Free Wind Dancer by Jamie Carie Page A

purples, from lavender to deep violet, of her dance worship that left him breathless in awe. Most unsettling was the deep black he felt at moments, tiny snatches of time that stunned him with their intensity, leaving him grasping as to what his instincts were trying to tell him about him and her and their future together.
    And they did have a future together. Since first laying eyes on her he had known. She had even said it aloud. They were meant to be together.
    But what was that to look like in such a time and place as they found themselves? He was in the middle of a campaign,a war, and there was a good chance he would die in the fighting of it. The risk was easier to consider without anyone waiting for him to come back on the other side of it. He had no home, no place to rest his own head, much less a wife’s.
    He thought of the wife he had lost. Sara. It had been four years since her death, a death that had shocked him after only ten months of marriage. He tried to remember her face now and felt a gripping fear that it was fading. He looked up at the dawn sky, trying to call to mind the pale gray of her eyes, the sound of her voice, and hearing only the throaty trill of a mockingbird nearby.
    â€œI can’t see her face anymore,” he whispered. When he closed his eyes, all he could see were Isabelle’s gypsy features, so strong, so fierce in comparison to Sara’s. Sara had been a faded beauty even at nineteen. He thought back to their wedding day, seeing only a pale visage, knowing that her hair had been blonde, her mouth small and bow-like, her eyes a dove’s gray. On that day she had been full of a young woman’s fear, reflecting the feelings in his heart, that they were being pushed into this thing by parents who wanted them joined for the land, for their dream of building an empire.
    But he had loved her in a sudden, unmastered way. He’d thought her lovely, had anticipated the night to come with a young man’s blood.
    Their wedding night, though, had only bewildered him. He knew he had been clumsy and she, so still and stiff in his arms. He hadn’t known what to do, falling asleep, feeling like a boy instead of a man. He remembered her in the sitting room with his mother and sisters the next day, bent over her sewing, smiling with them at some silly joke that had her turning pink and him feeling like an elephant in the room. She’d never, not once in the months to follow, crossed to the other side of the room tostand beside him . She hadn’t understood him, his restless energy, his occasional attempts at teasing her that only led to a doe-eyed confusion. But how easily she had melded into that woman-life that ran its own course during the day.
    She was a terrifying mystery causing him to feel that his wanting of her, his thinking of her during the day and wanting to reach for her every night, was some dark spot on her happiness. So he’d begun to make up excuses to be away, afraid of the overwhelming passion that was bursting inside him. Afraid he would somehow destroy her … and he had. He must have gotten her pregnant that first time. There had been little other opportunity.
    Sara had been his family’s choice of a wife, fitting so well in that life of Virginia plantation living, a place that left him feeling anchored, unchallenged, a square peg surrounded by round holes. And then she had died after a ghastly battle to birth his daughter. It was all a cloudy memory. But he would never forget her last words … her last word. Isabelle .
    He thought she meant to name the child Isabelle. So he had done so, not knowing what to do with the squalling infant. The way she moved in his trembling hands, the way she turned her head toward the sound of his voice and opened dark eyes, the way she looked at him like she had come from a place with all of the answers. As he held the newborn at arm’s length, his eyes blurred over, and he found himself shaking his