Free The Pelican Bride by Beth White

his profile clean and strong. It was the custom of the Mobile clan for the men to pluck their beards, so his angular chin always seemed to jut cruelly.
    She searched herself for pride in his strength. All she felt was a knot in her stomach.
    He found what he was looking for and tossed the bag aside, then rose with a fluid movement. In his fist was some kind of dead animal.
    She blinked. Not an animal. A clutch of human scalps. She looked up at Mitannu. The practice of scalp hunting was not unheard-of, though their clan did not often resort to it. The Mobile were a generally agrarian band, far enough south that the more warlike northern clans left them alone.
    Mitannu shook the scalps at her like a dog with a bone. “For these, the French will pay in powder—great amounts of powder— ammunition for hunting.” He gave her a slow grin. “Do you recognize the beading and feathers?”
    Horror-stricken, she couldn’t look away. Her head moved back and forth in negation, but of course she recognized the dressing of those hair locks.
    Alabaman. Kaskaskian.

    Tristan had managed to avoid Geneviève Gaillain for nearly a week, but it was time to return home. He had traded furs, hides, and corn for forged items like hooks, hinges, and knives; and he was bringing home a set of finely constructed cabinets, as well asa table and four chairs the town carpenter had made from timber harvested from his plantation. He had been up since sunrise, loading the barque for the trip downstream. Her shallow hold was full of the provisions he had purchased at Massacre Island, and the new acquisitions from Fort Louis had been crammed into the cabin topside. Fortunately, slipping downstream would take half the time it had required to struggle twenty-seven miles up from the mouth of the bay.
    He dumped the last case of farm implements onto the rear deck and paused to wipe his sweaty chest with the shirt he had stripped off a couple of hours ago and left hanging in the cabin window like a flag of surrender to the heat. As he surveyed the crowded deck, his thoughts wheeled in self-disgust. Why had he blurted out that ridiculous request for homemade bread? Where in the name of King Louis’s mistress was he going to put it? If he had kept the flour, he could have lived on it for months; as it was, he would be forced to store a quite unnecessary number of French loaves, which would undoubtedly spoil before it could all be eaten.
    Perhaps he could give some of it to his Indian neighbors at the Mobile village, but they were going to think he had lost his mind. Or, worse, that he was trying to buy them off for some nefarious reason. He only prayed they wouldn’t see through his thin excuses to the truth.
    The Frenchwoman had bewitched him.
    No, he hastened to correct himself, the truth was that he had felt sorry for her. Sorry that she was going to have to marry one of the profane, woman-starved young cocked-hats that passed for soldiers here in Bienville’s soggy little outpost. Sorry that some tragedy had brought her across an ocean to this alien world.
    He spread his feet for balance and looked up at the top of the bluff, where the fort’s timbered bastions marched on either side of the gate, its fleur-de-lis stirring in a desultory breeze. The whole fort was succumbing to rot, not two years after the raw timbers hadbeen seated into place. Mildew claimed the outer face of every wall, and every board was spongy to the touch. July had been mercifully dry, at least for the three weeks in the middle of the month, but August promised to lay a pall of heat, moisture, and mosquitoes.
    I tried to tell him.
    But Bienville never listened to anything he didn’t want to hear. He would simply thunder his arguments at greater volume until one had to give up or go deaf.
    Desiring to present his best work, Tristan had first shown his initial drawings—carefully executed maps of the Alabama river system—to La Salle. Seated at a drafting table in his warehouse