Shawnee Bride (4 page)

She slumped against him as he gathered her into his arms, savoring the solid strength of his big hard-muscled chest. He held her tenderly, making no effort to push things beyond the moment, and she realized that he too was tired. They had battled, parried and argued to an exhausted draw.

“I want to go home,” she whispered, not fully understanding what “home” meant anymore. Was it the cold, lonely house in Baltimore, ruled by Junius and the straitlaced Mrs. Pimm? Was it Fort Pitt, where her harrowing journey had begun? Was it Swan Feather’s crude lodge? Or was “home” a place she had known only in unremembered dreams?

Wolf Heart did not speak, but Clarissa felt his arms scooping her up as if she were a tired child drifting into slumber at the end of a long day’s outing. She lay unresisting as he carried her back toward the village, her head pillowed in the musk-scented hollow between his
shoulder and chest, his heartbeat a low and steady throb in her ear.

The wind had warmed and softened. It whispered in the low grasses, making them sing against Wolf Heart’s legs as he walked. The hooting cry of an owl from the deep woods blended with the low chirr of crickets and the faraway nicker of a horse. Somewhere in the darkness, the great golden puma would be running free, grateful—if such a beast could feel gratitude—for its harrowing escape.

Warm and sleepy, Clarissa nestled deeper into the cradle of Wolf Heart’s embrace. Images blurred as she recounted the long day—her emergence from the moon lodge, her chagrin at the pool, the odorous deer hides-and Wolf Heart. Wolf Heart most of all—his return, his laughter, his maddening pride, and the long, searing kisses that had left her limp with need. It had been a terrible day. A wrenchingly glorious day. And now it was over.

Tomorrow morning she would wake up levelheaded and sensible. She would start planning her escape, every precious detail of it, from gathering and stashing her supplies to stealing a horse and covering her tracks. Tomorrow, Clarissa vowed, she would do it all. But not tonight. Tonight she needed Wolf Heart’s supporting arms around her. She needed the deep cadence of his breathing and the clean, musky aroma of his skin sweeping through her senses like forbidden wine.

Through a blur of sleep-weighted lashes, she could see the high-riding moon and, around its pale ring of light, the glimmering stars. One star fell, leaving a long white streak across her darkening range of vision, and that was the last of the night she would remember.

Wolf Heart glided through the thicket with long careful steps, trying not to disturb the precious burden in his arms. Clarissa slumbered like a child, her head lolling against his chest, her fingers resting lightly on the medicine pouch that hung there. Her empty moccasins nested in the curve of her body. Her lashes lay on her pale cheeks like shadowy golden fans. Maddening as a bee sting, erratic as the darting flight of a hummingbird, she had finally settled into rest.

When had he first realized he loved her?

Had it happened in the pool, when she’d gazed up at him, transfixed with delight at her mastery of water? Had it happened when she’d melted against him, blazing with all the fire of her innocent need? Or had there been no clear moment at all, only a slow unfolding, like a flower’s change from bud to blossom?

Where had it come from, this aching tenderness? He had not nurtured it, not wanted it. And even now, he did not welcome it. In loving Clarissa, he had opened the door to disaster and placed his own Shawnee spirit in peril.

Through the trees, he could see the flickering amber glow of the village fires. Clarissa stirred as they moved nearer. She whimpered like a little cat, her head butting his chest before she sighed and sank even deeper into sleep. How tempting it would be to carry her to the seclusion of his own lodge and there, by firelight, to settle her on the deerskin bed and lose himself in her sweet young body for the rest of the night. No one in the village would question what had occurred. There would be no judgment, no condemnation, as one might expect in the white world. The Shawnee would view the new union as they viewed all natural events—with the serene acceptance of a quiet pond that reflects what is held above it.

Wolf Heart hesitated for an instant, then set his feet resolutely on the trail to Swan Feather’s lodge. Nothing was going to happen. Not tonight, not ever. Possessing Clarissa would be like possessing a flame. She would sear him with her heat, but he could never bind her to him. A part of her would always be yearning toward the world she had left behind.

