He watched, wrung with anguish, as a bit of blood formed on her parted lips.
God Almighty. The broken plea resounded inside him as he used the edge of his sleeve to dab the red away. Was she broken inside, in places he couldn’t see? He bent his head. The bold prayer was rusty. Desperate.
You raised the dead. Do it again.
Swiping the wetness from his eyes with a quick hand, he fought for his bearings. But the soreness was building. Unbearable. Unrelenting.
She moaned, eyes fluttering open and shut. More blood stained her lips. Moving her was chancy, but he couldn’t let her lie there . . . die there . . . atop a pile of rock. Gently, he gathered her up in his arms and held her, his back to the cave wall.
“Tempe . . . I need you.” The words came hard for one unused to tender things.
“Need . . . me?”
“Aye, here . . . beyond this cave. I—” He broke off, so full of feeling he was choked. “I’ve not yet told you—I want you with me—settled on a piece of land all our own . . .”
A fleeting smile, weak but full of wonder. “A dying man’s pretty words.”
“Nobody’s dying, least of all you.” He glanced at the torch, silently cursing Raven. “Pretty words, nay. More promise.”
“You’d best go, then . . . get help.”
“I’ll not leave you.”
“Then you’re more fool than I took you for.”
“Aye, a fool—over you.” The admission flowed out of him, relieving some of the pain and panic. “Ever since I first saw you along the river that day, I never could wash my mind of you. You’re a part of me, everything I do, everywhere I go.”
“Pretty words.”
“Promises.” He had to keep her talking. He’d seen dying men slip across some irretrievable boundary when they fell silent, never to return. “You know where I stand. I would know about you.”
Her head lay against his shoulder, her rent braid tearing at him in fresh ways. A thousand times he’d longed to sink his hands into that glory of hair, savor its silk and scent once he’d freed the leather tie.
“Sion . . . I’m . . . not the least . . . afraid to die.” The words came in breathless snatches, unwelcome and wrenching. She was thinking of James again, who was waiting for her in another world. A world that might well deny him.
Overcome, he let her be, a silent, open-eyed prayer of thanks overtaking him. No more blood spotted her lips. But he was far from easy. The light was nearly spent. He would not leave her. And Raven, their one hope of help, was long gone.
She came awake to a flickering light. The patter of rain nearly lulled her back to sleep, and then the sight of Sion’s head canted forward in that familiar way held her fast. He had his rifle across his knees and seemed sunk in reflection. The both of them were in another rock shelter, and every inch of her felt bruised and broken, every breath bringing a new ache. The pain ushered in what was best forgotten. A long, dark wait followed by a frantic flight out of the caves. Everything blurred after that. Her world had shrunk from vivid color to shades of gray. It was the emotion of the moment that spoke loudest.
Urgency. Tension. Danger.
She reached for the cup nearest her, fumbled then raised it to her lips, smelling and tasting brandy when what she craved was water. She set it down clumsily. Her slight movement caused Sion to turn. Relief flooded his face—and something akin to heartache.
“Tempe.” His tone, both tender and taut, shook her. He uncorked a canteen, lifted her head, and let a trickle of water slide down her parched throat.
“How long have I been out?”
He studied her in a way he rarely did. “A few hours. You haven’t been right since we brought you above ground.”
That she believed. Her head felt full of cobwebs. She recalled little of what had happened in the caves, just mud and darkness and panic. “Where are we?” She felt a burning need to know. Were they going a new direction?
“We’re headed east toward the settlements. You’re in need of a doctor.”
She almost smiled at the absurdity of such. “You think to find a doctor at Harrod’s or Boone’s?”
“I aim to, aye.”
He dosed her with more water and cocked an eyebrow when she said, “Best take me to Logan’s. It’s closer.”
“Logan’s—St. Asaph’s?”
She nodded. “But I’d rather see Boonesborough.”
He looked hard at her, again the most vulnerable she’d ever seen him. Did he sense what was couched in those words? The hunger for James? Barring that, the hunger for James’s kin? She thrust all thought of the past aside. How could she explain this insatiable need to reunite with James’s sisters, see his ma and Daniel himself? As if seeing them could somehow return James to her, or convince her he was gone for good and the past needed burying too.
