Eileen Charbonneau

I'm grateful to Diane Crawford, Turtle Woman, my first reader and little big sister, who keeps me on track always, and Charlie Rinehimer, who first got me thinking, like Rachel, in the rhythm of the waves.

Father Paul Healy was invaluable in sharing his passion for the Irish people, his knowledge of An Gorta Mor, and providing research books not available in this country. Does that make you a smuggler on top of all your other sins, Father? I think some of your humor slipped into Dare, too.

Thanks to Marv Ross, for writing the rousing musical Voices from the Oregon Trail, companion when my own traveling was hard to bear. And thanks to the troop that performed it: Lex Browning, Mick Doherty, Ron Nagy, Gayle Neumann, Phil Neumann, Skip Parente, Rindy Ross, Cal Scott, Dan Stueber, Don Alder, Bryson Liberty, Mary Marsh, and Scott Parker.

Thanks once again to fellow Blue Ridge Writers Jim Green, Jean Gold, Florence Kay, Barbara Ward Lazarsky, Robin O'Brien, Dolores Oiler, Margie Rhoadhouse, Patricia Rodgers, Susan Shackelford, Laurie Maxwell Tenney, and Alice Thuermer. I treasure our camaraderie and friendship, even now, across the miles. And thanks to my new writing friends, the Hudson Valley RWA women, who provided much help and encouragement: Terri Hall, Kathy Attalla, Renee Simons, Karen Drogin, Claire Ruane, Bette LaGow, Blair Lavey, Liz Matis, Jeannie Miraglia, Janet Walters, Paula Keller, Elaine Lindenblatt, Grace Bizzarro, Georgia Carey, Nancy Hajeski, Karen Larsen, Helen Grishman, Jennifer Probst, Mildred Lubke, Sunny Hogg.

I also received great bolstering from my fellow Loop Women: Deborah Barnhart, Kathy Caskie, Cindy Haack, Mary Jo Putney, and my dear Celtic sister Susan King. All had their own projects going, but had time to listen to my latest dilemma or disaster and offer words of love and encouragement, and, from Susan: plotting!

Thanks as always to Scott Meyer and his wonderful family and staff at Merritt Books.

Finally, thanks to Juilene Osborne McKnight, anam cara and Native American Celt, who taught me by way of her twin passions that a novel of contrasting cultures would turn out to be one of astonishing similarities because mitakuye oyasin—we are all related.

Nanih Waiya, Mississippi

The Choctaw Nation

October, 1832

prologue

Nanih Waiya, Mississippi October, 1832

Rachel's mother wrapped tiny Sleeps Sound close against her heart. She took Rachel's hand and walked, tall and beautiful, to the white elm tree nearest their cabin door. Rachel's parents had planted the elm when Atoka was born. It was now finely made, like her brother Atoka, lifting its branches like a fountain from the ground, its leaves reaching for the warm October sky. Atoka's afterbirth had been its first nourishment, as Rachel's was for the oak planted five years later.

Rachel's tree was in the shadow of her grandmother's white oak, and was the oak's child. The counselor oak told the Choctaw the place to build their homes. Its roots went deep in rich soil. Its wood was both strong and beautiful. Someday Rachel's small tree would be wise. She would advise the time to plant corn—when her new pink and silver leaves are the size of the mouse's ear. But who would hear the wisdom?

Another of the grandmother tree's children now grew from Sleeps Sound's birth gift. Rachel worried about her new sister'sseedling. Once they set off on their journey, the Americans would take over the lands and cabins of the Choctaw. Rachel knew enough of Americans to be afraid for Sleeps Sound's tree. She wanted to cry for it, and to cry for her sister, who would not remember the ancestral home of the people except in her deep dreaming.

Rachel was named LeMoyne from her father's French ancestor, Rachel by way of the missionary teachers who baptized her a Christian. But she'd also earned her first Choctaw name, Yalabusha—Tadpole—for her swimming prowess. Some had begun to call her Gathers Stories, too, for the way she listened to the old ones. She would tell her sister of this day, of their mother leading the women in this new ceremony, born of their circumstances. She must heed every detail, every sound and smell. What was the bird called, who flew down the branches of Atoka's elm? A shy, tufted titmouse, offering a lament. The song stopped suddenly. Then all was silent, even the season-change cold wind.

Her mother stroked the leaves of Atoka's elm against her face. Jagged dancing leaf, spiraling out, in an off-center swagger, like her brother's stride after slipping off his horse. The leaf was rough to her mother's touch, and still dark-blue green. Green, like Atoka in his ten summers of life. Her mother moved on to the oaks. She took their sunset-colored leaves between her hands, to her cheek—both the bright, touched-by-sun sides, and the pale underbellies. She bent a branch of the grandmother tree down to Rachel.Rachel took a red leaf between her fingers. Thank you for the shade, and the welcome into your limbs, and the seed pockets that Atoka and I made into whirl toys and nose ornaments. Rachel let the thoughts flow through her fingertips to the oak's understanding. In return she felt the tree's strength, and sorrow at parting. Felt its blood singing another lament.

Her mother took her hand, led on. The women followed Elizabeth LeMoyne, honoring their trees in farewell, proceeding to the next homestead, and the next, stroking the leaves. Some wept silently. None of the children, who ranged in age from elevenyears to Turtle Woman's six-day child, were afraid of their mothers' wet cheeks, Rachel thought.

Finally, down the road from Makes Sweet Cider's cabin, the federal soldiers waited, their blue uniforms striking against the gray sky. This journey would not become the horror that last year's group faced, their leader, Captain Armstrong, promised. Peter LeMoyne's clear voice translated the captain's English into Choctaw. Atoka sat tall on his mount Likes Water, beside their father on Two Hearts. Her brother's eyes were angry and cold until they found hers. They lit with a gruff tenderness then—for her, their mother, the baby. We honor you, they said. Carry the seeds in your pouches. We will bring you to the new land. We will live again.

Surely the vicious snowstorms and cold of last year were unusual, unpredictable. This year's band was departing earlier. The steamships would be waiting at Natchez to carry them up the Mississippi and its tributaries. From Little Rock they would walk to their new land. Last year hundreds had starved when heavy rains washed out roads and trails, slowing them to fifteen miles a day. Not this year, Captain Armstrong proclaimed. This year President Jackson had put the army in charge.

Worry strained Rachel's father's clear, beautiful voice. He was a Mixed Blood, trusted like the ones who'd gone to Washington. Peter LeMoyne had not gone, had not signed his name to the agreement, but looked after his family and all the ones left behind. He'd met Andrew Jackson once, though, on Choctaw land. He had seen the American leader lose control of his temper. Old Hickory disliked asking for anything, her father had said. He preferred to threaten. There were only two choices, Andrew Jackson said, for the people standing in the way of progress: emigration or extinction. And now this man who had turned on his wartime allies, the Creek, was President of the United States. It was time to think about the new country, even Peter LeMoyne advised.

Still, when the men returned from Washington and told him of the agreement, he had walked out to their woodpile alone.

Rachel followed. It was the only time she had seen her father weep. Now his eyes scanned small wagons loaded with provisions for six thousand. How many blankets, how much food, would it be enough? Rachel almost heard his thoughts.

The other leaders and their horses were dressed in their finery, gifts of the Americans. As if this were festival time, or a celebration, not an exile. Peter LeMoyne wore his red wedding-day shirt and buckskin trousers. No decorations, only that symbol of his love for their mother. And his worry.

Rachel wanted to climb on Two Hearts with him, and mold his face free of troubles. She wanted to be a peacemaker, trusted speaker among the missionaries and the soldiers, like him, there in the new land. And she wanted to do the dances and ceremonies, like her mother.

At the school, the missionaries said she could not do both, that she must choose. They had shown Rachel a globe of the world, and the place from where the English language had come. It was a small place, surrounded by blue. An island. But those who spoke the language of these islanders had power over all the world, and over the greatest parts of its wisdom and knowledge. The missionaries said the only way for the Choctaw people to become happy and respected was through this people's language, its ways, its great God who said that men should do women's work in the fields and women stay inside a house the day long. When she'd asked her father about these things, he'd smiled and said, "Know them, Tadpole, but swim as you're guided by your own heart."

He would teach her how to find the things that made the Choctaw kin to the white people who also dwelled in her blood—not only her Frenchman grandfather, the one who drew wonderful likenesses of the Old Ones, but the English speakers too, the Americans. The Americans did not visit or trap only. They did not become Choctaw, as her French ancestor had. They wanted to live, not beside them but instead of them. They called Choctaw land the Southern Frontier and came with their black men slaves. They wished to work the land for cotton instead of the Three Sisters—corn and beans and squash. And for tobacco.

Cotton was for clothing, tobacco for ceremonies. What would they eat, these new, foolish people, Rachel wondered, without the Three Sisters?

Rachel turned toward the horse soldiers. Some had eyes that reflected the sky, like Atoka's gift from their Frenchman grandfather. Nothing else about the soldiers was like her brother. They were not a dark and shining people, but whey-faced light and hairy. One, with yellow hair that sprouted all the way to his chin, pointed rudely at her mother. Why? Was he laughing at her ceremony, her grief? His eyes were greedy. Rachel didn't understand what he wanted, but she knew it was something bad. The soldier beside him pushed his shoulder. Rachel knew English almost as well as Choctaw, she was her father's "quick study." But these soldiers spoke the language in a different accent. They were from another English place, far from Mississippi, perhaps. A hard place, she decided, for they ground their R's like corn through a mill. Rachel could not understand all their words.

Suddenly, from out of the small grove of pine by Makes Sweet Cider's cabin, an old man stumbled. His clothes were ragged, his eyes hollow with grief. He spread his hands wide as he chanted.

My voice is weak.

It is not the shout of a warrior

but the wail of an infant.

I have lost it in mourning

over the misfortunes of my people.

These are their graves,

and in those aged pines

you hear the ghosts of the departed.

Their ashes are here,

and we have been left to protect them.

Shall we give you their bones

for the wolves?

Chief Cobb. Rachel barely recognized him. Atoka slipped down from his saddle and approached their elder. Her father spoke to the soldiers in English. Yellow Hair did not listen. He

shouted at her brother, barking orders in too-fast English. Atoka ignored his threats and calmly took the old man's arm, leading him into the woods where three women rushed toward their kin.

They were in the soldier's path. His horse bore down on Chief Cobb, the women, and her brother, at a gallop.

Rachel hissed "stay" followed by a sharp whistle. The horse stopped so abruptly the whey-faced officer almost catapulted over his saddle. He regained his seat, but not his lost face ... how do the white people say it? His dignity.

Atoka put Chief Cobb on the arm of his eldest daughter. The women guided him back into the woods.

Peter LeMoyne watched, the reins of Atoka's mount in his hands. The pride in his children had banished even the worry from his eyes, Rachel thought. She basked in the pride, smiling. Then she took her mother's hand for the long journey ahead.

Oklahoma

Harvest, 1847

one

Oklahoma Territory Harvest, 1847

"This great god, is he a Choctaw god, Miss Rachel?"

Rachel sighed. She was much better teaching arithmetic or sewing than religion, a point Miss Wakefield made constantly. But neither Miss Wakefield nor her reverend brother were at school today, so she would have to make do.

"Well, we—that is, our Choctaw Old Ones—have no great god, Thomas. So perhaps we can add the Christian god to our spirits of the forest, water, and sky."

That wasn't right. The missionaries did not graft one religion to another. Even when there was opportunity, like now, to do so. What did Reverend Wakefield have her commit to memory on the subject? "A diluted Gospel or any emulsion of Gospel mixture with other cults will be vapid and powerless." But the children were nodding, smiling. And she so loved to see them smile.

"And this great god, he lives in this other home, this heaven, the place from where Miss Wakefield says none will ever drive us?" Thomas, again. Bright Thomas, who still wore his hairbraided, whose parents were, like most of Rachel's people, unconverted.