“I want to go home.”
The memory of her poignant whisper echoed in his mind, and he knew that Swan Feather’s advice had been wisely given. But how could he set Clarissa free and send her back? She belonged to the village and to the old woman whose daughter she had replaced. He had no right to defy Shawnee law.

Through the trees he could see the dark outline of the lodge, the last embers of firelight flickering through the open doorway. The smell of roast venison lingered on the night air, recalling Swan Feather’s generous celebration of his gift.

From somewhere beyond the village, the fierce, lonely call of a wolf quivered on the darkening wind. Wolf Heart listened, a strange restlessness stirring inside him. The wolf was his
unsoma,
the creature that had appeared in his boyhood vision to become his guide and personal sign. He had taken his name from that long-ago vision and promised, for always, to follow the path of the wolf in courage, resourcefulness and loyalty to his clan.

It was a promise he had never broken.

Clarissa’s body lay lightly against him, her legs and her impossibly long, thin feet dangling over his arm. He recalled seeing her outside Swan Feather’s lodge that morning, hunched awkwardly over the deer hide, sweating and muttering as she scraped the slimy surface. Her battered courage tore at his heart. She was as out of place
in his chosen world as a jewel-colored songbird in a nest of eagles.

Once his path had seemed so clear. Where was it now?

As if in answer to his unspoken question, the wolf howled again. Its call came from deep in the woods now, growing fainter with distance. Wolf Heart’s inner sight glimpsed the animal running full out through the moonshadowed forest, hot on the scent of prey, baying a signal to its kin. A shiver of response passed through his body, and he sensed suddenly that the wolf was calling to
him.

Was it a sign? Had he ventured too far from the promise of his vision? Wolf Heart gathered Clarissa close as the blood-chilling call rang again in his ears, and he knew beyond certainty that he must follow it this very night. He would endure the boyhood ordeal of fasting and cold. He would open his mind, his heart and his spirit. And he would not return to the village—or to Clarissa—until he had learned all the wolf had to teach him.

The old woman was sitting alone in her lodge, the coals in the fire pit casting her walnut face into black and amber furrows. She glanced up at him, her gaze sad and knowing, and he realized there was no need to speak. She too had heard the call of the wolf, and she knew what it meant.

Swan Feather’s ancient eyes watched him as he crossed the open floor and gently lowered the sleeping Clarissa to the skin bed. Her stern gaze softened as it rested briefly on the exhausted girl, then shifted back to Wolf Heart.

“Go,” she whispered. “I will watch over her as best I can, but I am an old woman, and her spirit is free.”

Wolf Heart nodded, understanding all too well the caution in her voice. His eyes lingered on Clarissa’s face, knowing it might be for the last time. Then, forcing himself
to move, he slipped out through the door of the lodge and into the night. There would be no need to return to his own lodge. A vision-quest required no food, water or weapons, only a weakened body and an open spirit.

Without a backward glance, he began to run. The dark wind swirled around him, cooling his skin and sweeping through his long, black hair. As he plunged ahead, he felt the forest close around him, felt the power of the night and heard, in the distance, the wild, compelling cry of the wolf.

I
t was Clarissa who saw him first. Wolf Heart lay nearly buried in mud and rocks with only one leg, one arm and shoulder, and the left side of his face showing above the debris. His eyes were closed, his face gray and lifeless.

“Wait!” Cat Follower tried to hold her back, but Clarissa would have none of it. With a cry, she flung herself down beside Wolf Heart. Her trembling fingers explored his face and hair, then began to claw frantically at the earth that held him.

“Is he alive?” Cat Follower clasped one of the boulders that anchored his friend’s body, heaved it to one side, then seized another and began to pry it loose.

“I don’t know!” Clarissa groped along Wolf Heart’s cool throat for a pulse.
Be alive,
she prayed silently.
Please, please be alive.

Her fingers fluttered urgently down along the hollow between his windpipe and the muscular cords that supported his neck. Nothing—she felt nothing. Why couldn’t she have stopped him from going off on this ridiculous vision-quest? Why hadn’t she forced him to take her to his lodge that night and kept him there any way she could with her arms, her lips, her body?

