Fire Along the Sky
Page 211

“Good,” Lily said. “Then you can eat my portion as well as your own.”
“Blue-Jay looks contented,” Hannah said. “I think Teres will make him a good wife.”
“She'll make a better wife than a daughter-in-law, at least at first,” said Nathaniel.
They were sitting at Lake in the Clouds, close enough to the water to catch the cooling breeze from the waterfalls, but just out of the spray. Blue-Jay and Runs-from-Bears were in the water, and Many-Doves sat on a flat rock on the far side of the lake. Beside her was the young woman who had come with them from Canada, Blue-Jay's new wife, called Teres.
In many ways she was a younger version of Many-Doves; she had the same still beauty and serious way of looking at the world, but the similarities ended there. Teres was not so attached to the old ways as her mother-in-law, which delighted Annie and worried Runs-from-Bears.
“Ayuh,” said Nathaniel. “It will be a long winter up here on the mountain.” But there was more amusement in his expression than worry. Hannah supposed he was thinking of his own new son-in-law, and about Lily. Both families had adjustments to make.
“Everything's changing.” Hannah said it mostly to herself, but her father seemed to understand what she was unable to say more directly.
“That's the way of it,” he said. “You thinking of your little sister?”
“Of Lily, yes, and Blue-Jay, and the new baby coming, and Daniel.”
“Daniel will find his way, though it don't feel that way just now. And what of you?” Nathaniel asked, getting to the heart of it.
“I don't know.” She paused. “I don't know where I belong. How I fit in. It feels as though I've caught some kind of fever in the blood.”
“That's the war,” Nathaniel said. “Being caught up in it like you were. And it's Jennet.”
Jennet. Hannah drew in a hard breath and held it. Jennet, who was never very far from her thoughts, but whose name she could not say out of fear.
But there were other things that must be said, and if those words were to come to her, it could only be here, on this mountain where she was born and raised. They wouldn't be hurried, but that didn't matter: her father was a patient man and he would let his children lead their own lives.
His eyes were following an eagle circling overhead, but he was waiting for her, ready to listen, willing to understand.
She said, “I never read the letter that Manny wrote to me.”
He was waiting for the rest of it, and in the meantime there was nothing to read in the way he was looking at her. No disappointment, no expectations.
“Not so long ago it was all I could think about, but now—I don't want to know how he died.”
He rubbed a thumb along his jaw and then looked over his shoulder, toward the little graveyard where their people were buried.
“I always thought your grandfather would come back here to die,” he said. “To be buried next to her.” He looked into the shadows for a long moment, thinking of his mother, of the grandmother Hannah had loved so dearly and lost so young.
“But he never came. I expect he's gone now, but I don't know that for a fact. Sometimes I wake up at night wondering, and you know, daughter, I think maybe that's just what he wanted. He wanted me to think of him out there in the world someplace. It's a comfort to me, that much I got to admit. To think he might walk up the mountain some morning and be standing there when I wake up—if I live another fifty years, I'll still be wondering if maybe—” He paused. “If that's what he wanted, then it's the kind of gift a father can give to a son.”
“But not a husband to a wife,” Hannah completed for him. “I know Strikes-the-Sky is dead.”
“Do you?”
She flushed with sudden and unexpected agitation, feeling the color rising in her face. The things she wanted to say would sound childish and petulant, and so she made herself breathe in and out before she spoke.
“Yes. I know it in my heart. In my bones.”
“And if you're wrong?”
Hannah's head jerked up. “I'm not. I'm not wrong.”
“Late at night, you don't sit up sometimes, thinking maybe you heard his voice?”
She stiffened.
“I thought so.”
After a long time her father said, “Manny's been waiting for you to come find him, you know. He needs to tell you as much as you need to hear it.”
He started to get up, but Hannah held out a hand to stop him. She said, “Before he died, Liam said that Paradise would be too small for me. That I couldn't be content here, after . . . everything. I thought at first it was just his bitterness talking. He was bitter, Da, and with cause. But I can't forget what he said either.”
Her father was looking at her, hard. It was his turn to be unsettled, and Hannah felt some satisfaction and some embarrassment.
“Where is it you're thinking of going?” Nathaniel asked, his voice even and steady. As if they were talking about what to have for supper.
“Nowhere,” she said, more sharply than she intended. “There is nowhere I want to go.” What she meant to say, what she could not bring herself to say, was more complicated: she belonged nowhere else. There was no place for her to go.
“And you can't quite sit still either.”
“Yes,” she said on a sigh. “That's it.”
Her father said, “There was a letter from Ethan, come just before you got home.”