"Yes. The great Christian god lives in heaven."

"And this is a good place?"

"Oh very good, full of plenty and happiness."

Thomas made a face. "Is the white man there?"

"Yes."

"Huh." He folded his arms. "It is not for me, then. If it is as you say, the white man would soon come along, and, if he saw I had a good place, he would want it for himself."

The children nodded, acknowledging the sense of Thomas's theology. Rachel winced. Where were the right words? The ones Miss Wakefield said were Rachel's duty to the mission—to teach, not stand by callously while more and more of her people fell un-baptized through the gate of death and into hell with each passing year?

A little girl touched her shoulder. "There. Thomas has had his say. We have only our spelling words left, Miss Rachel. May we walk to the creek to recite them?"

They'd put Katy McCombas up to the request because of her perfect command of English and those large, dark eyes. Rachel tried to hide her smile. Miss Wakefield wouldn't approve of taking the class outside either. But the missionaries were guests at the council meeting. And Rachel LeMoyne was a translator's daughter. She knew how the council liked to deliberate, sometimes into the night. "You have all been diligent scholars," she agreed. "And the day is a very fine one for a walk. Carrying our slates and Webster spelling books, of course."

The creek bank was high, reminding Rachel of its level when she and Atoka had first seen it, on that cold spring day fifteen years before. They'd worn the ashes and dress of mourning then. Rachel remembered the icy water as Miss Wakefield scrubbed off the ashes. She remembered her brother's angry protests from downstream, where large-boned Reverend Wakefield did the same for him. Atoka's insults were all in ringing, indignant Choctaw. She'd endured her scrubbing in stunned silence. The

feathers she'd carefully woven into her bark skirt rushed downstream. The missionaries sighed. "The wilder the woman, the better the bead and fancy work she makes," they'd complimented her mother, who was now dead beside Sleeps Sound and their father. Where? She couldn't remember the name of the place along the trail, just that it had red, muddy ground. The graves were dug by people weakened by the sickness. Not deep enough. She was still haunted by dreams of wild dogs eating the flesh of her parents and sister. Better the bone pickers of the Choctaw old religion had used their long fingernails to make her family part of the land again. Better the bone pickers, who the missionaries denounced, than the dogs. Sometimes the hungry dogs came for her in her dreams. Why had she and Atoka survived that terrible time, Rachel wondered, even now.

"Might we take our shoes off, Miss Rachel?"

Rachel raised her head, put herself in the world again, where she was responsible for these little ones. "No, children. Stay firm on the banks, and avoid the temptation to slip toes into the water." No resistance, even from the boys. Was she becoming as stern as Miss Wakefield? Davis, the youngest of her twelve students, pulled on her skirt. "You would save me, if'n I fell in too deep. Mama says your name was once Yalabusha, Tadpole!"

Rachel touched the spiraling crown of the boy's hair. "That was long ago, before I wore many petticoats."

"You didn't forget. Uncle says we might come to the missionary school because you didn't forget, and still know who you are. That you allow us to speak of singing water spirits and that you still know our crops are gifts of the Three Sisters."

"Who were all created by . . . ?" Rachel asked, nervously looking over her shoulder.

"The new god, Creator."

"Not new. Always here, remember? 'I am who am.' "

Katy giggled. "Yes, the Christian god, who would fail his English grammar!"

Rachel shook her head, but thought Katy's joke so quick-witted that perhaps even the Christian god was laughing.

"My uncle speaks up for you at council," Katy said more seriously, "because he says Rachel LeMoyne does not forget the Old Ones, and tells Choctaw children good stories of this new god I Am, remember the one where he makes himself a bush that burns without ash?"

"Ma!" several children answered, as their elders did at council, with the hearty Choctaw affirmation. Rachel wondered how they'd gone so far afield again.

"Your uncle honors me," she said quietly.

Davis's older brother stepped forward. "We all honor you, teacher, and thank you for this good time under the sky."

Rachel smiled. "Under the sky and singing out your spelling words, if you please."

But they had barely distributed the books before Rachel caught sight of her brother on his painted horse, High Head. They roared over the banks, splashing onto all of her squealing, delighted scholars. Atoka slid to the ground with the ease of the finest Choctaw lighthorseman. But he fit in among the company of the native police force about as well as she taught Christianity.

He grinned in that broad way he used to when they were very young, and their parents still alive. What was the occasion? Perhaps Helen Grant had accepted his marriage proposal? "School's out, by order of the council," he declared.

"The meeting is ended already?" Rachel asked.

"Yes. They have agreed on how much of the corn surplus to send across the Atlantic. And the relief money collected? More than seven hundred dollars."

"Atoka! How wonderful!"

"Tonight, the peace chiefs have declared a feast and dance to celebrate."

Rachel fought the urge to squeal with as much abandonment as her students. But she was likely already in trouble for leaving the academy's confines, if the Reverend and his sister were back home, and knew. The children gathered around her handsome brother in a joyous cacophony until he held up his hands. "No

more questions. Go home while I tell my sister how she herself is the cause of the celebration."

The scholars looked to Rachel for her permission. Atoka crossed his arms, behind them. "Ruled by women," he muttered. Rachel sighed. "Class is dismissed. My disruptive brother will help me put our poor creekside schoolroom to right."

Atoka watched the children disappear over the banks. "You are doing well by them," he said quietly.

"Why, thank you, Atoka."

"One or two of your scholars could be your own children by now. With boys to teach the hunt, my life would have more purpose. And you would be warm at night, and enjoy their father's company, and not frown so much."

Tricked with a compliment into an old argument between them, Rachel realized. She tried to relieve her face of its displeasure, but spoke firmly. "Your life's purpose is your pursuit, not mine, brother."

"Have the missionaries instructed you to forget our common blood?"

"No." She knew where this was going, but did not have the power to stop it.

"Have they made our men ugly in your eyes, then?"

"Atoka!"

"So you have an obligation to me. This is how I see it."

"You are five years my elder. And have not married, helping to repopulate-another woman's clan," she challenged.

"Not from lack of courting."

Success with his latest woman was not the cause of the pride she'd seen in face, then, Rachel realized. "Oh, Atoka. Has Helen Grant's family refused your suit?"

"Yes."

"I am very sorry."

He shrugged. "Missionaries," he complained.

"Now what have they done?"

"Made many of the people value working all the time. Getting things, always things. Not to make us all rich, but to horde likemisers with no kin obligations. Helen Grant's father ignored my presents! He counted my horses, looked at their teeth. And the woman I sought to make my wife? She counted the too many steps from my house to the spring. They found me wanting. He called me poor, this man who has no time to talk, to play in ball games. He only attends missionary ceremonies, not our own! I wonder if Helen Grant only counts things. I wonder if she dreams? Am I better off alone, if she does not dream, little sister?"

"Perhaps she is not for you," Rachel agreed softly, in traditional, circumspect language, her heart aching for her brother's disappointment and wounded pride.

He smiled ruefully. "She is the fourth to refuse me. My flute playing will be very fine when I'm done with courting and finally catch a wife. But perhaps by then my ancient bride will be deaf to the music?"

Rachel shook her head at her brother's ability to heal himself with his humor. She wondered again why Atoka's courting choices had been town women of progressive families, not traditionalists like himself. All were too tame a match for his wild-ness, she thought. Why did he set his sights on them? He was a woman's man, not meant to be alone, like her.

Atoka's eyes brightened as the creek hollow rang with the distant sound of the children's happy laughter.

"Their shoes will be off, laces tied together and over their shoulders before any reaches home."

"I know," Rachel agreed, pushing him toward the spellers piled on the flat rock's surface.

"And I am a man of five and twenty years, not your fetch-and-carry boy, little sister," he intoned, eyeing them.

Rachel cocked her head. "You disrupted my lesson. There are consequences."

"Spoken like a Christian woman."

"I am a Christian woman, Atoka."

"And an eagle clan woman besides. A diminished clan, in need of new blood. But you give us no children, sister."

"I teach all the children."

"Yes, and tell us of the wide world, and now wish us to feed these people whose crops have failed, these Irish. You make me dizzy with your purpose! Surely you can let one good man make you a wife, too? The clan and our nation are proud of your blood, and our mother's before you. How else do you have this high privilege of a feast in your honor?"

"The feast is not in my honor! You should not have put it that way. The children think too much of me as it is. I only read the accounts to the council, of the need across the Atlantic. Our feast is called to celebrate last year's harvest. And the bounty it provides to help the great hunger in Ireland."

"And the one called to deliver it."

"The one—?"

"There. Rendered speechless at last. My magpie of a sister. You are that one, our new peace chief. The only one both the Wakefields and the council trust with the corn shipment."

"They wish to send me to Ireland?"

"They wish to send a representative of the nation. You were the only one all factions could agree on—the Wakefields, because they think you are at their bidding; the Choctaw, because we know you are not."

Rachel felt a deep need to sit. Her brother took her arm, lowered her to the flat surface of the rock. "Tadpole Who Gathers Stories," he summoned her by her childhood names, "this calling, it did not surprise me as it does you."

"Why?" she whispered.

"Because I have dreamed of a ship with great white wings and a fire in its hold, sending you across the water. To this place, this Ireland of terrible suffering, of skeletons. You fed the geese our corn in my dream. And one filled your belly in return, and protected you within folded, broken wings. This dream kept me quiet, when they said your name, though I fear for you on this journey, so far from me."

Rachel touched the blue glass bead he'd woven into one of his hair plaits.

"You will go?" he whispered, with a tinge of the same abandonment he'd hidden so well when their sister and parents left them with only each other for warmth on their desperate journey to Oklahoma Territory.

"If you have dreamed it," she said softly, "then I will go. Your dreams are sacred things, brother."

He growled softly. But she sensed pride and contentment with her decision living beside his worry. "The lighthorsemen will travel with you to the port of New Orleans. I can go no farther. Only you, with the missionaries. To watch over them, to watch over the corn, to make sure all is done in the right way. This leaving grieves me." He reached for his skinning knife and slashed his beaded braid in one deft stroke. He hadn't cut his hair since that day in the cold creek when the missionaries robbed him of it and his mourning. Now he placed the braid and its gleaming indigo glass in her hand. "Come home. Do not become one of those skeletons," he urged.

"You are our own, our very own dusky angel, Rachel!" Miss Sarah Wakefield said again. "And your kind heart our inspiration! The home office is so pleased. This Atlantic voyage, this new mission, is exactly what my brother needs to regain his health and to secure his position as a great shepherd of heathen souls!"

Rachel did not feel any part angel, of any color. She only wanted to help feed the starving she'd read about, to help the ones who reminded her of her own people. She didn't want to leave the Choctaw. She didn't seek to spread a religion whose precepts she still needed guidance on herself. But that was what Sarah Wakefield and her sickly brother talked about most. At least he'd already gone below to rest in his berth, so Rachel didn't have to listen to them both as she searched the dockside.

Rachel only wanted to ease distress, not bound over the Atlantic to the island beside that one where all the English started. That small place that could swallow up nations, why wasn't it feeding its own sister island, she wondered. Why did the Irishneed the Choctaw? Why was she standing beside this stern, black-clad woman who towered a head over her own height and was as sure of her station in life as Rachel was conflicted?

Atoka had dreamed her where she was now, aboard an American steam and sail ship about to head into the Gulf of Mexico and across the great Atlantic. She should be content, not full of doubt.

Rachel breathed in the sea air. Was that the salt of the Gulf that cut though the tar and sweat of the sailors? It was tart and fresh. She liked the scent. Rachel searched the dock again for the last sight of her brother. He'd scowled and walked off from Miss Wakefield's offer of money for the work he and his lighthorsemen comrades accomplished. Where did they go? Rachel only recognized three of the city Choctaw, ones like those she'd recognized on the streets of New Orleans, the ones who had shocked her, dressed in filthy blankets, trading what little they had, even their bodies, to remain drunk all day. Miss Wakefield had pulled her away from the beggars, reminding her that she could have easily become one of them, and her brother and his friends yet might, if she did not work harder toward their salvation.