Why hadn’t she told him that she loved him? Her fingers moved lower, pressed harder against the hollow of his throat.
Please,
she prayed silently.
I’ll do anything. Give anything.

“Is he alive?” Cat Follower demanded again, pausing to catch his breath and wipe the sweat from his pockmarked face.

“I can’t tell, not until we get more of him uncovered!” Clarissa had felt no pulse, but she could not admit defeat until all hope was gone. Desperately she began to scrape at the stubborn earth, pawing with her bare hands while Cat Follower moved the heavier rocks. By the time they freed his chest and face her palms and fingers were bloody, but she scarcely noticed.

Please!
She groped for his pulse again, more carefully this time. A little sob broke from her throat as she felt a light tick of movement beneath her fingertips. “Hurry!” she urged Cat Follower as she slipped supporting hands under Wolf Heart’s head.
“Hurry!”

Wolf Heart groaned as his shoulders came free—a miraculous sound to Clarissa’s ears. But even as his eyelids fluttered open, she could not help wondering how badly hurt he was. The landslide could have broken his legs, crushed his ribs, his spine. He could be crippled, or paralyzed, and trying to move him might only make his injuries worse.

“Get help!” she ordered Cat Follower. “Men with poles to carry!” She knew no other way to describe a stretcher in Shawnee, but the young brave seemed to understand. Without a backward glance, he was off, racing back toward the village, leaving her alone with Wolf Heart.

His eyes were fully open now. They stared up at her in dazed confusion, like a lost child’s. Aching with tendemess,
Clarissa cradled his head in her arms. “It’s all right,” she murmured over and over, wanting desperately to believe it was so. “It’s all right.”

His lips were dry and cracked. They moved awkwardly as he tried to speak, but no sound emerged except a hoarse breathy croak. His obvious thirst tore at Clarissa’s heart. Though the river was scarcely two hundred paces away, she had nothing for carrying water and, in any case, she dared not leave him to fetch it.

“Hush.” She bent low, kissing his forehead, his eyes, his cheeks, wetting his lips with her own tongue. He moaned, struggling to speak. “Lie still,” she whispered. “It won’t be long now. Cat Follower is bringing help.”

His throat moved in a paroxysm of effort. “The vision…” he whispered.

“You found what you were looking for?”

“No.” His face was ashen beneath its sun-burnished surface. His blue eyes held a haunted look, as if his soul had passed through the portals of hell. “No,” he rasped again. His lips closed. He shuddered convulsively. Clarissa held him close, suddenly as much afraid for his mind as for his body. What had it done to him, this barbaric ordeal of fasting and isolation? What kind of savage society would require such things of a man?

Before she could ponder these questions, Cat Follower burst out of the trees, followed by three braves all running hard. One brave balanced a pair of long stout poles and a fistful of leather lashings. Another carried a blanket. Cat Follower gripped the neck of a calabash—water. She slumped in relief at the sight of it, her tears blurring the sight of Wolf Heart’s tortured face.

Their pace slowed as they mounted the treacherous fan of the slide. For Clarissa, a small eternity seemed to pass before they reached the spot where Wolf Heart lay with
his head pillowed in her lap. Cat Follower thrust the calabash into her hands, then swiftly joined the other braves in digging the debris from around Wolf Heart’s body.

“Careful now.” She raised Wolf Heart’s head, tipped the calabash to his lips and was gratified when he gulped it thirstily. “Not too fast, or you’ll make yourself sick,” she warned, aching with tenderness. “How do you feel? Can you tell me how badly you’re hurt?”

“I…don’t know. The vision…Hunts-at-Night…bring him…” He spoke with less strain now that he had moistened his throat, but nothing he said made any sense to Clarissa. He was clearly out of his head.

“It’s all right.” She cradled his head against her breast, passionately wishing she could believe her own words. “Don’t try to talk. Not yet”

Cat Follower and the other braves had him fully uncovered now. His limbs appeared straight and unbroken, but who could say what horrendous injuries lay beneath the scrapes, bruises and mud that covered his battered flesh.