Taking a breath, or trying to, she looked down the length of herself, clothed in garments that had been hidden in her saddlebags. She had on her marrying dress.
“Your clothes were ruined in the slide,” Sion said by way of explanation. “No sooner did Nate and Lucian haul us out of the caves than we crossed paths with another war party heading to the falls. There’s sign everywhere. We’ve been traveling by night in the other direction.”
They’d dosed her with brandy for most of it, enabling her to travel. The throbbing in her wrist was all too familiar. Splinted and bound with whang leather, her writing hand was swollen and nicked beyond recognition, a nail missing. For a moment she couldn’t feel her feet. Wiggling her toes assured her she had on clean stockings and new moccasins. She wouldn’t ask who had done the honors of cleaning and dressing her. Some matters were best left dangling.
She felt humbled. Gone over. Grateful.
“Your wrist is busted. I figured you were the same inside, as you were bleeding from the mouth right after the slide.” He took a drink from the canteen. “But you’d only bit your tongue.”
He set his jaw as if he would say more but couldn’t. She saw stark worry flood his features. Anguish even. The mask was off. This was the true Sion. “Your leg is the worst of it.”
“My leg?”
“You’ve got a gash that needs looking after.”
She reached a hand to feel her left thigh swollen with linen wrapping. It formed a slight bulge beneath her petticoat. Strangely, it didn’t pain her. “You’ve been carrying me atop your horse.”
“You’re not fit to ride solo. I’m thinking of making a sling, a litter between two horses, for you to ride on.”
“That’ll just slow us. You coddle me and I’ll not be worth a continental.” The firm words shot down the notion. “We’ve been moving fast. Where’s the equipment?”
“Stashed in a cave.”
“Nate and the others?”
“Readying the horses to ride again.” He put the canteen away. “The moon’s full. We might make the middle ground before another day’s gone if the forts aren’t still besieged.”
In that case they’d have to turn aside, take another way. She didn’t dare dwell on this. The thought of riding right into the thick of bullet lead and smoke had the appeal of caves and mudslides.
The question that had dogged her since they’d gone underground could no longer be silenced. “What’s become of Raven?”
He hesitated. “I can’t answer that, Tempe.”
Nay, he couldn’t answer, but he’d obviously given it much thought.
He released a taut breath. “I suspect he joined a war party. He’s a formidable foe.”
She felt a crushing remorse. “I was wrong to ask him to scout.”
“Misguided, mayhap. Raven’s an able guide with questionable loyalties. I hardly blame him—or you. There’s plenty of shifting sides with the war on.”
“I thought—since I helped save his life—he’d be beholden enough to help us till the end.” Such a hope seemed hopelessly naïve in hindsight. At Sion’s querying look she continued. “I sprang him from a man-hold trap last spring. If
I hadn’t, he might have died . . .”
“Let it go, Tempe.” The forthright words put an end to the matter.
Hascal brought Beck around, and Sion began gathering up their belongings. Tempe spied her book of Psalms lying open atop Herrick’s poems. All the cobwebs left her head. “You’ve been reading to me. I thought I was dreaming.”
He grinned. “What else was I supposed to do all the livelong day? Watch you sleep?”
The shadows about his eyes spoke of too much watching and too little rest. He tossed a saddlebag to Lucian, then bent and picked her up.
Despite his gentleness, she gritted her teeth. Without her asking, Lucian brought more brandy. She took two swallows unwillingly as Nate and Cornelius and the chain carriers looked at her apprehensively from atop their mounts. She was hurt worse than she realized. She could see it in their faces. Nate even had an odd sheen about his eyes—further confirmation.
Once she settled in the saddle she wasn’t sure she could reach a fort, feeling swimmy headed and ailing. But Sion’s arms went round her and she curled into him as best she could, his familiar bulk a blessed solace.