How could the headmistress say that? The lighthorsemen of the new nation were different, were proud and brave and purposed. How could she speak of them in that way when they'd hauled sacks of corn on and off riverboats from the Arkansas to the Mississippi to New Orleans? Rachel searched harder. She didn't want to remember Atoka's face enraged at being treated like a paid laborer. She had understood both the intention of the missionaries and the insult to he? brother, of course. She had her father's gift of understanding, without his genius for pulling warring parties onto common ground. She now understood why Peter LeMoyne had often looked so tired and sad.

She knew her brother's temper. Rachel admired the forbearance it took to stalk away from the handful of silver. Perhaps he was gone already, finding a place to run off his frustration. No. There he was, carefully balancing himself on the rim of a rain barrel, above the dock's crowd, where she could see his full form, and even the piercing blue sky of his eyes. Their father's red shirt

graced his shoulders. The river wind picked up his fine black hair and sent it skimming off his shoulders. Except for the braid he'd cut away, that Rachel had pinned close to her heart. He was singing. Loud. Beautiful. In Choctaw.

You will be running to the four corners of the Universe:

To where the land meets the big water;

To where the sky meets the land;

To where the home of winter is;

To the home of rain.

Run, sister!

Be strong!

For you are the mother of a people.

He sang it four times, and Rachel's heart swelled with each singing. He was giving her a new woman ceremony, years late, years after she'd followed the advice of the missionaries and declined it. Taking communion replaced it, the Wakefields said. Running with the other newly menstruating women would be a sin against Jesus. But Jesus was a kind man who loved children, who loved her brother and his wildness, Rachel felt sure. She asked Jesus to look after Atoka while she was gone.

She felt Sarah Wakefield's hand on her shoulder. "What is he saying, child?"

"A prayer."

"Blasphemy."

"No, Miss Wakefield."

"I do not have Reverend Wakefield's command of the language, but I know all the Christian prayers in Choctaw, Rachel. That is not one of them."

"It is not a Christian prayer."

"That brazen boy. We must counter his wickedness with a prayer of our own," she determined, her jaw clenching as she leafed through a book in her hand. "Here we are. 'Our efforts will continue until the waters of life shall have rolled their healing floods over every part of the earth, washing the bloody temples of Paganism, quenching the fires on horrid altars, and refreshingthirsty, dying men from the debasement of the brute to the dignity of the sons of God.' "

Miss Wakefield's book closed with a thud. "You must pray harder for your brother's salvation," she urged. "There is always hope."

What Rachel hoped was that Miss Wakefield would not talk about Atoka's salvation in the last moments she saw her brother's straight, proud form, his hand raised in silent farewell. To his sister, a new woman.

Ireland

1847

two

Rachel lifted the delicate lace curtain from the window. Sligo was not a city like New Orleans, bright and brimming with life and movement. It was a gray, colorless place, bulging with beggars from the starving countryside. Their desperation scented the air along with the smoky peat fires of the hearths. It was not always this way, her hosts said. The hunger had cast this great pall over the town.

Miss Wakefield fit into this place with her iron hair and gray eyes, and even her suspicion. She'd complained that their hosts were not real Christians at all, and called them "foot-washers." John and Memory Allen were American Quakers from the state of Indiana. To Rachel they seemed deeply devoted to the people they'd come to assist. Perhaps her teacher was too occupied with the care of her sick brother to see this.

The Irish themselves saw it. Rachel enjoyed helping the Aliens serve the once-a-day meal to the growing ranks of the city's poor.

She marveled at how a little food could restore some of the luster in the people's eyes, the lilt to their speech. She was even getting used to the way the Irish spoke their English, and laughed, along with their children, at her efforts to try a few Irish words. They were a resilient people, like the Choctaw. She longed to get the Choctaw corn to the countryside, where the need for it was the greatest.

"Rachel! Come join us!" Memory Allen called her to the simple tea and marmalade cake laid out on the table.

She turned to see the American Captain Lawes of the Hammersmith offering his arm. The Hammersmith had been Atoka's vision—a great winged creature when all its sails were filled with wind. Life at sea had enhanced Rachel's senses in a way she'd never expected. She found the Atlantic bracing, the ship full of wonders. Even here in Sligo, she was still sleeping soundly each night, still dreaming in the rhythm of the waves. The glowing confidence that was the sea's gift had carried over here, where Rachel would normally be shy, sipping tea at a table of white strangers, their English accented all different ways.

"Miss LeMoyne, would you have had me deliver your precious Indian corn even if the English import embargo was back in place?"

Rachel considered Captain Lawes's question.

"Well, after our talks on board the Hammersmith, you seemed so fond of the people of Ireland, sir. And we are very determined to get this food to them."

His dark brows descended in a way that was becoming familiar to her. "You call yourselves Christians? Expecting me to break the law?"

"Oh, no sir," Rachel tried to assure him. "Only to leave us to do it!"

Memory and James Allen laughed heartily, surprising Rachel. She didn't understand how she was the source of their amusement, but she so liked to see them smile, just as she did her little scholars. It was both simpleminded and a great fault in her, Miss Wakefield said.

But Rachel felt fortunate to be caught in the circle of these

generous Quakers. Prompted by their mirth, even the sad-eyed English artist Mr. Combs managed a smile.

Captain Lawes raised the teacup that looked very small in his hand and offered a toast with it. "Miss LeMoyne would have gotten her corn to Ireland, if I'd have had to haul each sack off myself. I think her story quite extraordinary. A reverse Pilgrim feast of Thanksgiving, if you will. You understand my meaning, do you not, Miss LeMoyne?"

"If it is that the Indians of Plymouth helped the colonists in their homeland to survive, and now the Choctaw people bring their excess corn to ease the famine in this country."

"Exactly."

"But captain, only the place is reversed. The constant is that Europeans still seem unable to feed themselves."

He laughed like a singing bellows, like Uncle Bridges on his cabin porch in Mississippi, this man that Rachel was beginning to see as her great bearded brown bear, her protector.

Not all eyes were" amused this time. Mr. Combs, the London Times sketch artist, raised his head, looking as if her words wounded him. He seldom spoke, though their hosts often tried to engage him in conversation.

Rachel thought English newspapers must pay their artists well. Indifferent, even slovenly about his appearance, Mr. Combs neither shaved his face nor dressed his hair with any regularity. But his clothing showed wonderful attention to details, from his elegant braided trousers to his rich crimson vest and gold watch fob.

"You are new in Ireland, Miss LeMoyne," he said quietly. "But if you keep your keen child-of-the-forest eyes focused, you will notice that quite to the contrary of your supposition, this city of Sligo is an export center."

"Export, sir? I was given to understand that the wool and other exports left Ireland's east coast."

"Not wool, Miss LeMoyne. Food."

"Food?" the word made her mouth dry. "Ireland exports food while her people are starving?"

"Exactly so."

From the Aliens, no denial. Rachel looked to the Hammersmith's captain. His merry eyes sobered. She turned back to Mr. Combs, forgetting his handsome attire. She listened.

"The Irish have long fed England," their cheerless teatime companion explained. "Thanks to your New World potato, they found a crop they could survive on while they grow oats and wheat and barley for their masters. The landlords sell these grains to England—to feed the city workmen who run the machinery of English industries. The Irish are forbidden, on pain of death, to eat what they grow for the landlords."

"Is this possible?" Rachel asked her hosts.

Memory Allen touched her hand. "I'm afraid so. Mr. Combs has been able to trace the worst of the consequences of the system on his excursions here in the west. The folk of the countryside know him quite well. Some even trust him."

"But, if this land is not barren, is still producing food, can the Irish people not grow it on their own plots?"

"The plots allowed them are meager gardens. Still they've been extraordinary husbandmen—coaxing a quarter acre's potatoes to feed a large family. Before the blight. But this is not the vast American wilderness where your people were driven, Miss LeMoyne. The Irish are on their native soil, but they own no land. The Celts are tenants on land the English dominate."

"Was this always so?"

"Oh, no. Some of the poor wretches still hold deeds to vast holdings, passed on through families, now stashed in their hovels. Mighty chieftains, kings, in greatly reduced circumstances. Starving beggars at the feast."

The artist's eyes scanned the room's edges—where walls met ceiling, encompassing picture frames, the outline of the room's clock. He looked at people that way too, around the edges. How could he make good likenesses, if he saw that way, Rachel wondered. Perhaps that's why he'd shown them none of his sketches, because they were vague, shadowy ghosts? Then the thought struck her. If he had seen terrible suffering, perhaps this was mourning behavior.

"Where is it the worst, Mr. Combs?" she asked him quietly. "I will bring the corn there."

"When your superiors recover their health, I doubt they will allow the journey to where I have been."

"The Wakefields are not my superiors. I represent the Choctaw. We are like the Aliens, our hosts. We are in service. I remember the suffering of my people's recent past. The missionaries helped us then. We wish to help here, because we understand."

The artist looked suspiciously at Memory and John.

"Are you sure she is not a relation of yours?" he asked.

Memory shook her head, smiling. "I would gladly welcome Rachel into our family for restoring that fighting spark in your voice, Mr. Combs."

"Americans," he muttered, reaching behind his chair for the portfolio that was never far from his side. What did he mean, Rachel wondered. Did he think that she was an American?

"Allow me to transport you inland as best as my skills will allow. And explain why your trip will be much more dangerous than you can imagine."

Rachel felt her hostess's hand at her shoulder. "At last," Memory Allen whispered. "I knew you could do it, Rachel."

Rachel looked up into eyes flashing with approval. What had she done? "Let me clear guests and crockery to suit your purpose, Mr. Combs," Memory offered.

Once the room was emptied of all but the artist and Rachel, he arranged his watercolor sketches on the dark mahogany of the dining room table. Sketches signed only "Combs," which matched their starkness. They did not picture shadows, as she'd feared, but well-wrought likenesses. They were not like other newspaper sketches of the Irish, which made them look like monkey-faced buffoons, their small eyes glaring with hate even as they bowed and scraped to their English masters. Mr. Combs's work reminded her of the pictures the American artist George Catlin had painted when he visited the Choctaw Nation during ball playing season. In the first few, sturdy cabins reminded

Rachel of her people's own in Mississippi and Oklahoma, only constructed of stone instead of wood, and covered by thatched roofs. Then the pictures showed those roofs caved in, or burned, as devastation visited the small structures. The people standing outside them disappeared with each progressive sketch, too . . . parents, grandparents, kin, until a lone child or two foraged in the blighted gardens, reduced to rags.

Such old eyes peering out at her. She had seen these eyes before. Rachel knew this story. Weren't those two, that brother and sister scrounging, weren't they the children Rachel and Atoka, wild with grief, searching for roots under Oklahoma soil?

The Americans had gone to war twice against these English, but had acted like them in the ancestral home of the Choctaw, the Cherokee, the Seminole, the Creek. Taking. Always taking. And the artist had called her one of them? ,

She raised her head. "In my ignorance I made light of these people's suffering, Mr. Combs. I ask your forgiveness. And guidance on my journey."

His eyes found her at last, perhaps for the first time since they'd met. They traced the contours of her face, looking deeply into her eyes. His own went sadder. "Why, you're quite young," he said.

"I have twenty years," she protested.

The amusement at her indignation lasted only a moment. "If you go into the west it will age you twenty more," he promised.

Rachel placed her upturned hands over the gallery of suffering, and offered a silent prayer for guidance. "Tell me of this place?" she asked the artist quietly.

"There is only one mill to grind your raw American corn, in Manor Hamilton. And it is in disrepair."

"Surely someone can fix it?"

"The millwright can. He and his grandfather built it." He brought forth a sketch of a dark-haired man, his face turned from view, his long, lithe-boned form dancing with a small, heart-faced woman, their bare feet in midair. High, graceful,

moving. They were bathed in a wash of crimson and blue tones. Rachel's hand hovered over the strokes and colors, so brimming with life.

