Free Lori Benton by Burning Sky

against the door frame. Willa heard his scrabbling and turned, face drawn with surprise. The Indian looked startled, too, as Neil staggered from the dark—startled but immovable, planted in the doorway like a great oak tree.
    He would fell him, then. Crash him over. Topple him out of the cabin.
    He lunged, but before he could make contact, the Indian tree uprooted itself, stepped nimbly aside, and Neil went through the door instead. Darkness and the porch floor rushed to meet him.

S EVEN
    Concern for Neil MacGregor, fallen across the threshold of her cabin, urged her to move, but she could not move. She could not look away from the other man in her doorway.
    “Tames-His-Horse,” she said, as though speaking his name would render him more substantial than a tall, deep-chested ghost that might vanish with her next exhalation. She breathed, and still he stood there, rifle slung at his shoulder, solid and real as her beating heart. His face, bronzed in the cabin’s firelight, was leaner than she remembered—a warrior’s face, chiseled and stern.
    “
Sekoh
, my sister,” he said. “But in this place, better to call me Joseph.”
    His voice washed over her, deep like the beating of drums at the fire, summoning a thousand memories to make war in her heart. He’d taken the name of Joseph in the lands south and west of the Mohawk River, where he’d gone as a youth to acquaint himself with his father’s people, the
Onyota’a:ka
—Oneida—only to return to his mother’s Mohawk kin in Canada with the white man’s writing words in his head and the Christian God’s Son, Jesus, in his heart.
    Words crowded now behind Willa’s teeth, but they could not speak like this, with Neil MacGregor lying prostrate between them. She knelt to touch his face. He moaned but did not rouse. She raised her face to Joseph. “Will you help me? He is ill. We will have to carry him.”
    Joseph set down his rifle and squatted in the doorway, hair spilling shiny black over his shoulders. He was dressed much as she last saw him—many seasons ago, when he rode away to fight for the British in their war—in blue linen shirt and deerskin breechcloth, leggings tied with beaded cloth strips, tomahawk and knife thrust through a sash. The difference was his hair. Last time she saw him, it had been plucked into awarrior’s scalp-lock, tied with hawk feathers. Now his hair fell long and full, though there were still feathers tied in back. She reached across Neil MacGregor and gently grasped a lock.
    “This is good to see.”
    His face lifted. Firelight reflected off the jutting planes of his cheekbones and jaw. His eyes locked with hers. Though she knew it was to neither of their good, she could not help searching them for that secret fire he’d carried for her, despite its impossibility, despite her efforts to quench it, certain it must have turned to ash like the rest of her Mohawk past.
    But no. There on the cabin porch, Joseph Tames-His-Horse opened his soul to her. He still burned.
    She let go of his hair.
    “It is two years since I left the warpath,” he said.
    What, she wanted to ask, had he done in that time? Where had he been doing it? Why had he not returned to their village?
    She said none of these things as he pulled Neil MacGregor upright, got a shoulder into his chest and, hoisting him like a grain sack, carried him into the cabin.

    Kneeling in the dark beside Neil’s pallet—Joseph smelling of balsam fir and the smoke of fires, and the clean musky scent that was his own—she wanted to lean into Joseph’s chest, feel his arms enfold her, but resisted the need.
    Her words were barely audible. “How did you find me?”
    He spoke softly too. “I saw the trail sign you left. It was not hard to guess where you were bound. Not Niagara.”
    Niagara, the fort in the west by the Great Falling Water, where so many had fled to shelter under the clipped wings of the British who led them to ruin in the war that shattered the Longhouse