Phillips had vanished into thin air. At the moment he was longing to bend over and kiss her full lips, still parted in surprise. Or just to touch them, even, with his fingertips instead of with his mouth would be enough to ease his yearnings. Perhaps.

A deep, ragged breath sighed through him like a whispering breeze.

“Sneak up behind a man with those yellow-eyed monsters at heel, will you?” Phillips shouted. “I ought to smash that solemn face of yours to smithereens!”

Walks-With-Spirits spared him a glance.

“You’re welcome to try,” he said.

He could hardly believe the belligerent words as they came out of his mouth. What was happening to him? His spirit and his body both were swirling in turmoil, and the prospect of a fight fired his blood, felt like a coming relief.

But Phillips was all talk.

“Well, uh … uh,” he stammered, and took a step backward, his hard, pale eyes flicking from Basak to Taloa and then back again, “I wouldn’t want to distress Cotannah. I won’t fight with a lady present.”

“That’s very unselfish of you,” Walks-With-Spirits said, taunting him.

And observing him. Closely.

The man was afraid of more than Basak and Taloa. He was hiding something—that was clear in his anxious, erratic movement as he turned his face away.

Walks-With-Spirits’s blood rushed through his veins, flamed hot as the sun. Did the slimy white-eyes have designs on Cotannah? Had his appearing here so suddenly thwarted some nefarious plans?

He forced himself to take a long, ragged breath.

This must be a full-blown attack of jealousy, he knew of no other name to put to it. This tormenting selfishness must be jealousy, and he was helpless against it.

“Come, my dear,” Phillips said, offering his arm to Cotannah. “Let me get you back to the others now.”

Cotannah didn’t even glance at him. Her eyes were on Walks-With-Spirits. “I need to talk with Walks-With-Spirits,” she said.

“Very well.”

Phillips snapped out the words as he was already leaving them, disappearing into the growing gloom.

“I’ll tell Tay where you are,” he said, in a tone like a warning.

“He must think I’m in danger from you,” she said, her gaze unwaveringly fastened to Walks-With-Spirits’s.

You are. Let me tell you now, you are
.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking deep into her eyes with a feeling like silent laughter moving him inside. “He seemed very concerned about me and my troubles. Perhaps he thinks
I’m
in danger from
you
.”

And I am. It is the Great Spirit’s own truth that I am
.

The laughter inside him was a pitiful bravado in the face of that fear.

She took a step toward him.

He reached out and touched her mouth with the tips of his trembling fingers.

It wasn’t enough. He had been wrong about that. It was not enough.

Desire flooded him, stiffened his loins, weakened his legs. His lips flamed with the need to kiss her again.

But that way lay madness, he was living proof of that now. And the quick intake of her breath told him she knew the same thing.

She was helpless, too, however. Her lips closed against his fingertips in a kiss light as the brush of a butterfly’s wings. She kissed them again.

He thrust his fingers into the silky mass of her hair and cradled her cheek in his palm. He ran his thumb over her fragile, high cheekbone, traced the pert shape of her nose. The smooth, unspeakable softness of her skin moved against his hand as she snuggled her face into it and sent a warm melody singing through his blood.

He tilted her head back on her slender, beautiful neck and took her mouth with his.

And she took his heart away. With one, tiny welcoming whimper, deep in her throat, she reached right out and took his heart from his chest to keep forever.

She kissed him with a sweet, honest urgency like a promise and his eyes burned with tears.

How had he ever walked off into the woods without her? How would he ever do so again?

But someday soon he would have to.

Slowly, his arm burning all the way to his shoulder, he dropped it to hang useless at his side. He looked her up and down, devoured her face with his eyes and then forced them to fix on the ground, on her pale skirts swaying like a candle’s flame against the grass, its color changing from green to black in the quick-falling darkness.

“What did you want to tell me?” he asked, his voice too husky to recognize. “Or did you just say that to get rid of Phillips?”

“No. I want to say that I lied to you, and I’m sorry,” she said. “You are the only man I never lie to, and I won’t do it again.”

“Why not?”

“I … want us always to trust each other.”

Always
.

The word hit him like the sharp blow of an oak branch across the back of his neck.

Bless her innocent heart. Always would be one moon’s worth of days and nights and that was all. That was why he must not touch her again—for her sake, not for his.

He’d known that all along. Why was he so weak when he was with her?

“What he did you tell me?”

“I said that I’m going to keep on trying to save your life only to assuage my guilt.”

He could barely hear her for the roaring of realization in his ears.