"What is he called?" Rachel asked.

"Ronan the Millwright." . "And his given name?"

"Darragh. Darragh Ronan."

The way Mr. Combs pronounced the man's name—"Dare"— it did not sound strange to Rachel, the way some of the Irish names did. It sounded like her brother's name, the name of a man who was not afraid of challenges.

"Darragh Ronan is one of the dark Celts," the artist continued. "Quick-witted, with a good command of English. Went to a national school for a short time, I believe. Came home to become the bridge between his people and their English landlords— the translator. That position cost him dearly."

"What do you mean, sir?"

Mr. Combs voice turned softer. "I mean the very reason it is not safe for you to go to Manor Hamilton is because of what happened after the last Indian corn shipment there."

"The last shipment, sir? Of corn?"

"Yes. A government scheme. Underground Indian corn was shipped in, to get the hungry fed and back on their feet again. The Manor Hamilton mill was built for oats, barley, and rye. Cash crops. For export, protected by the government's support of private enterprise. It was not for Indian corn, Lord Hamilton told his tenants. Darragh Ronan knew better. He said that the wheels could be adjusted for a harder grain like your corn. He could do it, good as he was with machinery.

"But there was no need of that, Lord Hamilton insisted. A memorandum proclaimed the government's relief supply of un-ground Indian corn could be boiled whole and eaten, thus milling was not required. The millwright, with his fine command of English, translated the words into Irish."

"But, that's not true," Rachel whispered, horrified. "Corn must be ground several times before it is good for eating."

"The millwright's own starving kin proved you correct, Miss LeMoyne."

"How?" she whispered, afraid of his answer.

"Upon his landlord's instructions, Darragh Ronan gave a small supply of the unground corn to his widowed sister and her children. She cooked it as instructed, fed it to them. The unground corn pierced their intestines. The children died in agony, followed by their mother. Of grief, perhaps."

Rachel pressed her hand to her mouth, but the artist's story continued in the same even tone. "The millwright's sanity went with their screams, they say, the ones who would still talk with me. Others claim he held on to some semblance of coherence until after he'd lost his own wife and children to fever.

"The mill is abandoned now. It frightens away all with its screaming gears, they say. But the Irish love to weave their stories, Miss LeMoyne. It may be Lord Hamilton merely finds it preferable to ship his profit grains well guarded and not yet ground to Sligo these days, all things considered."

"And the millwright?"

"Taken to the mountains above the town, where Irish renegades have hidden out for centuries. A wild man, quite mad. I found no trace of him this last time, only stories and shadowy reminders of his family's gracious hospitality to me over the years. He's dead up there by now, most likely. That might be his way to take his leave, for he was a proud man and has none left of his own to bury him."

"I hope he lives. And can still run a mill."

"Miss LeMoyne, you can hardly expect you or your gift to be welcomed, after what these people have suffered."

"I expect to deliver corn, sir. And to see it ground thrice," Rachel said, gaining power from the quiet confidence she heard in her own voice. "Our gift is a life-giver, when people are not ignorant of its preparation. Those who are of a mind to accept it and turn it into food might get through the coming winter. I will teach them this, if they allow it. Then I'd like to go home."

"Here." Mr. Combs handed Rachel the watercolor of the dancing millwright and his wife, then another of the heart-faced

woman flanked by a small boy and a bright-eyed girl. In her lap, another tiny face peered out from her shawl's depths. His wife, three children. And his sister and her five. Darragh Ronan had lost them all.

"Take the sketches with you," Mr. Combs instructed. "If he's alive, you may need something more than your Yankee persistence to get him out of those hills."

three

To keep his mind off the hunger, Darragh Ronan thought about the ancient circle of mammoth stones on the ground above his earthen cave. The stones had been shelters of time, of space, of the religion of the Old Ones, people said. That's why he and Bevin had dared each other to spend the spring and fall equinox nights in the middle of the fallen circle, back when they were children. .

What had knocked down the thirteen stones, long ago? Did the great oak that grew up in their midst absorb their power, along with their position, aligned to the constellation Pleiades? Is that why he was disoriented here, in the earth chamber beneath the oak's roots?

The disorientation drew him to this place. That was the truth of it. He loved the feeling of being lost to self under the damp roots. He deserved this time. Because he'd become useful again. He'd found a job. He was always good at finding jobs'. People had brought him things to fix since he was a child working beside his grandfather. Now the dead sought him out, calling from the shallow graves, some dug up by the wild animals. Not right, not proper, their bones gnawed on, then scattered about the hills. But he, the once mighty fixer did not have the strength to dig them safe from the animals. So he'd gathered, brought them here, the dead who would not lie quiet. Like the ancestors of his mother's people, Darragh Ronan mounted their bones and skulls on dug-out shelves in the chamber beneath the ancient oak. His new, last, home. He'd made the oak a Celtic skull tree as he waited, praying to his Christian God for his own death, careful to end each prayer with "not my will, but Thine," just as the Savior did in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The oak rewarded him for his work. With visions.

Sometimes he would see Bevin asleep in the corner, wrapped in her mother's shawl, as she was on those equinox nights of their childhood. Sometimes she would appear as she was at their wedding, shy and trembling under his touch, as if he were a stranger, and they'd not grown up in the shadow of each other's cottages. He could see her bright eyes, feel the lines of freckles he traced that night to make her laugh, to make her remember that they were friends; that, as clumsy and young as he was, he would never hurt her.

But after the pleasure they took in each other's bodies, the children they had planted hurt her. He'd endured Bevin's screams as they came into his mother's hands, him outside the cottage door, weeping. Until Sheea, who'd slipped as a sleek new seal into his own workman's hands the day his mother was at market. That child taught him the other side of birth, and why women endure it. Sheea, her father's heart, so impatient to see what little was left of the world. She'd outlasted her brother and sister. Because of the milk, he supposed, though Bevin had put all three back on the breast, so desperate she was to save them.

At least Bevin had the milk to give them. He could only feed them stories of Tir na nog, of the girl with the magic apple branch with crystal flowers who would soon invite them to the endless feast. "And will you come, Da, with your dancing?" they'd asked.

After her ranting about the potatoes, ranting enough to make him mad, Bevin had promised, smiling, clear-eyed, before her last breath, to send the girl for him next. Had she forgotten? Why was he still here?

He leaned back, feeling the sharp bones of his back as he lay on the hard ground beneath the oak. Guarding his skulls and bones, listening to the rain starting to fall above, soaking into the soil, intensifying the rotting odor of blighted potatoes. He close his eyes and the years began to jumble again. He saw the birth, not of his children, but of his sheltering oak's ancestor. When the kingdom of Connacht was forested, before the English came into the west and stole the trees for their ship masts, for their bloody great halls. The oak's mighty roots displaced the great standing stones of the Old Ones. Some broke, their fractured power gathered by the learned monks to build the garden walls of Tartan Abbey nearby. Was it all connected then—the stones, the trees, the animals and people—the way his mother always said it was? Centuries. Was he seeing the birth of Ireland's Golden Age of saints and scholars? Was this a gift from God? Or was it the hunger's last sickness coming on? Darragh Ronan felt something he thought he no longer had the strength for: fear.

There. Light. Light in his dark, damp shelter for the bones. Bevin hadn't forgotten him. She's sent this glistening girl standing, her rush torch high, holding out her hand. Her clothes were miraculous, shimmering silver, without a rent or tear. She was raven-dark beautiful, lit from within with purpose, like a saint. Needing him to come. Of course. He saw that in her eyes. He sat up slowly, found his voice. He greeted her politely, asking if she were human or of the spirit. But she didn't answer. He tried again, the traditional greeting.

She asked him to speak English.

English? Darragh Ronan did not know the wisdom of the world around, but he knew that no one from the land of Tir na nog spoke a word of bloody English! This girl was mortal, then, not sent by his wife, not a spirit? She said something about the gristmill at Manor Hamilton. He couldn't understand all herwords. Her teeth were chattering from the cold rain falling on the ground above them.

The English avoided skull trees, even as they accused his people of still being wild, pagan barbarians. But their marksmen were certain to be waiting just outside, to kill him. He was not the millwright any longer, but a wanted man, who could be hanged three times over for his crimes. Who was this woman the cowards had sent to ferret him out? He was curious enough to want to know that, before they killed him.

He stood. "Speak slowly," he advised, in English.

"My name is Rachel LeMoyne," she said.

"Not English. French, then, are you?"

"No. Choctaw."

"Chock—?"

"Choctaw,"

"What is that, Choctaw?"

"America. I'm from America. I've brought corn. Maize. Indian corn."

He heard his sister's children screaming there, inside his head. "To torture us before you kill us, Choctaw?"

"No! Mr. Ronan, my people have been growing, eating corn for centuries. I know how to prepare it, the way the others, who came before, did not. That is what killed the children, that ignorance. Feeding it to them unground. If we grind my corn, at the mill, if you'll come, help me—"

She raised her rush torch higher, illuminating the skulls and bones behind him on their shelves. The sight of them stopped her mouth at last. Good.

He let loose an onslaught of Irish curses as preamble. Then, in English he told the woman that she was an agent of the landlord, sent to lure him to the mill with her story of saving children. Lord Hamilton meant to kill him, not to save children. Then he showered her with his curses in English translation, so she would run away. Because he wanted to throttle her soundly, and he had promised his mother never to raise a hand to a woman, even when one tried him sorely.

She stood firm. Her white teeth bared as she widened her stance. "Do not seek to frighten me with your incantations, Darragh Ronan!" she shouted. "I come from the people of the bone pickers. There is no horror for me here. I am not interested in this dead place. It's the living I serve. Will you use your skill to help those left, or will there be no one left to tell what happened here?"

He blinked in the soft, choking smoke of her rush light. She was not afraid of the skulls, of the eons of time that dwelt beneath the tree's roots with him. She had courage, then.

Her torch illuminated something else: the standing stones. Burrowing down. Crashing in. Invading this small space beneath the oak. Returning, out of time. Returning, to entomb them. Did she not see them? No. There was still only that fire of purpose in her eyes. This woman from the country that had beat back the British, where liberty was lord. She should not be buried here, this American, with him. That would be a sin. His thefts, his work for Young Ireland, his raids on the fields of three landlords around, his grave robbing, all the things they would kill him for—they were not sins. But this would be.

"Get out," he entreated her now, wanting only the peace the stones would bring.

"Not without you."

So his death was not to be here. Would not be quiet, already buried in the chamber beneath the oak? Was it waiting outside, at the hands of English? Or, worse, hired Irish marksmen? Was that to be the price of taking his leave of the world? Did he have the courage for that? Not my will, but Thine.

He took her outstretched hand. Strong. Like his wife's in childbirth. Yes. He'd forgotten how strong a desperate woman's grip could be.

Rachel led the man who seemed to be made of straw more than flesh and bone out into the clearing dawn mist. He released her hand. His sunken eyes surveyed a tight circle, then a wider one. He did not move from her side.

"Where are they?" Even his voice was cracked, dry, straw like.

"Who?"

"The marksmen."

"There are no marksmen," Rachel said, perplexed. "I came here alone. No one followed."

Gaunt face, but those eyes still held life. "I will not hurt you. I will not take you hostage, or use you as a shield. Just tell me where they are, so I have a chance."

"And I tell you no one tracked me here."

He didn't believe her. His eyes kept up their wild, hunted search of the settling mist, the shrubs, the heather banks on the surrounding hills.

"Many warned me not to come," Rachel said, trying to anchor those frantic eyes.

"Why did you come, then?"

"My people's gift is of no use without the mill."

"Why do American Red Indians bring corn to Manor Hamilton?"

"Because we are no strangers to suffering. And because we are all children of God."

"God, is it? Your God?" He took her arm in his bony grasp. Startled, Rachel forced herself to face him. He had the age-obliterating look of all the starving people she'd seen, even the children. He was tall, taller than Atoka. She wondered what a madman's eyes looked like.