Two of the braves had rigged the poles and blankets into a makeshift stretcher. Clarissa kept her eyes fixed on Wolf Heart’s face as they laid the poles parallel to his body. His eyes were open, the pupils gazing upward as if staring at something no one else could see. “Be careful,” she whispered as they eased the stretcher beneath him. “Don’t hurt-”

Her own words ended in a gasp as Wolf Heart’s face contorted in sudden pain. Cat Follower had clasped his rib cage to slide him onto the blanket, and the pain had all but undone him. Only his tightly clenched jaw had kept him from crying out. Crushed ribs, Clarissa surmised worriedly. How many and how badly they were broken remained to be seen.

Cat Follower’s second effort was more carefully made. Sweat beads formed on Wolf Heart’s pale face as his friends eased him onto the stretcher, but he did not flinch or cry out. The four braves lifted the poles, two on each side. Then, almost too swiftly for Clarissa to follow, they took off at a trot for the village.

“Not so fast—you’ll hurt him!” She sprinted after the stretcher, a stitch jabbing her side as she ran. Wolf Heart’s eyes were tightly closed, his teeth clenched against the jarring pain. Tiny specks of whisker stubble, black against his ashen skin, sprinkled his upper lip and the long square line of his jaw.

Ahead, in the village, word of Wolf Heart’s accident had spread. More than a score of people had swarmed out to meet the stretcher. In their lead, snapping orders like a diminutive general, was Swan Feather.

“Bring him into my lodge!” She kept pace with the stretcher in spite of her arthritic legs. “Be careful! Don’t bounce him like that! He’s an injured man, not a dead buck! And the rest of you, out of the way!”

The crowd parted in deference to the disheveled old woman. This was Swan Feather’s arena, and she was master here. Sides heaving from the run, Clarissa hurried after the growing procession. Nothing mattered to her now except staying close to Wolf Heart.

With Swan Feather barking directions, the four braves carried him inside her lodge, laid him, stretcher and all, beside the small crackling fire where water was already heating in two clay pots. Clarissa squeezed in through the crowded entrance. She struggled to reach the spot where he lay pale and still, the amber firelight gleaming on his bruised skin.

“Go!” Swan Feather dismissed the braves with a wave
of her hand, then looked sharply at Clarissa. “Only you are to stay. I will need your help.”

As the lodge cleared, Clarissa flew to Wolf Heart’s side. His eyes opened as she flung herself down beside him. His cracked lips twisted, moved. “Hunts-atNight…get him for me!”

“There’s no time for that now,” Swan Feather cut in. “Listen to me, son of my friend. I am brewing some leaves to make you sleep. When you awaken—”

“No!” Wolf Heart struggled to sit up but was stopped by the stabbing agony of his cracked ribs. He fell back onto the stretcher, his eyes agitated, insistent. “I must speak with him—alone. Get him! Get him now!”

“I’ll go!” Clarissa was on her feet before the old woman could argue. If the one-eyed chief could do anything to ease Wolf Heart’s troubled mind, she wanted him here.

“Hurry, then!” Swan Feather’s impatient voice echoed behind Clarissa as she ducked out of the lodge and raced toward the council house. “Hurry!”

Hunts-at-Night listened intently as Wolf Heart recounted, in labored whispers, the horror of his vision. They were alone in the lodge, the chief having sent everyone else outside to wait. Swan Feather’s herbs simmered in their pots on the fire, the redolent steam filling the darkness around them.

“I saw it all” Wolf Heart spoke through a red blur of pain. “The end of our world, the end of all we hold sacred, at the hands of those whose blood I share.” The words ended in a grimace as a shaft of agony stabbed upward from his ribs.

“Not so, my son.” A thread of warmth wove subtly into the chiefs voice. “Your blood is Shawnee, as is
your heart. You are as much a part of us as if you had been born in one of our
wegiwas.”
He stared into the flames. “Would it surprise you to know that my own dreams have been the same as your vision?”

Wolf Heart gaped up at him in surprise.

“I know what is going to happen to our people,” Hunts-at-Night said softly. “And now you know it, too.”