One evening, one, wrapped in the warmth of her smile and basking in the light of her eyes inside the cozy walls of the cabin, and one kiss—the very first one at the horse shed that had fired his blood and shattered his bones—had ruined him. When the afternoon shadows began to grow long today, he had come to her like a goose returning to its mate.

“And what did you have to say to Peter Phillips?”

Her face fell.

“He just kept telling me that the curse killed Jacob,” she said. “He wouldn’t tell me a thing about Jacob’s enemies.”

She came a step closer, her skirts swishing against the grass with a whispering like the voice of a spirit.

“I’ve got to go see William Sowers,” she said fiercely, “and ask if he overheard anyone arguing with Jacob. He worked for weeks building the mercantile and, aside from Phillips, he probably spent more time around Jacob than anyone else in these past few weeks.”

“Don’t go alone,” he said simply.

He knew when he said it he would go with her if she asked him. William Sowers was trustworthy, but it was a long way to his place and no telling what witch-hater would watch for Cotannah to ride by. He would not let her be in danger from someone else like Jacob Charley.

She looked at him, her eyes like shining dark pools in her pale face.

“If you went with me, I wouldn’t be alone.”

“And ride back from there in a thundering silence as we rode for hours from Greentree’s Crossing?” he said softly.

Her face changed, one quick emotion after another racing across it like birds flying across the sky. He saw it, he felt it, when the one realization he was willing upon her swept down and settled on her heart.

“No,” she said slowly, “we won’t act like that anymore. Ever. No matter what happens, let’s promise each other that. It’s a waste of precious time.”

He couldn’t help himself then, as hard as he tried to make himself be strong. He reached out and pulled her to him, wrapped her in his arms, and cradled her head against his heart.

Over and over again he stroked his hand through her hair, feeling the silk of it on his skin like the blessing of sunlight on a bitter cold day.

I
t was in that moment that she knew how much she loved him and that she would never love anyone else. He wanted her, yes, just as Tonio and the other men who had held her had wanted her—she could feel his desire in the thrumming tension of his muscles and the hardening of his body against her. But unlike the others, he wasn’t concerned with pleasure, he hadn’t taken her into his arms for that reason. What Walks-With-Spirits cared about was her, her spirit, her real self.

She tightened her arms around his slender waist and nestled her cheek deeper into the solid solace of his chest, let every thought roll right out of her head. He was what she had needed all her life long.

He stroked her hair with his big hand over and over again, and the ease it gave her flowed from her scalp down her neck, down the length of her spine, collapsing her against him until they were melted together so surely they would never come apart. For an endless while he held her there, in the purpling twilight, and she clung to him, warm and safe, while the evening air grew briskly chill.

She clung to him until she had soaked up his closeness
to fill her, until his presence had eased her heart and filled it lipping full with the sweet knowledge that this, this was love, come to her at last. This magic connection between them was love, this comfort and wanting and needing to give to him was what she had feared for so long.

But she shouldn’t have. Loving Walks-With-Spirits didn’t make her afraid. She lifted her head and leaned it back into his cradling hand, looked up into his half-open eyes.

“I love you.”

A smile, a quick, blinding smile that made her go weak in the knees came over his face and lit his eyes.

“I love you, Cotannah. That is the truth—in my body, in my spirit, in my harmony.”

She laughed.

“What? I don’t disturb your peace anymore?”

“You disturb every inch of me,” he growled, and pulled her even harder against him to prove it.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and went up onto tiptoe to meet his blazing kiss, his mouth lusciously moist and so hot it branded her, his body a rooted oak, strong enough to cling to in a rolling wind. He was as famished for comfort, for love as she, he crushed her to his chest and devoured her mouth with lips and tongue and teeth.

Then suddenly he stopped, as if sorry to have been greedy, and changed the kiss without ever breaking it, changed it to a slow, lovely savoring. But not a gentle one—a tasting of lips and a twining of tongues that made shivers of pleasure run all through her blood.

She ran her hands over the bulging muscles of his shoulders and his back, stroked the satiny club of his bound hair, then jerked the rawhide thong from around it to drive her fingers through it before she began to
caress the back of his big neck, glorying in the sheer strength she found in this vulnerable part of him, his skin sleek beneath her palm, his hair soft and shifting across the back of her hand. He scraped his teeth lightly over her lower lip and made a rough purring sound deep in his throat when he felt her trembling.

Then he trailed the tip of his tongue around the shape of her lips and dipped inside again, shoving both hands into her hair to catch her head in his hands as he had done that very first time in the cabin and he held her there, helpless and willing, while he plundered her mouth and drew her soul right out of her body. Deep, deep at the woman’s core of her she opened to him, wept for him to come in.

He cradled her head in one hand, then, and with the other reached to cup her breast. She turned a little to give him the aching tip, and he ran his rough thumb across it. The glory of the touch blazed through her like a fire.