"What religion are you?" he demanded suddenly, his voice gaining timbre. "Church of England?"

"No."

"What church?"

"I—I'm Presbyterian."

"Bloody Scots Protestant," he muttered with only a little less disgust. He pulled her in against his chest. There was strength in him still. "The pledge. You would have us take the pledge, then?"

"The pledge?"

"To your church, woman! Your Protestant church. Before we might have this gift of your Indian corn must we renounce our religion?"

"No. Of course not."

He released her abruptly. "I have heard such things."

"Not about us. Not about the Choctaw people."

"I have your word on this?"

"You do."

He searched the hills again, before his fierce eyes, eyes that reflected the mist, the gray dawn sky, grew wistful. That, and his slanting brows changed the look of him completely.

"So. Let us repair the mill and grind your corn, Rachel LeMoyne, Queen of the Choctaw."

Rachel frowned. "We have no queens, except in silly European stories. And it is now your corn, sir. And your neighbors'."

"Oh, aye," he said indifferently. Though his raw-boned frame and quickly hooded eyes could not hide his weakness, his hunger, his own body's desperate need, Rachel still felt her people's gift was a bother to him personally. "Give me that useless piece of finery before you catch a chill," he chided, compounding the impression. She held out her wet shawl. He replaced it with his cutaway coat, its style from the last century. Although in tatters, it was warm and armed with life, his life, still in it.

"Better?"

"Yes, thank you."

"If there are Hamilton marksmen about, they'll take aim on the coat, you understand?"

Rachel looked up at his changeling eyes and saw a remnant of something he might have once had in abundance. Humor. She smiled.

"It's good for me as well as yourself that I speak the truth then."

"Aye," he agreed as they began their journey together.

four

Darragh Ronan spoke patiently in the ear of the draft horse, convincing the animal to pull the heavy millstone into place. It was almost ready to take on its new task-grinding American corn. As the pot heated on the outdoor fire, Rachel watched the man and beast at their dance. It reminded her of the same movements from Atoka and his horses. She would make a story of this day they ground Choctaw corn for the people of Manor Hamilton. The story would be a returning gift to her brother.

She longed for the scent of ground corn to replace the terrible smell of the blighted potato crop, the sickness, the decaying bodies, not buried deep enough by mourners who lacked the strength to do so. Starvation was a long, lingering way to end, a hard path to death.

Rachel drew her stringed pouch from where it was tied to her skirt's waistband. She tested the iron pot with a sprinkle of water. It sizzled, evaporated. She smiled,

"Just right."

"What is right, little one?" The woman asked, stepping forward with the sure footing of the long sightless. Blind Maeve stooped beside Rachel at her work. "What do ye need my iron so red hot to accomplish?"

"Listen, grandmother," Rachel urged in a low tone, as she saw the children watching from the shadows. Blind Maeve sensed them too, she knew. Did she also know how Rachel longed for her own little scholars at the academy, their laughter and trust? She wasn't sure she could draw forth these beings with ancient eyes set in small faces. But with the black-draped woman's help, she would try.

Rachel removed a kernel from her stringed bag and dropped it in the bottom of the pot. Waited. She felt Maeve's hand grip her shoulder.

"Brigid and Padrig! Something's cooking," she whispered.

"Yes."

The kernel burst, flowering in tender whiteness. Rachel picked it out of the pot gingerly, and placed it in the old woman's hand. "This is corn, too," she explained. "A special variety called Zea mays everta—popcorn."

"It feels like nothing at all."

"It's a treat. For the children. I'll put more in the pot. Would you like to taste it?" •>

"I might! I might just taste this gift from America! Do you think I should, children?" she proclaimed. Then, under her breath, "Are they any nearer, little one?"

"They approach. I believe you've granted me safe passage, grandmother," Rachel confided, placing the lid on the iron kettle just as the kernels of Zea mays everta began to explode.

A group of six children burst forth, wailing in their own language, surrounding Rachel, pulling at her skirts. They were louder than the exploding corn, and were soon joined by a cadre of others. Blind Maeve chucked. "Well, passage maybe. But not safe, I'm thinking, little one," she said.

Suddenly, Darragh Ronan left his work and swooped down among them like a dark angel. The children backed away. Out of respect, not fear of him, Rachel thought.

"Just in time, Mr. Ronan," she said as if he'd joined her for afternoon tea. "I will need help pulling the pot off the fire before my bounty burns."

"Bounty?"

"Onto the ground. Just so. Thank you."

He stared at the still popping kettle as it sat cooling on the ground. "Your Indian corn needs grinding! You said—"

"Not these kernels. Look." She lifted the lid. One of the last kernels popped, hitting his cheek, before it jumped back into the pot. His jaw set in a grim line before he grabbed three of the light puffs, swallowed them quickly, waited. For what? Signs of-the painful death that had claimed his sister's children? All his neighbors watched, holding breath. When neither death nor pain visited, Dare Ronan said something in his own language, something he did not have the grace to translate. But the people nodded, took handfuls of her bounty for themselves and their children, then ate slowly. Rachel delighted in the many manifestations of wonder as the puffed corn melted on their tongues.

The people of Manor Hamilton trusted Darragh Ronan, mad or not, Rachel realized as all but the children set off about their duties again. He was the center of the story she was weaving in her heart to take home to her brother.

They worked in secret there at the mill. They were used to secrets, these painfully ragged, fair-skinned, copper-haired people of the rolling beautiful green hills. Scouts among them watched for strangers. A few emaciated children made the youngest ones more popcorn as they waited for the adjusted millstones to grind the corn to more substantial food.

Blind Maeve had a quick mind, full of stories. Before she'd granted Rachel the use of her big iron pot, she had granted her several. One was about an Irish saint, Brendan, a seafarer who visited her own ancestors, the Woodland Indians of North America, in the long-ago time. There was no one left this old and wise among the Choctaw, so Rachel had felt privileged from the moment she stood before the Irish wisdom-keeper.

"Combar na gComharsan," Maeve said now. "A much used phrase, a much practiced art."

"What do your words mean?" Rachel asked.

"Neighbors who help each other."

"My people do that too."

"Do more. Help us. Under the English noses, you come quietly, with your food. You must take the dark one away from here, Rachel."

"The dark one? Mr. Ronan?"

"His family once numbered among them the kings of Connacht. He is the last. Apart from us now, the selkie's child, and ready to return to the sea."

Rachel smiled, remembering the old woman's shape-shifter stories about selkies, seal people who swam the shores of Ireland's coasts and its deep, cold lochs. They sometimes took on human form and made their descendants mighty swimmers. One of those stories explained why Darragh was not copper-haired, but one of the Irish "dark ones," though he would have been considered very pale among the Choctaw.

"I've seen him leaving. I've seen it in a dream," Blind Maeve pronounced.

Miss Wakefield would not approve of this woman, or her divination. But Rachel kept that small war inside her, and quiet. "What did you dream, grandmother?" she entreated.

"That you turned the selkie's child into a goose, and carried him over the two hanging post place, across the water. And there . . . oh, little one." The lids closed over her sightless eyes, and she began to chant. "Deep peace of the running wave, the quiet earth, the shining stars, and the Son of Peace to you in your trials." She crossed herself then kissed her fingers. A superstitious, papist gesture, Miss Wakefield once told her, when Rachel had seen a French trader do the same. It did not seem so to her then or now, Rachel thought.

"I saw more," Maeve continued. "You walked across a sea of grass. Dust holes cradle what our Padrig banished from this land—serpents. Did they all go to America?"

"We have many snakes," Rachel said. "My people think they are the keepers of the lightening and thunder medicine."

"Oh, aye. That would be the proper place of beings so fearsome quick. Deadly. You must be quicker, with your knowledge of them, for Darragh Ronan has none. I saw mountains, too, little one. Not like ours. Mountains so high the snow never melts from them. You and himself and your meitheal, you were bringing trees, bringing your life to a land at the corner of the world."

"Grandmother. Maeve. What is—"

She raised a gnarled finger, closed her lids over her whitened eyes again. "If you don't take him away from here, he and his kind will end. He has lost his meitheal, all of his family, this one from the clan of the best swimmers, the selkie people. He is Oisin indiaidh na Feinne, Oisin after the Fianna, his comrades, were all dead. He cannot return to us, just as the hero Oisin could not. Rachel, listen well to me now. Here the British will hang him, and cover his form in black tar so none can bury him. The birds will not even feast on his eyes. That is what they did to my good man in the uprising of '98, the year of the French. That is what they'll do to yours, mark me, if he does not go over the ocean to America. I have dreamed this."

Suddenly, silence. Rachel felt a ringing in her ears. Everything went on as it had before. The millstone grinding, Darragh's gentle prodding of the mare, the men oiling gears and hauling sacks of corn. And the scent of death on the wind.

"I don't understand," Rachel whispered to the wise woman.

"Aye, you do. You're only afraid of the journey, I'm thinking. You have brought us great stores, and have greater inside you. He does too, do not let the look of him and his black grieving deceive you. This is his wake, his American wake, this celebration, this moment of hope you bring. He must go. For the English sniff out these moments, and ride on the heels of them, killing the very air of possibility. They will start with him, this time, with their killing."

In the next moment Darragh Ronan slipped on a mossy patch of the old stone wall, landed in the mill pond. There was a cleft below his right knee when he rose, dripping and sputtering Irish

curses. His blood stained the water and the stones of shore. Blind Maeve called out to him.

"Your voice is a touch lower toned than when I helped your mam knock yourself into the world, Darragh Ronan!"

"Go 'way with ye, wicca woman," he groused in between streams of Irish, "and take that young one as well!"

Maeve smiled. "Ach, then. She interests you enough to curse, does she, our Rachel?"

Inside Blind Maeve's almost roofless cabin, Rachel cast a quick prayer to the spider spirits before she pressed the webbing against the Irishman's cleaned cut. No. To God. Her Christian god. To please work through the spider spirits of course, she amended the request, before she caught Darragh Ronan staring at her battle with herself. "You should keep your leg raised," she told him.

He shrugged.

Rachel shoved the three-legged milking stool under his foot. His gaunt form smelled of the sluggish mill pond, making him even more the old woman's mossy sea creature. Rachel straightened his drying clothes by the small turf fire and sat. He looked as if he wished to be anywhere but beside her, under a threadbare gray blanket. To keep herself calm, Rachel breathed in the scent of fresh-ground corn, the mill's first batch, so familiar in this strange place. She brought out the chipped crockery bowl and set it on the dirt floor.

"You do not have a care for your own health, do you, Mr. Ronan?" she asked, intent on-her cake-making.

"Does it appear that way to you, miss?"

"Yes. As it appears you avoid a direct answer to the simplest of questions."

"Oh? English lends itself to the art, maybe?"

"Shall I have to learn Irish, if I'm to get any real conversation?"

"That may be, American Miss."

"Choctaw siah!" burst forth.

"Beg pardon?"

A deep breath. "This is difficult for me. English is not my first language either."

"I had not thought of that," he admitted.

Rachel rolled back her sleeves and began to add the water to the cornmeal. The look of her tewa-in-the-making soothed her. Another piece of home.

"Did your missionaries not try to drum your language out of you, then?" Darragh asked, surprising her. His cynicism was edged curious.

Outsiders often berated the missionaries. They usually wanted something bad to come of it, like the traders selling whiskey, offering another god for the people to worship. Rachel kept her voice calm, like her father's would be, to honor him. And because this outsider, for all his anger, was listening. She kneaded the corn dough against the side of the crockery bowl as she spoke.

"The first missionaries learned our language. They defended us at treaty times, they came west to the new nation with us. My schoolbooks were in both languages. They are mostly in English now, though."

"And why is that, if you Choctaw have your own nation within the great United States of America?"

