Free Choices of the Heart by Laurie Alice Eakes

touched.
    For a moment, Griff’s blood raced with the potential challenge of simply taking Miss Esther Cherrett’s hand without her flinching away from his nearness. At once he dismissed it as improper, unworthy of the kind of man Momma wanted him to be, unworthy of the vow he had taken to preserve or restore peace at any cost between the families on the ridge.
    Annoying things were vows. When a body made them, he didn’t know the cost they would demand.

7
    If nighttime had not been so close, Esther pondered after two more days of riding and sleeping on the ground, she would have turned her horse east, north, south, anywhere but a continuing trek west. West and up. And up. She kept glancing back toward the east, where the land lay in darkness and the wind through the trees sounded like the sea.
    She ached for the sea, the sharp tang of salt spray, the cleanness of the air. There in the mountain forests, she smelled nothing but leaf mold, damp earth, and the occasional whiff of pine. Not to mention her own reek of wood smoke, horses, and, horrifyingly, perspiration. She wanted a bath, a swim, a bar of her fragrant soap applied more lavishly than quick splashes while bent over a stream allowed. Clear, sweet-water streams, but cold and shallow streams nonetheless.
    More than bathing, more than clean clothes, more than a day spent off a jouncing horse, she ached for her feather bed and lavender-scented sheets, a variety of food, and, most of all, peace.
    “What have I done?” she asked the space between the mare’s pointed ears. “What have I done?”
    She had asked the question a few times after learning of a conflict between the families. But now that she had met Bethann and Griff, had been told that she could be responsible for someone’s death if she said the wrong thing to the wrong person, all Esther wanted to do was run back to the shelter of Seabourne, home, Momma, and Papa. Except she wanted that home to be the one she’d enjoyed before she had gone to the Oglevies’ house when Papa had said to wait for Momma.
    She longed for the impossible.
    So she remained facing west, perhaps a little south, and always climbing through lush, green forests and past racing streams. Then they reached a river that shimmered and sparkled in the last rays of the sun as though the stars had come out early and drowned themselves in the racing current.
    Esther stared at the current, blinked, stared again. “It’s flowing north. I thought rivers flowed south.”
    “This is the New River.” Zach walked his horse back to Esther’s. “It flows north to the Kanawha River.”
    “So does the Shenandoah,” Hannah added. “Not to the Ohio, but it goes north.”
    “I didn’t realize.” Esther ran through all she had learned about geography. She could tell someone how to find Saint Petersburg in Russia but hadn’t known about a river in the commonwealth of Virginia.
    A fine teacher she would make for children growing up in these mountains.
    “Do you live by this river?” was all she could think to ask.
    “Another five miles away or so.” Zach’s face shone as bright as his hair. “My family operates a ferry. Has for fifty years.”
    “And the ridge is named for us.” Hannah’s voice rang with pride.
    On his mount a dozen yards behind them, Griff said nothing and made no move to ride closer. A shadow on the path farther back suggested Bethann did indeed follow them and Griff remained in the rear to watch over her.
    “Our father’s people were here first,” Zach explained.
    He already had said so along the way. His mother and Griff’s mother were sisters whose families had resided in the mountains since the Revolution. The Tollivers were relative newcomers, having only been in Virginia’s mountains for the past forty years or so. “They’ve been in America forever, though,” Hannah had admitted reluctantly. “Maybe lived around your people once.”
    “I don’t know the name.” Esther would have remembered any