Sion knew the forts along the frontier’s westernmost border like he knew his own name. Martin’s Station. Blackmore. Glade Hollow. Elk Garden. Maiden Springs. But the Kentucke settlements were an altogether different matter. All the way along Otter Creek then halfway up the ridge to the south of Boone’s Fort, Sion expected to find a sea of smoking rubble. Sign was everywhere, yet they’d not come across a single Indian. Heavily wooded, almost vertical in places, the climb was devilish rough, the gnats thick, the danger high. Every rod or so he and Lucian stopped to listen.
Early morn, the dew was heavy, wetting their moccasins. The land bore the overripe scent of late summer, the air shimmering like a cast-iron skillet. Sion longed for late autumn. The first frost.
The crest of the ridge was their reward. The rising sun poured pure gold into the chasm between bluff and outpost. He narrowed his gaze to take in the scene some four hundred yards distant, hardly trusting his vision.
There, sitting on the south bank of the Chenoa River, was a sight for sore eyes. Four blockhouses with projecting second stories rose up, each made of round sugar-tree logs. Two gates were shut, the main north facing. Outside the fort were a small collection of cabins. Inside the pickets stood an impressive line of log structures, twenty-six by his count, their roofs sloped inward. The back of the fort ran parallel to the river.
Above the rugged slope of the riverbank were two springs and what looked to be a salt lick. An enormous elm shaded one side of the fort, its leafy richness a pleasing contrast to an abundance of ugly stumps. His eyes roamed, making judgments and calculations.
The fort looked too near the river and prone to flooding. No provision for water in times of siege had been made, as the springs were too far. The treed ridge to the west was fine cover for Indians firing directly into the fort. But it was a comely spot nonetheless. It bespoke ingenuity and endurance. Humble welcome.
At the foot of the hill along a small branch was a fine place for a gristmill. His mouth watered at the thought. Their cornmeal had run out long ago. He blinked. Inhaled. The river breeze carried the scent of roasting ears and cornbread. Was he delirious?
A hasty glance told him Lucian was just as dazzled. Sion even heard his stomach rumble. And then Lucian’s silent chuckle gave way to a broad belly laugh of delight, his dark face shining.
“Makes me feel like one o’ them Israelites finally gettin’ some manna in the wilderness.”
Sion’s need to have Tempe near was keen. He’d left Nate to look after her once he’d secured her in a little cove near a spring. She’d bid him a calm, clear-eyed goodbye, not giving in to the pain that beset her, but it did little to blunt his rising worry. Her leg needed care he couldn’t give her, and that was why he was perched on this ridge, measuring their odds of traversing that muddy river to safety. Her heart needed some answers, and that was why he looked down on Boone’s Fort and not Logan’s. She needed to see Boonesborough, and he needed her to see it, though he wasn’t sure just why.
He expelled a tense breath, his gaze never settling. The stump-littered clearing above the bank, absent of all foliage, was an antidote to ambush yet exposed any friendly approach just the same.
Impatience told him to venture in, but long experience urged restraint. They waited atop an outcropping of rock amid dense hazel till the fort’s gates finally swung open, and a group of women came out to milk the cows clustered near the pickets. A party of armed men accompanied them, some continuing on to the springs. All seemed calm. Tranquil, even.
There would be milk. Cheese. Beef. Sion’s stomach cramped. Boone’s Fort would be home for a time. While Tempe healed he could act as scout if they needed an extra hand. The opportunities unfurled like a Patriot flag, full of promise. He’d pay his party in land, send Cornelius upriver to Fort Pitt and overland to Philadelphia, and wed Tempe if they could find a preacher or justice of the peace. The latter turned him weak-kneed. He spied watermelons in a garden patch just east of the fort, big as powder kegs. What a wedding feast they would have, even among strangers. Mayhap some fiddling and dancing. But for Tempe’s leg . . .
Hope and haste got the best of him.
“Let’s go in,” he told Lucian at last.
26
We shall lay up provisions for a siege. We are all in fine spirits, and have good crops growing, and intend to fight hard in order to secure them.
—DANIEL BOONE
Tempe expected something grand, a good quarter-mile of stout pickets linked by bulwarks of blockhouses, not this beleaguered structure susceptible to the first assault. Her disappointment ran deep. But even a pitiful outpost such as this was better than a worn saddle.