Rachel threw the dough against the bowl's side. "Perhaps because there are so few of us left, and we are surrounded by English speakers. Reverend Wakefield says it is because our own words are too few," she said softly, without meeting the Irishman's fathomless eyes. "He ... he says our language has a great wanting of expression to convey religious truths."

Darragh Ronan made a cynical sound. "Their truths. Is that any wonder to me?"

Rachel smiled, looking up from the third cake she'd placed on the griddle. "You sound like my brother."

"Do I? And what is his name?"

"Atoka."

"Atoka," he repeated her inflection exactly. "That is not a name like yours, is it now? A name the missionaries gave him?"

"They tried to change it," Rachel admitted. "He wouldn't

say its English meaning. 'It's too deep for you to understand,' he told them, 'you have too few words.' "

She saw that rare thing, his smile. "I would like Atoka, I'm thinking."

Again, he'd honored her brother with an exact pronunciation of his name, this listener. "And he would cherish your ways with horses," Rachel told him. "Atoka has four. They are like his children."

"Your brother owns horses?"

"Yes."

"They allow him this?"

"Who?"

"The ones who lord over you. Your missionaries. The government."

"No one lords over us! I told you, we invited the missionaries." Rachel drew in another calming breath. "No one can prevent Atoka from owning his horses. Only his foolish tendency to gamble sometimes loses him one or two." The eyes were no longer challenging her, she realized. They were full of longing. "Mr. Ronan, can you not own horses here?"

"That we cannot, if we are Catholic. Not a horse worth more than five pounds, that is, which is all, of course, isn't it?"

"Why?"

"Now, you'd have to be asking the politicians that, miss."

Rachel turned each of her five cakes on the fire. Darragh Ronan stole glances at her in her silence. Is that what he was doing on the wall before he fell into the mill pond? The next sentence out of his mouth was not a question.

"Tell me what you assaulted my ears with."

"Assaulted?"

"What you spat at me, when I called you American miss."

Rachel felt herself color in her shame. "Choctaw siah. It means 'I am Choctaw.' It is our battle cry."

"You do not make it sound like a battle cry now. Now it sounds like music out of you."

"I am no longer angry."

"And if you were? Would my life and limb be in danger? Do Choctaw women fight in battle?"

"Some."

"So did ours. The Celts, I mean."

"Truly?"

"Oh, aye." A small, pained sound came on the heels of the word, starting her.

"Does your knee hurt, Mr. Ronan?"

"That was not my knee, but my hollow insides, responding to the scent of your food. With my insides I must again test your good will toward my neighbors, Miss LeMoyne."

"How?"

"By seeing if you'll offer me one of your cakes, though I'll not pledge myself to your religion."

There it was again. A spark of humor.

She took a cake from the fire, and held out the steaming plate. "Don't let it burn your tongue," she advised.

five

Once the corn was ground three times, Rachel suggested they cut and refashion the hundredweight sacks into smaller bags. That way the weakened heads of households would be able to carry them into storage in caves in the nearby hills. It was a good plan, except for it putting the hobbled Darragh Ronan amidst the women sewing the sacks closed, and under Blind Maeve's iron hand.

"Too wide apart, and crooked besides," she informed him of his work.

"And how do you know—"

"I have ears. Do you have eyes?"

He bristled, then pulled out the stitches, muttering, "I am no fine-baste seamstress."

"Ach, is there one talent that shuns you, then, fixer?"

He gripped the long needle, fisting it at the old woman as she passed, listening to the sewing of others. Rachel touched his back.

"Kindly use that instrument for its intended purpose, or find another crew to plague."

Maeve turned sharply. "What is he doing?" she demanded.

"He is only—that is to say ..."

Darragh Ronan's grip eased. "Ah, surely any charge of wrongful intent against me is conjecture, Miss LeMoyne, and would not hold as evidence in an American court of law, where all are equal."

Instruct, Rachel, she heard Miss Wakefield's voice demand there inside her head. Use this attention of the Irish for proclaiming the glory of God, shining through the laws that men had made. "You have heard principles, Mr. Ronan," she stated evenly. "Have you also learned that some American principles were taken from ways of the people you call Red Indians?"

"Now, that I had not," he admitted, his eyes firing. "And do your high-minded Red Indians also own African slaves, like their white neighbors?"

"Some do. Because the United States is founded on ideals not yet in widespread practice."

"Ah, I see."

Rachel smiled. "I hope you will, Mr. Ronan. Then you might stop this teasing."

"Teasing, is it?"

"I believe so. Though Atoka says the missionaries have it drummed out of me, I believe I can still recognize the tone of it."

She saw the brief shine of his white teeth. Had her words caused this precious thing, a flash of laughter?

"Suddenly, a sharp whistle sounded over the mill's gears. From one of the scouts. Darragh Ronan broke his sack's cord with his teeth. He tied it closed and handed it to the nearest woman. He called more of his neighbors to him, then spoke in the swift, strange sounds of the Irish language. They gathered their children, left their cakes and took the sacks on their backs. Below, Rachel saw the mill emptying of its workers even as its wheel kept turning. It was all happening so fast. A second whistle, higher. And then, in the distance, the muffled thunder of hoof beats over dirt road. Darragh Ronan swung her around, held her arras between his callused hands.

"Rachel," he summoned. "Hold them off as long as you can. Will you do that, in the name of our common God?"

"Yes," she promised, understanding only the desperate need in his eyes.

Then, she was alone.

The horses belonged to a dozen English soldiers, led by three men, perhaps Irish men, but in unpatched clothes and with full stomachs. And there, behind them in an open carriage, sat a large, dark-clad man with shining silver hair. Miss Wakefield sat , beside him. Instinctively, Rachel wound her shawl about herself more tightly as she stood in the ghostly smoke of the abandoned fires.

Sarah Wakefield got to her feet. There was something wrong with her eyes. The man took her arm to steady her. "Rachel!" she called out, "are you well?"

"Very well, Miss Wakefield," she said slowly, calmly. "And you?"

"I am ... better."

"I thank the Heavenly Father for it. These corn cakes are burning. Perhaps the gentlemen could help me retrieve them? It would be a sin, in this country, to lay food to waste."

The horsemen looked to each other, then to their leader, a man in uniform of red and gold. He looked to the black-clad man, whose mouth tightened.

Sarah Wakefield descended. Her voice rang in its fury. "Foolish girl! What have you done?"

Rachel breathed in deeply. "What I was bade do by the Choctaw council, Miss Wakefield. I brought the corn surplus here to this place of great need. People came to this mill, to grind it. We distributed the meal among the hungry."

Her teacher was beyond words, but not beyond those terrible eyes Rachel remembered from her childhood. She felt herself turning back into that small child so far below her benefactor's iron grip. Ungrateful child, not saved enough. Rachel began to say whatever came into her head, in another voice—the high,pleading voice of that child. "I made corn cakes, Miss Wake-field, see? The women were most patient with my instruction. This is not food they usually eat, did you know that?"

"You have no idea what you were about here!"

"But I have just told you—"

"Keep still!" she almost screamed, before swallowing hard, "while I attempt to smooth things between you and Lord Hamilton."

Silver Mane's head rose from his talk with the army officer. Silver Mane was Lord Hamilton, then? His look was cold, distant, even a little afraid. Rachel recognized it. It was the look of the soldiers who brought the Choctaw west. They knew that for all their mighty weapons, they were both vastly outnumbered and surrounded by the Western wilderness. So were Lord Hamilton, the English soldiers, and their full-bellied Irish scouts. That look helped Rachel find both her courage and her calm, deeper voice again.

"This gentleman has some smoothing of his own to do. With his tenants, I think," she said quietly.

Her teacher's face went whiter, but her shaking voice was as quiet as Rachel's own. "Simpleton. Foolish, obstinate girl. These Irish misbelievers have brought you back to your own heathen ways."

"Surely not, dear lady." Silver Mane stepped forward, bowed to Miss Wakefield. He made a deeper bow to Rachel.

"You were most brave in your captivity, Miss LeMoyne," he announced, so the troops could hear.

"I was not a captive, Lord Hamilton."

"Miss LeMoyne," his twitch-mouthed captain assured her, "you would have been the first sacrificed if those cowardly devils had decided to take a stand against us."

Rachel faced his shining uniform. "Surely you can find more formidable devils than starving women and children, sir." •

"Starving women and children did not start the wheel turning on this mill again, young woman."

"Oh, but they did, along with the help of their men."

Lord Hamilton stepped between them. "And with the help of

my renegade millwright, who is a very dangerous man, Miss LeMoyne."

"I did not find him so, sir."

Silver eyebrow raised. "There!" he called to his tin soldier accomplice. "We have it from our little Red Indian saint herself. He lives. Worn down by this time, I wouldn't wonder, for all his poaching on my land. A party of five into the hills should do the job, Captain."

"Yes, m'lord," the soldier agreed, before barking out names to join his search. The selected men seemed only too glad to jump to their horses again.

The corn cakes burned on the fires. Rachel felt a sickening ache at her bones, thinking of Darragh, weakened by his leg's wound, being run down by five soldiers. Because of her. Because she'd let them know a wanted man was alive, and had been here. She reached out to Lord Hamilton. His eyes went even colder, telling her he had no more need of her services. But the eyes still had interest, an interest she did not like. Still, she took his sleeve.

"Mr. Ronan only worked at my bidding. If you could see what I have seen, sir! I am sorry, so sorry if I acted improperly, but I am what my teacher calls me, a simple woman, and a stranger here, and the people are so hungry."

He patted her hand, then smiled in a way that made her feel soiled.

"Darragh Ronan is no stranger to us, Miss LeMoyne. Rest assured his crimes are of sufficient consequence to have hanged him long before now. Think no more of him. But come, return as a guest to my home. I would know of the many savage practices from which Miss Wakefield has saved you."

"Rachel, drink your tea."

"I will not eat or drink until I know what has happened." They sat in the parlor of the stone-cold house, a world awayfrom the mill and Blind Maeve's cabin. Rachel was supposed tohave come here first. She did not, because there was no need here. And now she was prisoner in this place of crystal chandeliers, oil paintings, majestic trees, and a trout-filled river in which the poor might be killed for fishing.

"You are being blinded by these people, you foolish girl!" Miss Wakefield summoned her away from her contemplation of the white marble fireplace. "The authorities at Sligo, and now Lord Hamilton himself, have warned me this might happen. And those dreadful Quakers putting their schemes into your weak mind!"

"Miss Wakefield, the Aliens did not—"

"It is criminal, taking advantage of your sheltered life at the mission, and your defective bloodlines to mold you to their purpose. But it will all be set to right. Salvage. We must salvage what is left, for the glory of God, in the name of the Mission Society."

"Miss Wakefield—"

"Listen! Listen only, you ignorant girl!"

Rachel realized suddenly that Miss Wakefield was right. It was a good idea, listening. The best idea. She sat still, folded her hands in her lap. Watched the mantle clock. Listened.

"There. That's better. Now. What we have left to build upon is as follows: Lord Hamilton is delighted the mill is running again. It had been sabotaged you see, by his tenants themselves, not by any landlord's cruelty! And now he says it can be used to relieve these people's suffering. Is that not of good consequence?"

"Yes, Miss Wakefield." If it were true. And Rachel felt in her bones it was not.

"The distribution of the remaining food will be supervised by myself and Lord Hamilton. How much maize remains?"

"None."

"What?"

"We worked hard. We ground it all. It's gone."

"Gone where?" her elder demanded.

No. She would not be trapped again. "I don't know." That was true. She did not know where in the barren hills they were headed. Didn't Darragh Ronan speak in the Irish language to

keep her from knowing? "They all left so suddenly when the soldiers came," Rachel said, staring at her hands, wishing they'd brought her with them, up into the hills, for she now felt she was in the splendidly appointed camp of her enemy.

"And why would they do that? Run away?" Miss Wakefield demanded. "I don't understand the Irish at all. The soldiers and Lord Hamilton's hired men were only sent to help the poor creatures."

"The creatures were doing well helping themselves."

