Dawn on a Distant Shore
Page 25

"Your father and grandfather will be home safe in another month," Liam said. He sat on an upturned bucket, his face hatcheted with shadow.
"Yes," Hannah said. She swallowed hard to banish the tears that swelled without warning.
"You're going with her." Liam pulled his hat from his head to examine the inside of it, as if the worn crown might tell him what he wanted to hear.
She nodded. "If she'll let me."
He laughed a little. "You'll talk her into it. You've been wanting to go off ever since the summer."
Last summer. She had been desperate with worry through those long weeks when her father and Elizabeth had been gone, on the run through the endless forests. Liam had still been living with his brother then, but he had always seemed to show up when she needed to talk. Now she barely knew what to say to him. If it was in her power she would leave him behind and go north with Elizabeth and Runs-from-Bears and Curiosity. He would stay here and split kindling and carry wood and water, clean possum and skin deer, lay traps. He would be more alone than she had been in the summer. She had had her grandmother and aunt and uncles.
"You will like Otter when you get to know him," Hannah said. "He knows all the secret places on the mountain. He'll show them to you."
"Will he?" Liam's voice was hoarse.
"You are one of us now. He will show you."
"I've been thinking." He never raised his eyes to her. "Maybe I should go stay with the McGarritys until you get back. The two women can manage with your uncle here."
"No," Hannah said, more forcefully than she meant to. "Don't do that. You belong here."
"So do you."
She blinked. "She'll need help with my sister and brother--"
His shoulders slumped in defeat. He nodded.
"You'll stay?"
Liam would not meet her eye. "I'll be the only white on Hidden Wolf when you go."
It was like snow on the back of her neck; the chill ran down her spine to settle in her gut. She must have made some sound. His head came up and he studied her with eyes the blue of winter ice.
"I am not white."
"To me you are," he said.
The world blurred, the red-gold of Liam's hair and the bright metal of the traps hung on the wall colliding in a rusty rainbow. Hannah pressed her hands to her eyes to stop it, to take away the look on his face. He thought he had paid her a compliment. I am the daughter of Sings-from-Books of the Kahnyen'kehâka people, she thought to say. I am the granddaughter of Falling-Day, great-granddaughter of Made-of-Bones, great-great-granddaughter of Hawk-Woman, who killed an O'seronni chief with her own hands and fed his heart to her sons. These names ran like a river through her veins, but they meant nothing to Liam. They were not the names of white women. She opened her mouth to say it again--I am not white--but at her shoulder was another grandmother. Cora Bonner, who had come here to the edge of the endless forests from across an ocean Hannah had never even seen. Granny Cora, with her fair skin and eyes of indigo blue and her gentle smile that hid a will as hard as flint. From her Scots grandmother Hannah had gifts she could not deny: a love of song, an appetite for words on the page, a talent for languages, the desire to roam. I am not white: it was only one part of the truth.
He was looking at her as he did sometimes, as Bears looked at Many-Doves or her father at Elizabeth. It was something she did not understand completely, and so she put it away, a kind of magic to be kept for later when she was older, woman enough to understand what it meant and strong enough to know what to do with it.
"Hannah!"
She paused at the door with her back to him.
"I'll stay if you want me to."
All her words had deserted her, and so she left him there in a pool of cold winter sunshine.
In the night, Runs-from-Bears came to Many-Doves. The sound of his step on the floorboards brought Elizabeth out of a light sleep. On the other side of the wall she heard Doves murmur in welcome. There were small creakings and sighs and a low laugh, suddenly hushed.
She would have gone outside, despite the cold and the late hour, but it would mean walking past them. Elizabeth rolled onto her side and buried her head in the covers, trying to banish the images that came to mind. She called up a different picture, one she had been pushing aside all day: Nathaniel in a gaol cell. It would not be the first time she had visited such a place. Her brother Julian had spent three months in the London debtors' prison before Aunt Merriweather had paid his bills and seen him clear to get on the boat to New-York. He had left England only reluctantly. So much effort put into giving him a new start, and it had come to nothing. Julian was dead.
But Nathaniel was alive. Elizabeth wondered if they had blankets and a fire and decent food, if they were chained. Her breath caught hard at this thought. Nathaniel teased her about breaking Hawkeye out of gaol, but it was ridiculous to compare a pantry in the trading post secured with nothing more than a rusty lock to the military garrison in Montréal. She must trust that Will could speak persuasively for them, and if he could not, that he would know better than she how to effectively use the gold to bribe the right men. Together with Falling-Day she had sewed two hundred gold coins into sacks that could be worn next to the skin. She and Bears would carry it, but once in Montréal she would hand it over to Will Spencer if he had need of it.
But if Will should fail ... It was a phrase that ran through her mind like a dirge. If Will should fail; if Somerville were intent on hanging these men he must see as nothing more than backwoodsmen, troublemakers, wayward colonists. Americans.