Then a blow hit her at the backs of her knees.

“’Tannah! What you doing? ’Tannah!”

Even with the voice rising into a hopeful wail, and the small body with its rough splint supporting one arm pummeling her legs through her skirts, it took a while for her to realize that Sophia had joined them. Walks-With-Spirits tore his mouth from hers and clasped her to him, holding her head in the hollow of his shoulder, shaking all over now, as she was, while he circled his hand on her back.

“Sophia!” Emily’s voice called from out of the dusk. “Where are you, you little rascal girl?”

“Mama!” Sophia screamed. “I found ’Tannah.”

Then Emily’s voice, and Tay’s, sounded from someplace very near, and Walks-With-Spirits spoke to them over her head.

“Tay,” he said. “Do you know where William Sowers lives?”

“Over near Standing Rock Mountain,” Tay said. Then Emily cried out.

“Oh! Oh, my goodness, we are so sorry! We didn’t mean to intrude. We just never dreamed … Sophia! Come here.”

But Sophia’s one healthy small arm was firmly clasped around Cotannah’s legs and Walks-With-Spirits was loosening his hold on her. With a last squeeze of a hug, Cotannah let him go and turned to bend down and pick up the baby.

Emily reached out.

“’Tannah, let me take her away …”

Cotannah laughed. She couldn’t keep from laughing, the joy rising in her was growing so great.

“No, it’s all right,” she said. “Sophia’s come all the way out here in the dark to find me.”

“Dark!” Sophia agreed.

Tay was talking to Walks-With-Spirits, their bass voices rumbling quietly in the dark. The moon and stars were coming out overhead, and the sharp night air carried the scent of pines and junipers. Cotannah took in a long, shaky breath of it and held Sophia’s face to hers.

Life is wonderful right now at this moment. For this one instant, everything is all right, for the first time since I was born
.

“What is it about William Sowers?” Emily asked.

Cotannah told her.

“Walks-With-Spirits and I are going to see him early in the morning,” she said, when she had explained. “I found out nothing from Phillips, but William has been around Jacob nearly as much as Peter those last weeks before his death, and he may know of some enemy we haven’t heard about.”

“He might know something,” Emily murmured. “But William’s a responsible person. I think he would’ve come forward by now if he did.”

Cotannah felt disappointment flood her face at that news.

“I’ll go talk to Olmun tomorrow and find out if he knows of any more enemies Jacob may have had,” Tay said quickly. “But it wouldn’t hurt to talk to William, too.”

A little silence fell.

Emily shivered and wrapped her shawl more tightly around her.

“Well, we’ll surely all keep on looking under every stone,” she said. “You must really question Olmun, Tay, and make him answer you.”

She sighed.

“Now it’s hard to get Olmun to admit that Jacob ever had a falling-out with anyone when everybody knows he had to intercede for him many a time in one dispute or another. He’s rescued Jacob from scrape after scrape, but now he refuses to remember any of that—he seems to be trying to proclaim Jacob a martyred saint.”

“Daisy told me that in town she heard Olmun saying that Jacob would never have tried anything with me if I hadn’t led him on,” Cotannah said.

Emily patted her arm.

“Don’t you take that to heart,” she said. “Like I said, Olmun’s refusing to see reality.”

Cotannah sighed.

“About Jacob he is, but he’s telling the real truth about me,” she said.

Then she marveled that she could speak of it so calmly, that the guilt didn’t overwhelm her. It was still there, but its cold fingers couldn’t even dent the warm feeling that filled her. Walks-With-Spirits was in this
terrible predicament because of her, yes, but now the power of her love for him would make her strong enough to save him.

“I don’t care if you were making eyes at Jacob like crazy, if you were wearing that shameless dress or even if you told him you wanted him to ravish you right then and there on the ground,” Emily cried. “When you started telling him no, then he should’ve taken his hands off you!”

Cotannah smiled and hugged her friend. “I love you, Mimi,” she said. “You are the most loyal friend I ever had.”

Then she marveled that she’d said that, too, and that she’d meant it. It seemed incredible that there’d ever been a time that Emily had betrayed her. It seemed even more incredible that there’d ever been a time when she’d thought she loved Tay.

“Tay?” Walks-With-Spirits said. “May I impose on your hospitality and sleep in the shed with my friends here tonight?”

“You bet. We’d like to have you.”

A new, raw happiness filled Cotannah, a feeling so powerful it made her believe she could rise and fly. He was going to stay at Tall Pine tonight and go with her to see William Sowers tomorrow.

