Queen of Swords
Page 35

“I’ve seen you before,” he said. “But I never made the connection. She was hiding here with the Savards the whole time, waiting for Scott.”
Hannah kept still.
He stopped. “And now they’re both under Livingston’s protection.”
She was braced for the next blow, curling around herself as she was hurled to the floor. With her head tucked in the kicks fell on her back and legs. There was a sound a rib made as it cracked, like a walnut shell stepped on by a heavy man’s boot.
This time he dragged her to the cot nearest the cold hearth. Near enough to grab a piece of wood, one she could use to cave in his head. But his grip on her right arm was crippling, and her left arm was still numb and useless.
Poiterin stood over her. “They aren’t looking for you,” he said. “Savard thinks you’re still at the Livingstons’, so there will be no rescue for you this night.”
Hannah heard herself cough. Pain flared in her ribs, along her spine, in her pelvis. She coughed again, and then she forced herself to look at Poiterin, who stood over her.
He said, “Say something or I’ll cut out your tongue.”
Hannah tasted blood as she tried to work her mouth. Her voice came finally, in a whisper. “What do you want?”
“What do you think I want?” He leaned over to speak into her face, his words sharp and wet. “What would any man want in my position? Satisfaction. Revenge. Vengeance. The slut made a fool of me in front of the whole city. In front of my grandmother. Someone must pay. You, I think.” He smiled and brushed Hannah’s hair away from her face. It took every bit of strength she had to allow his touch without stiffening or shuddering.
“Tomorrow,” he said, fisting his hand in her hair. “Tomorrow they will look at you and understand that it isn’t wise to cross me. A lesson Scott should have learned long ago.”
Hannah thought of Ben Savard, of his smile as he bent over her, the smell of him. The look in his eyes when he spoke of killing Poiterin, the plain fact of his intention, and the satisfaction it would afford. As Poiterin used his knife to cut her clothes from her body, as he ripped strips from her skirt and used them to tie her wrists to the frame of the cot, Hannah focused on that image of Ben Savard. A terrible sadness came over her, a sense of loss and her own stupidity.
Poiterin talked. Through the hours of the night, he spoke to her, sometimes in English, more often in French.
“I don’t intend to kill you,” he told her again and again in a conversational tone. There was a swipe of blood on his face, not his own.
“I want you to tell them about this. I want you to tell everybody.” And, breathing hard: “Of course, things get away from me sometimes.”
Sometimes her mind simply shut him out, refused to allow his words meaning beyond an inhuman hiss.
He seemed to be at ease, sure of himself, unworried about time or interruption. He would pace back and forth across the room, and in the light of the failing lantern Honoré Poiterin looked to Hannah like the devil the O’seronni priests talked about when they came to her grandmother’s village. Wild-haired, bloodied, ranting.
Sometimes he used his fists, and when he tired of that, he found other ways to amuse himself.
Hannah turned her mind inward and sang.
I am Walks-Ahead of the Wolf Clan of the Kahnyen’kehàka, the Keepers of the Eastern Door of the Haudenosaunee Nation. We are the People of the Longhouse.
I am the daughter of Sings-from-Books, whose voice I still hear. I am the granddaughter of Falling-Day, whose touch I still feel. I am the great-granddaughter of Made-of-Bones, who was clan mother of the Wolf for five hundred moons. I am the great-great-granddaughter of Hawk-Woman, who killed an O’seronni chief with her own hands and fed his heart to her sons, in the time when we were still many, and strong.
She sang her death song to herself, and when she paused, she heard her ancestors speaking back to her.
You are strong, Hawk-Woman told her. You are stronger than the O’seronni devil. And: You don’t belong here with us. Not yet. Not yet.
At first light Hannah opened her eyes and understood that she was still alive, and alone.
Time drifted. There were faces: her father, her grandfather, her grandmothers, her stepmother, beloved Curiosity, who might be waiting for her in the shadowlands.
Strikes-the-Sky came and sat beside her. There was white in his hair that hadn’t been there when she last saw him.
It’s not three years since you died, she said to him. Does time pass so quickly in the shadowlands?
He touched the jagged wound left in his throat by a Potawatomi arrow and frowned, as if she made too much of it; as if it were no more concern to him than a blackfly bite.
She said, It was an honorable death. She did not say: It was a quick death or It was an easy death. Both of those things were true, but they meant nothing to him. He had died in battle with the Potawatomi, men he had hoped to win over to Tecumseh’s cause. He had failed, and then he had died. As Tecumseh failed, in the end. As they had all failed.
He touched her forehead with two fingers. He said: It is not your time.
A river of pain coursed through her bones and forced her up out of her body. She looked down at herself, and saw a woman who had been beaten. Her face so swollen and washed in blood that her own father would not know her. Bruises on her throat, and the impression of teeth like a half-moon on the slope of her shoulder. More bite marks on her breasts. A circle of cut rope on each wrist, so sunken into the flesh that it couldn’t fall away. Blood in a pool under the skin over the left ribs, blood on her belly and on her legs, like a skirt of red feathers. A bruise in the exact shape of a boot on her thigh.