Free Fire Along the Sky by Sara Donati Page A

trailed along behind her like ragged tail feathers. That women did not age into beauty was one of her ideas; that children could be kept safe from the world was another. Even the losses they had suffered had not convinced her to let go of that second idea.
    This particular day ahead of them would be a hard one. All of the children were home at once, which pleased him more than he knew how to put into words. But each of them carried their own bundle of problems, some he had never imagined.
    Luke, for one. Luke and Jennet. Elizabeth had pulled that idea out of thin air and put it down in front of him, trouble wrapped up in a pretty ribbon. Nathaniel had lived too long among sharp-eyed women to discredit out of hand what his wife had to say, especially in matters of the heart. So he watched for himself and saw the truth, like words springing to life on the page when a candle is lit in the dusk.
    There was a connection between the two of them, but it had nothing to do with new love. Instead of the shy smiles and questioning glances, Luke and Jennet circled each other warily and sparked like steel on flint. It was an old love, a knotty one with deep roots, one that had survived Jennet's marriage and long years of separation, and it explained why Luke had never brought home a bride. What Nathaniel didn't understand was why his oldest son was holding back from the inevitable. Because he wanted Jennet, of that much Nathaniel was sure.
    He would have to raise the subject, and soon. But maybe not today.
    The bigger problem, the one that couldn't wait, was Daniel.
    Elizabeth was fond of saying that if Nathaniel had his way, he would build a wall around Paradise and burn every newspaper at the gates, and she wasn't far from right. The boys were wild at the idea of a war and they couldn't be held back for much longer.
    The old way, the way of all the tribes and the way Nathaniel himself had been brought up, was to send a young man off to his first battle under the wing of a father or uncle or older brother. But Elizabeth would not hear of it, and truth be told Nathaniel had trouble remembering why he had ever been eager to go to war.
    It was Luke who had presented them with the first glimmer of a real solution, one they could all live with. Late last night he laid it out to Runs-from-Bears and Nathaniel: Daniel and Blue-Jay would leave here with him and head northwest. Luke knew where to find a man called Jim Booke, a Yorker born and raised, with a small band of militiamen under him, loosely attached to Benjamin Forsyth's company of riflemen. Booke and his men moved back and forth along the river, keeping track of the British on the other side, who liked to send raiding parties into New-York. If the boys were the marksmen that Luke claimed they were, Jim Booke had declared himself willing to take them on for a provisional nine-month commitment.
    With any luck the war would be over by then. Luke said this last part without looking the men in the eye.
    “They'll be far safer with Jim Booke and his men than they would be in that sorry excuse for a navy,” he added. “There's no man who knows the river better.”
    “A smuggler, was he, before the war?” Nathaniel had asked, and Luke grinned at him.
    “And will be after, unless they call off the embargo.”
    That had satisfied Nathaniel and Runs-from-Bears both, and Elizabeth as well.
    “Nine months,” she echoed when Nathaniel told her all this. And then: “He'll be home in the spring.”
    Now Nathaniel watched his wife sleep, at peace in the world of her own imagining, where she had only to speak the words to end a war and bring her son home.
    He touched his forehead to hers to breathe in the scent of her and left the room without a sound.
             
    Runs-from-Bears was already climbing up out of the lake under the falls, shaking himself so that the water flew off him in sheets. Then he waited in the sun while Nathaniel swam the length of the lake and came to join him on