"Exactly. Helping themselves to Manor Hamilton's gristmill, equipment. For the which their gracious lord has forgiven them. Well, now he has purchased a new supply of Indian corn for them. In your honor, he says. Could there be a better gesture of his good will?"

Rachel strongly suspected it was not her good will the lord of Manor Hamilton wanted. She knew that look in white men's eyes for Indian women. She'd seen it first long ago in the eyes of a soldier. For her mother, even with a baby at her breast. Should she be so suspicious of Lord Hamilton? He'd bought more food. Mr. Combs said that the farmers' eviction would mean death. Rachel wished the artist was here to guide her now. Could she convince Lord Hamilton not to evict his remaining tenants? She made herself look at Sarah Wakefield. "Who will distribute this ground corn?"

"Us, Rachel. What do you think of that? Lady Hamilton is even drawing up our pledge papers in her own hand."

"Pledge papers?"

"To have their runaway tenants ally themselves to our good Protestant faith! The lord and his lady have agreed to allow us to seek our converts among their tenants in thanks for your assistance in getting the mill started. And in acknowledgment of our part in bringing the needs of his people to his attention. Is that not most generous of him? Is this not a wonderful opportunity to bring these unfortunates out of both their hunger and their darkness?"

Rachel felt the cold seeping into her bones, along with Darragh Ronan's hatred. He had heard of such things. "They are already Christian people," she whispered.

"Oh, Rachel. Papists are as the unsaved Choctaw. I don't expect you to understand this, in your blighted state. Only to rely, as you always have, on my superior comprehension. Now, perhaps you would like to help us draw up the pledges? You have such a lovely handwriting yourself. I would enjoy the lord and lady of this place to see your fine hand, to see how far you've come out of your own darkness. It will erase their first impression of you, I feel sure."

"No."

"I beg your pardon, child?"

"I am not your child. I am the child of Peter and Elizabeth LeMoyne. And I wish to go home."

"Home? With only half our mission complete?"

"AH of my mission is complete. I have no ambition to offer these people the choice of my religion or starvation. That... that is against American principles. Religious freedom, written by Thomas Jefferson, first for his Commonwealth of Virginia, then adopted by the new United States of America. Separation of church and state."

"Rachel LeMoyne, do not lecture me on American principles! Or that Deist Jefferson! What do I care for laws that men have made? I serve a higher purpose. I thought you did too. God has put us here in this terrible time to use this famine terror He's sent! He requires us to bring these people around to the path of their true salvation."

"This terror was not sent by my God but by greed, I think."

"Careful. Your thoughts have been bent dangerous by the Quakers and these people, these thieves."

"I think I know who the thieves are. Of flourishing land that grows all but one crop. I know thieves of souls, too. And I will have nothing more to do with either. I wish to go home."

"I see. Well, perhaps you'd like to make restitution to Lord Hamilton for your own trespass and use of his mill?"

The cold fear, again. Of this stone house. Of this man with

greedy eyes for her. Restitution. What restitution would he demand, alone? In the dark? In the night? "I have already apologized for not seeking his permission before I—"

"And now you could join the party looking for those renegades who escaped into the hills, couldn't you?"

"Escaped? These are their hills, their country!"

"This is Lord Hamilton's land. Do you think the people who helped you were any of his good, loyal tenants? No. These lazy arrogant people who started the mill turning again were the evicted, with no right to remain here. And the millwright is worse. He is a traitor—a terrible criminal who needs to be tried and punished. You know where he is. You found him, when the authorities have been searching for months. It is your obligation to deliver him."

"I do not see it that way."

"As I thought! You are infatuated!"

"I do not see it that way," Rachel repeated. She tried to be her father's daughter, and keep her voice calm. "Miss Wakefield, perhaps you should give me my return passage ticket. I can return to New Orleans on my own."

"On your own? How far do you think you'd get without me?"

"I think I could find my way home. If you'd—"

"My brother's death will not be in vain! I will carry home the news of pledges to the mission. Of souls to add to the roster!"

"Reverend Wakefield is dead?"

"Yes, dead! You selfish, ignorant girl! Did you ever once wonder why he did not accompany me to Manor Hamilton?"

"I assumed he was recovering in the Aliens' care.^

"Foot-washers? Do you think I would have left him with those foot-washers? No, he is dead, and I had to bury him in the soil of this putrid-smelling country!"

"I. . . Fm very sorry for your loss." There. Rachel saw the raw grief overcome the emptiness in her teacher's eyes, and knew how she would feel if she lost Atoka. At last. Sarah Wakefield became a human being again to her. She took her teacher's arm.

"I'm so tired, Rachel," her elder whispered. "Don't fight me anymore."

"Please, Miss Wakefield. Let me bring you home." "Yes, home," she whispered. "What was I thinking? No triumph. How can there even be a hint of triumph? You and your love of these filthy people have killed my dear brother and polluted everything. There is no hope here. Only your cleansing remains."

six

"They've got your millwright locked up," John Allen informed her without taking his eyes from the horse he guided gently through the streets of Sligo.

Rachel felt a pain between her eyes. "Where?" "We will be passing in just a moment. Yes, there it is, directly ahead of us."

Rachel gripped the open carriage's side as a large building with two permanent gallows erected out front came into view. The Aliens were good people, Rachel reminded herself, who gave food to the starving without conversion to their religion as condition. They had shown her nothing but kindness. To whom else could she give her trust? Still, they were strangers. And she had been so foolish already. John Allen kept talking in his familiar, animated tone. "The jailer is an amiable fellow, and fond of his drink. He's worried that if Darragh Ronan gets any weaker he won't be able to stand in the accused box, never mind last to the hanging. That would reflect badly on Friend Jailer, of course."

"We must get him out of there," Rachel whispered.

"Pardon?"

"The Hammersmith sails tomorrow. Captain Lawes is a compassionate man. We've got to get Mr. Ronan out of that place, and on board," she told her hands, fisted together there in her lap.

"Why, that was just my Memory's line of thinking," John Allen said, grinning, when she finally looked up at him. "Perhaps you are distantly related to my wife, Rachel. And she believes we can enlist Mr. Combs in our efforts. Don't tell me you've thought of that, too?"

"I've thought of nothing until just before I gave it speech," Rachel whispered, shaking her head.

"Ah, well. Some of the most wondrous ideas come about that way. Spontaneous, through the heart."

Rachel's elation was short-lived as she thought of a new complication.

"Friend Allen?"

"Yes?"

"I'm not sure Darragh Ronan wishes to be rescued."

"Ah." He paused just long enough to give his horse gentle encouragement. "Then we'll have to convince him."

That night Rachel stood between the two men, willing herself to look more like Darragh, and so be taken for his sister. She prayed to the spirit of his real sister, the one dead beside her little ones, to help her deliver the one who would remember them. Beside her, Mr. Combs weaved. He dropped his sketch pad.

"Are you—?"

"Practicing," he assured her. "I would like to appear so inebriated that it would be possible for a fierce but decidedly small Choctaw woman and a pious Quaker man to bring me down."

His voice was muffled with spirits-soaked scarves draping his fashionable clothes. His was the greatest risk. Mr. Combs would be the one spending the night in a cold cell if they were successful, and he'd be running the risk of time of his own in prison ifhis story of becoming a forced accomplice was not believed. All for the hospitality that Darragh Ronan's family had shown the sad-eyed artist over his years of visiting.

Money and a bottle of whiskey changed hands between John Allen and the jailer. Rachel couldn't tell how much money. But she could never hope to repay the gentle Quakers except in a life well lived. The gruff jailer bent down to Rachel's height and peered inside the hood of Memory Allen's beautiful Quaker cape. "Don't you be feared of me, little sister," he said. With kindness, Rachel thought—a miracle in this dark place.

Inside one door, then another. Twin doors to the inner keep, like the twin gallows outside. Rachel thought of Blind Maeve's prediction. She was charged by the wisdom-keeper's dream to be here now, Rachel reminded herself.

Darragh was lying on a pallet of straw. Unmoving, but not chained by the cold iron lengths attached to the wall. His jailer shoved his side. "Visitors," he said gruffly. "Your friends have not forsaken you all together, millwright. Look, they've brought your wee sister." He shuffled out of the cell.

Rachel leaned over Darragh Ronan. His eyes opened, trying to blink back the darkness. Gray eyes, like the walls around. "Water?" he whispered.

John Allen was ready. He handed her the cup. Rachel lifted his head, held it to Darragh's lips, trying to avoid the festered cut. He had not gone gently into his captivity, then? Though grieved for his already ravaged body, Rachel felt heartened by this sign of his spirit. Did she have a right to the trust in his eyes as she fed him the laudanum John Allen had slipped into the cup? "I want you to come with us," she said, once Darragh had swallowed.

"Into the west?" he asked.

"Yes."

"All right, then," he agreed. His eyes closed.

"There," John Allen touched her shoulder. "He appears willing, even before the drug does its work."

"The west and death are the same to the Irish," Mr. Combs said behind them.

"I'll teach him to separate them," Rachel maintained, thinking, if God, his and mine, grants him life.

The men exchanged the millwright's ragged clothes with Mr. Combs's finery. To her surprise, Darragh Ronan's homespun tailcoat fit Mr. Combs. Had they once been the same size, before the hunger had reduced the Irishman who'd once graciously fed the Englishman? The artist's hands shook as he doused himself with more whiskey. "I hope this keeps the vermin at bay until morning's light," he said, smiling grimly as he leaned over the still form lost in his fashionable frock coat with its flared skirts and matching long trousers. "Darragh!" he called out, as if he were hailing the millwright's cottage, "Darragh Ronan!"

Gray eyes opened again, glassy with the laudanum now. They stared hard at the man who'd called.

"Mr. Combs, is it?"

"None other."

"How have you been keeping yourself, sir?"

"Tolerably well, thank you."

"My daughter has been painting wondrous great likenesses of the pigs since your last visit, did you know?" Was the laudanum wreaking this havoc with is memory, Rachel wondered.

Mr. Combs seemed undisturbed as he answered. "Has she?"

"Oh, aye. It was a great present you left her, the paints. A passion she has for making likenesses, Mr. Combs. Akin to yours even, in time. Plucked the swine of their hair for her brushes before she takes to immortalizing them on the stones by the water's edge! Do painters ever take on apprentices of the female persuasion, sir? Or have they schools that my daughter might someday—" He blinked, staring harder at the artist. "Mr. Combs?"

"Yes?"

"What would you be wanting with my coat, sir?"

"I told my friends of your family's celebrated hospitality. They were doubting Thomases. Had to see to believe you'd give me the clothes off your back. So I've . . . ah, taken the liberty."

"A joke, then? Some manner of English joke, is it?"

"Yes. Exactly."

Darragh's eyes looked over Mr. Combs's shoulder, found Rachel. "I know this woman, sir. She ... she brings something— I don't remember."

"You don't have to. Just remember her a good woman, and go with her now."

Darragh Ronan grabbed the artist's sleeve. The sight of Rachel was breaking his voice of the lilting artifice he'd used with the Englishman. A dark, raw-edged desperation took its place. "Where is this, Mr. Combs? Where is my family?"

"Rest from your questions," he urged. "Trust us."

"To—to send your likenesses of us as word to the queen?" Darragh groped now, "To show her how her subjects are starving, as you said last time?"

"Yes, exactly."

"Good of you."

"Not at all." The artist's voice was finally gruff with unshed tears, Rachel suspected.

Darragh turned his face to the wall. "Bloody English," he muttered. "How can we trust any? After the Battle at the Boyne? After the year of the French?"

"What? What do you say to me, Darragh Ronan?"

The millwright remained still.

"I believe the truth has finally won over thy friend's famous hospitality, Friend Combs," John Allen rendered an opinion.

"Get him out of here, before I change my mind," the artist charged, hauling Darragh Ronan to his feet. "And hit me hard, you damned Quaker, so I don't spend the rest of my life in here."