That’s all she ever wanted for the rest of her life: Walks-With-Spirits with her tonight and tomorrow.

They turned and started walking toward the big house in a tightly knit group, Emily, as usual, making small talk.

“We’ll all have hot chocolate and popcorn,” she said. “It’s way too early to go to bed yet.”

“Choc’late!” Sophia crowed, and Cotannah danced a few steps with her in her arms.

Walks-With-Spirits didn’t ask to stay the night at Tall
Pine so he could come to her bed tonight or she to his—she knew him well enough to know that. But he had asked to stay because he was feeling the very same way she was feeling about him: he could not bear to go away and leave her, to be in another place where she was not there.

They loved each other. Neither of them would ever be able to go away and leave the other, not ever again.

By the time the sun had climbed halfway up the sky the next morning, Cotannah and Walks-With-Spirits were within three miles of their destination. The closer they came to the big hill called Standing Rock Mountain, the more excited she became. Not once, had he agreed with her that William Sowers just had to know something that would help them, but she knew it was true.

“I know you think it, too,” she said, finally, “so you might as well admit it.”

He threw her a slanting glance that she couldn’t quite read.

“And how do you know what I think?”

“The first thing you said to Tay when they found us kissing last night was to ask him where William Sowers lives,” she said triumphantly.

“That’s true,” he said, and he smiled at her in a sad way that scared her, “but I said it not because I believe Sowers knows something that will help us but because for that first moment, when I had just torn my lips from yours, I had to hope that he did. Because I can’t help but hope for many, many years of kissing you or die.”

Shock brought stinging tears to her eyes.

“Well, what about this moment, this one right now?” she cried. “Don’t you still feel that way?”

His topaz eyes blazed at her.

“Yes! I could kill right now and deserve my death sentence for one taste of your mouth.”

She melted in her saddle.

“But I don’t know whether William Sowers will help us. I don’t know what we’ll find out, if anything, and I’m worried sick that you have your heart so set on finding a secret enemy for Jacob.”

“I know we will!”

“Cotannah,” he said, “I cannot bear for you to be disappointed. Please try to wait and see.”

They said no more, and she rode beside him with a little smile on her lips, for she knew she was right.

“There’s the Standing Rock Mountain,” he said, after a little while.

She followed his glance to the low mountain curving blue-purple against the sky. He rode out ahead of her and turned off the road onto a grassy track that led into the woods.

“Here’s the trail to the Sowers place,” he said. “Tay said it’s less than a mile from here.”

They rode single file through the woods without talking any more and soon came out into a rail-fenced clearing, a pitifully poor little solitary farm. There were a few head of cattle grazing in a long, narrow pasture, two milch cows, some chickens and guineas and two mules and five goats scattered about the property. The log cabin home sat in front of a small grove of oaks on a rise to the west of the ramshackle barn and pens. Behind it lay a scraggly attempt at a fall garden.

Walks-With-Spirits started his horse down the slight incline. Cotannah followed on Pretty Feather. As they approached the cabin, a man hobbled slowly around one corner of it into the front yard, gazing straight ahead, holding a forked stick in his hands. Not William. An old man with his hair in two long, white braids.

The old man saw them then and stopped in his tracks. A woman stepped out onto the porch as they halted the horses. She looked almost, but not quite, as old as the man who had begun walking toward them. His face had wrinkles upon wrinkles, but his eyes looked alert and sharp.

When he stood in front of them, Walks-With-Spirits spoke to him.

“Hello, Grandfather,” he said respectfully. “We are looking for a man called William Sowers. Does he live here?”

The old woman came closer to the steps and peered out at them.

“Why?” she said, her voice quavering a bit. “Why are you looking for William?”

“Only to talk to him, Auntie,” Cotannah said, also using a term of respect for her age. “We think he might be able to help us.”

“About what?”

“About who might have had a disagreement with Jacob Charley a little while ago in Tuskahoma.”

The old woman’s gaze froze to Cotannah’s.

“Jacob Charley is dead,” she said flatly.

“We know that, Auntie.”

The old woman stared at Walks-With-Spirits then, as if she hadn’t noticed him earlier, gasped, and clapped her hand over her mouth, started muttering behind it.

Walks-With-Spirits spoke to the man again.

“Would you call William out here so that we can speak to him? Tell him I am called Walks-With-Spirits.”

At that news, the old man also drew in a deep, sharp breath.

“My grandson, William, has gone away,” the old man said, in a voice full of sudden fury. “Out of the Nation.”

Cotannah’s heart dropped into her feet.

“Where?” she cried, leaning off her saddle toward the old man. “Where did he go?”

“To find work that pays in money,” the old woman announced clearly. “To save our farm.”