Blackened cornfields to the west told of a recent attack and promised little meal to grind. Yet she couldn’t rid her mind of the notion of thick wedges of hot cornbread slathered with butter. Turnips and potatoes. Maybe a melon or two.
She kept this in mind as they crossed the Chenoa River, the horses adjusting easily to the sluggish current. The muddy water made her wrinkle her nose, but it was blessedly cool, the far bank holding the promise of safety. Healing. A full belly.
The sodden horses scrambled up the shore and picked their way over unfamiliar ground, bypassing stumps and grass burnt umber by the sun. Sion led, arms round her as he held the reins. She could hear the creak of leather thongs as the fort’s front gate slowly opened.
A cow mooed dolefully, and then the fort’s dogs began barking, the boldest curs rushing toward them and turning Cornelius’s high-strung horse more dauncy. Seeing neatly clothed women in bonnets and aprons waiting just inside the safety of the enclosure—and staring—lent to Tempe’s loose ends. Clad in a marrying dress now begrimed with a sodden hem, shorn of half her hair, she lowered her lashes.
Sion had taken a knife and slashed off her remaining braid, what little the rock hadn’t severed. Now her hair hung to mid-back, hardly the lush waterfall to her hips of before. But any embarrassment was short-lived. One of the men who greeted them had a pegged head, evidence of a survived scalping. A shiver ran through her at the sight of all that puckered skin about his ears and forehead. The startling pate was bare and round as an egg.
Sion dismounted. Mute, Tempe sat on his horse as introductions were made and he shook hands with men she’d heard about but never seen. Richard Callaway. William Hays. Flanders Callaway. David Gass. Their women stood behind them, sober faced, taking her measure. Her leg was aching, the linen bandage in need of changing.
The bonnet-clad bunch was dominated by a tall young woman, babe in arms, two little girls hanging on her skirts. Tempe softened at the sight of them, reminded of James’s sisters. But not one Boone did she see as her gaze scoured all present. What she’d give to meet Susannah and Jemima, Lavina and Becky. But would she even recognize them? The passage of time and all the changes it wrought stole away her gladness.
&n
bsp; “I’m hoping for a doctor,” Sion was saying quietly, sparing Tempe further unease by being terse.
“No doctor hereabouts,” the elder Callaway said matter-of-factly. “This your wife?”
“Nay, Miss Tucker lives down along the Shawnee River. Her family inn-keeps there.”
Gass flashed a yellow-toothed smile. “The Moonbow?”
“Aye,” Sion answered for her. “I aim to return her there as soon as she can travel.”
Her heart squeezed at the finality of his words. So they’d part company at the inn. Try as she might, she still couldn’t recall their tense exchange in the caves. Wouldn’t she remember if it had been heartfelt? All that filled her mind was the horror of finding Raven gone and the ensuing deluge of rock and mud. The heavy stench of it still seemed to cling to her. She longed for a good soaking, but she doubted a decent tub could be found in so sparse a fort.
Hays looked at Sion’s party with an appraising eye. “We’re in need of a few more guns. Since the June siege we’ve been worn down to a nub.”
The young woman in back of him spoke softly but distinctly. “I’ll see to Miss Tucker.” At that she passed the baby to the wrinkled woman beside her and shook the least ones from her skirts. Sion moved to help Tempe down. She swayed a bit, not trusting her leg, and clung to him longer than she should have.
“Nothin’ but a hussy,” came an overloud womanly whisper.
Stung, Tempe looked to the ground, mortification giving way to understanding. What else were they to think of an unwed woman among so many men? Hadn’t she cautioned Pa about the very same?
The tall young woman turned on the whisperer. “What does it matter how she’s come here in the midst of so much wilderness, being in such obvious distress?”
Reaching out a welcoming hand, Tempe’s protector drew her farther into the fort’s dusty common. “We’ll leave the men to their talk.” Her chin nearly touched her chest as she looked down the length of Tempe’s dress. “There’s blood on your skirt.”
Tempe flushed, beads of perspiration dotting her upper lip. “It’s not what you’re thinking.” That had been hard enough to manage on the trail with so many men and so many miles. “It’s my leg.”