“But what can we do to prevent it?” Wolf Heart demanded, stunned by the chiefs fatalism. “There must be a way! We have to think—we have to plan—”

“And we will do all of those things.” Hunts-at-Night’s scar-streaked face reflected the dancing shadows. His single eye glowed like a fiery coal. “We will fight like the warriors we are. We will lose in the end, but we will lose honorably. That is all we ask of Weshemoneto, and all that he asks of us.”

“The others, the council—” Wolf Heart struggled to rise, but an explosion of pain lanced his side and he fell back onto the stretcher, gasping. “We have to warn them! We have to prepare everyone!”

The chief shook his head. “What you have seen will take many years to happen. Would you bring fear and sorrow down on our people so soon? I, for one, would not make such a cruel choice.”

Wolf Heart closed his eyes, fighting the pain that gripped his ribs like the talons of a great eagle. His ears heard the laughter of the people—the women singing as they tended their patches of corn and squash, the children shouting happily as they played hoop and pole or chased each other among the lodges—and he knew that Hunts-at-Night was right. The terrible vision was not meant to be shared, perhaps not for years to come. Perhaps never.

“When the dark time comes, our people will need a strong war chief,” the old man said. “You were given
the vision as a blessing, not as a curse. Use it wisely, and you will guide our people on the path of wisdom and courage.”

“There are times…when it is more than I can do to follow that path myself.” Wolf Heart felt a bloodred fog welling in his mind, clouding his reason. He struggled to stay conscious.

“You are young and still learning,” the chief said. “Be true to yourself and your people. When the black days come, you will be ready.” He straightened from his crouched position next to the fire. “Rest now. Give your body and spirit time to mend. We will talk more when you are well.”

Wolf Heart’s mouth worked in an effort to speak, but no words would cross the bridge from his brain to his tongue. He watched the chief turn away and drift out of his range of vision. Then the fog swirled around him, and he began sinking slowly into it. He heard distant voices, the sound of light, running footsteps, and then Clarissa was bending over him, her moss-green eyes as tender as springtime, her russet hair glowing like flame in the firelight. Her tough, slim hand caught his own, her fingers interweaving with his as she pressed his bruised knuckles to her lips.

“It’s all right,” she murmured in English, her tears cool-and sweet on his skin. “Rest. We’ll take care of you.”

Wolf Heart’s hand tightened around hers. Then he closed his eyes and, at last, let the deepening fog enfold him and carry him away.

For Clarissa, the days passed like a whirlwind. Wolf Heart’s strong body was swift to heal, but Swan Feather would not hear of his being moved from the lodge until
he was well on the way to recovery. By day he reclined against a pile of skins and baskets, his torso lashed to a frame of woven willows to immobilize his broken ribs. Though his gaze darted about the confined space with the ferocity of a hawk’s, he clearly realized that mending bones took time, and, because he wanted that time to be as short as possible, he forced himself to keep still.

At night he lay restlessly in the darkness of the lodge, too impatient for sleep. From her place near the snoring Swan Feather, Clarissa would hear him shifting on his bed and hear the sharp exhalations of his breath like the
whuff
of a captive puma pacing the bounds of its cage. She felt his frustration in the darkness, his longing to be back in action. Sometimes it was all she could do to keep from creeping across the open floor, slipping her arms around him to nestle close as she whispered words of comfort in the privacy of the language that only the two of them shared.

Would he welcome her? Clarissa had no way of knowing. Wolf Heart had closed himself off since the vision, refusing to talk about what he had seen. Clarissa had teased, cajoled and wheedled, but he had resisted her every effort to draw him out. Never easy to know, he had closed himself within a tight fortress of silence, leaving her outside, hurt, angry and alone.

Clarissa had long since come to realize that she loved Wolf Heart—loved him with all the power of her young, giving heart She loved the lithe bronze grace of his body, and the glimpse of white skin where the leather cord that held his breechcloth shifted up or down on his lean flanks. She loved the wavy fall of his blue-black hair over his sinewy shoulders, the sudden flash of his cobalt eyes when he was amused, intrigued or irritated. She loved the sight, scent and sound of him. But even love was not
enough to bind her to the world of the Shawnee, Clarissa reminded herself sternly, especially when Wolf Heart shut her out of his thoughts like an unwelcome visitor.