Miss Wakefield would not be favoring the idea of smuggling Darragh Ronan out of Ireland. Of that Rachel was sure. But Captain Lawes of the Hammersmith was a kind man. And they would be well at sea by morning. Perhaps he'd understand, and would help her to repatriate the millwright to America.

She leaned over the bunk, grateful for the cabin's darkness. Perhaps all will be well, until morning, she dared to hope.

Darragh Ronan slept so soundly. Due to the drug, she reminded herself. Still she checked his breathing, like she once did with Atoka, crammed with him aboard the steamship on the way west. Suddenly, out of the darkness, a flash of movement. She felt the Irishman take her wrist. In a hold, not a grip. One that was gentle, but strong enough to steal her breath. And so cold . . .

Now, here was a switch: Bevin standing over him. How was he tucked in bed before her, Darragh wondered. Perhaps she had gotten up to check the children? He felt the rapid pulse at her wrist before taking her small hand in his. He called her. name, then urged her to get into bed beside him. She did not answer. And it was so damp, cold outside the bed.

"Bevin, is something wrong?" he asked.

A little murmur. Was she angry? Had he forgotten the blessing, and climbed into their bed without its recitation? He thought of a short one, for his mind was fogged with sleep and darkness. He sang it softly in his best Irish.

Bless Thou, O God, the dwelling,

And each who rests herein this night;

Bless Thou, O God, my dear ones

In every place wherein they sleep,

Both bab and begetter,

Both wife and children,

Both young and mature,

Both maiden and youth.

Michael, bright warrior

Brigid, fair and tender

And Columba kindly

Giving benediction

On those within.

There. Did he have everyone under their roof covered? Her hand was warming. Still, she did not come into the bed. He pulled himself to his elbows.

"Shall I build up the fire then, love?"

She pushed him back and quickly climbed in at last. What was this game? He liked it, even her strange silence. The whole cabin was silent with every mother's son and daughter deep in dreams. Bevin smelled like she never had before, like a forest at midnight. Perhaps he was not so tired .. .

Rachel tried to stop the frightened catches in her breathing. Mr. Combs said laudanum had unpredictable results. But by morning Darragh Ronan would be himself again. Please, God, just keep him still until morning, until they were well out at sea. The Aliens said Rachel should go to the captain with the request for his asylum then. They didn't tell her what she should do now, with Miss Wakefield expecting her for evening prayers, while she was lying in a man's arms. Send him back to sleep, please, God, so she might slip away. But he was speaking at her ear now, in a language she didn't understand. He was asking for something as he reached down, drew her shift up her leg. Of course. How stupid of her . . .

He smelled her tears. "Bevin. You're crying. What is it, love?"

She shook her head.

"What has you worried?"

No answer.

"Is it the raid at the newspaper?"

She curled away from him.

"Don't you be fearing for me. I only ran the press for Young Ireland. I don't have the head for rhetoric those more formal educated boys do. It's they, the bright lads, and know where to hide until cooler heads prevail. And they won't call on me again until they want me to get the press up and running. And I stay clear of the Whiteboys, do I not, then? It's them the bloody English will be seeking out first."

Rachel felt his hand slip around her middle. He asked her something. Just one word, this time, not related to that speech that sounded like an apology. A question, she was sure of it. Rachel searched her mind for a word of his language, some phrase that might make sense to him. Perhaps, if she answered, he would go back to sleep. There, that strange Irish word again, more insistent.

"Warm?" be asked his wife.

Rachel nodded slowly. She felt his lips beside her ear. Along with a longer sentence.

"And would it please you to be warmer still, my sweet, silent wife?"

He kissed her throat.

"Rachel!" Miss Wakefield shouted from the doorway. Light flooded into their cabin. Into Darragh Ronan's eyes. "Rachel?" he repeated, squinting into the light, then yanking his hand back from the small waist as if it were on fire. "An Mhaighdean Mhuire," he whispered, "briongloid?"

"Speak English, you filthy heathen!" a grim woman in full black fury demanded.

"Not— Not a dream," he translated, putting his too heavy head in his palm.

"You'll have to do better than that, if you want to avoid a hanging at sea."

"Sea?"

The woman sneered at him. "I thought he was clever. They all spoke of him as clever." The look on her. Saint Michael, what had he ever done to this woman? "Perhaps you'll be more lively company for the captain, in his irons."

"Miss Wakefield," Bevin, who was not Bevin, but was Rachel LeMoyne, called out. Darragh saw a flash of her leg before the nightgown covered it in her flight from the bunk. He shivered without her warmth. She caught the woman's arm. "You must not go to the captain yet! Not until we're well out, please! You must—"

The woman turned, freezing back any other protest with her eyes. "No 'musts' from you, backsliding into your own heathen ways! They warned me. They all warned me. You are like the rest, possessing only the faintest spark of moral conscience, pathetically insufficient to enlighten your dark nature, or to prevent you from wallowing in all kinds of sin." She gave Darragh the hard stare again. "You now have two choices regarding this man, now that you are his whore. Watch him hang, or marry him. I am done with you."

Rachel couldn't bear to look behind her in the ringing aftermath of the woman's departure. She fought back the tears that threatened. Without success. Finally, she felt a gentle swipe at her elbow. "You didn't have to indulge me in an ocean voyage to convince me to marry you, Rachel LeMoyne," his voice, light, teasing came out of the darkness like spring.

Laughter joined her tears as she turned to her scarecrow. "English! You're speaking English! And you know me!"

"I was on my way to that, maybe."

"Mr. Ronan!"

"Miss LeMoyne, as you are the one subjecting me to drugs, jailbreak, abduction at sea, and one more thing I'll have the delicacy not to mention, I hardly think you ought be taking that tone on yourself."

"You know me," she said again, unable to stop her relieved weeping. "Oh, Darragh, we were so worried about you."

"We? Who? Not that battle-ax just left us, surely!"

"No, not her." She wiped her nose on her sleeve.

"Will you stop this forsaken caterwauling, and tell me what you're up to this time?"

She bowed Tier head, bit her lip. "Marriage, I think."

"Bloody hell! You cannot be obligated by that woman's preposterous . . . Rachel?" He scanned her loose-weave shift and reddened. "You wouldn't tell them that... I— I did not, did I?"

"No. But I think you'd best let me marry you, just the same."

He cocked his head. "Why?"

"Because you are a dead man in Ireland. In America, you have a chance. And I can make you an American."

"American? I thought you were queen of the bleeding Choctaw Nation!"

She fisted her hands at her hips. She'd taken enough from this man tonight, despite his desperate circumstances, and in or out of his dreams. "Oke, I am a peace chief from the Choctaw, who were thriving in my country before your great seafaring Brendan the Navigator was a thought in the mind of his grandfather!" sheinformed him. "If that country is now America, then I am American."

He ran his hand through his lifeless black hair. Rachel watched him struggle to clear himself of the drug. Rachel's own mind tried to catch up with what her mouth had proposed, almost without its knowledge. To go back to his own country meant death. He did not have a place, except for the one she'd made for him, here on the Hammersmith. He did not have a family, except in his dreaming. She'd passed for his sister, there in the dark of that hanging place. They were not so different. Would that help? Or would Atoka be furious, Rachel wondered, by her sudden, strange choice in husband?

seven

Captain Lawes was kind and solemn and respectful. So respectful Rachel almost changed her mind, until she saw his compassionate interest lighten the occasion of her shipboard wedding. He was her great protective bear. She longed to fold herself in his soft fur, and not have to marry this flinty man who smelled of death beside her.

She had not thought of being married in years, except when Atoka badgered her about it. She had chosen another path, an honorable path. Had the missionaries chosen it for her? Is that what she'd had to travel across the Atlantic to find out? The first mate lit a candle that burned with little smoke and smelled of beeswax. Her Uncle Bridges kept bees, isn't that what Atoka had told her once? Was this a sign then, of her family's approval?

It was not a true marriage. It was being done to save a life, this promise. Did that make it less a lie? Who would counsel her? Not Miss Wakefield, a tight-lipped, gloating witness to the lie, to Rachel's fall from grace. That caused her satisfaction, perhaps? The possibility made Rachel's hands tremble. It was not a good thing to have such a person standing beside her at the ceremony.

Rachel had never loved Miss Wakefield or her brother, nor any of the missionaries, not with the fierce love she gave Atoka, her parents, sister, her people. The missionaries didn't seem to want love, for all their devotion to the life and afterlife of the Choctaw. But she had respected them, and tried so hard to follow, to be a good Christian and a good Choctaw. Was that so impossible? Her throat was dry. Would she be able to speak, to declare herself for Darragh Ronan?

These people—the missionary and the ship's captain—were binding her in this Christian marriage, to a man who still slept with his dead wife. "Death do us part?" The words shocked her. They were not part of Choctaw marriage. This was her first time attending a Christian marriage ceremony, even after all her years at the mission. When she faltered, she received comfort from the place she least expected it. Darragh Ronan took her hand. She looked up. Yes, comfort in his calm eyes, helping her to repeat the strange words.

She leaned against his side and closed her eyes, feeling spent, like when Atoka told her that her patents had joined Sleeps Sound in death.

"My wife could use the benefits of the salt sea air, I'm thinking, gentlemen," she heard this man, her husband, say as he anchored his long fingers at her waist.

They departed the captain's quarters with congratulations, with the slammed door of the cabin she'd shared with Miss Wakefield, the key turning in the lock.

Rachel wore the hooded cloak that Memory Allen had given her as they reached the open deck, and carried the document that still waited for their signatures. If she loosed her grip, the paper might sail off in the breeze and into the depths of the Atlantic, never signed, never legal. Perhaps that's why the captain, her protector bear, left them alone here, left the inkwell and pen. Waiting for a final decision.

But they'd said the spell of marriage, and words had power.

Rachel felt married. Was marriage to Darragh Ronan a punishment for all Rachel's betrayals of her Christian faith? For enjoying the brief feel of a man's hands along her spine, and his gentle, persuasive kiss? Rachel felt dizzy with questions that ate themselves, like the tail of a snake.

"Breathe deeply, little one," her husband counseled.

She nodded, following his instruction, and felt better.

Darragh Ronan released his hold on her, then leaned on the rail to brace his healing leg, watching the stars come out.

"If I jump overboard, you'd be rid of me," he suggested.

She stepped forward. "In no time. I know you, in the water. How you sink like a stone."

He winced. "Aye. Yet I can't go that way unless you push. I'm no coward, mind you. But my religion forbids suicide."

"I see."

"That's why I waited, there, in my own country. For death to come to me. Instead you came with your corn. Perhaps this is a dream within a dream. I don't understand it at all."

"Does your religion require understanding of all things?"

"Oh, no. It is full of mysteries."

"Mine, too."

"Ah. Common ground, then, Mrs. Ronan."

"Swimmer."

He turned, facing her. The moon cast a silver halo around all his darkness. "Swimmer?"

"Yes. Our name is Swimmer. Mr. Combs thought it best, to change it. To protect—"

"Combs? The English artist?"

"You don't remember? He took your place in the jail."

His mouth twisted in its displeasure. "No Englishman took my place."

"And no Irish had ever shown him such hospitality, he said of you and yours."

She watched him work the sense of what she said through his still-fogged mind. "Well, he can be a comb if he wishes, but I'll not be turning myself into a fish. My name is Ronan."

The pressure of her grip crushed the document in her hand,but she willed her voice calm. "Ronan means 'swimmer,' Blind Maeve told me. That and many wonderful stories. So when it came time to choose, I thought it might be a respectful name, if it was a translation. I am a translator's daughter. I was trying to ease your journey to my country. I was trying to keep you safe."

He frowned deeply. "The name mocks me as it honors you."

"Not once I teach you to swim, and so honor your ancestor."

"My ancestor? What are you about now? Ah . . ." She saw understanding brighten those intelligent eyes, even as they struggled out of the vestiges of the drug. "One of that bane's stories, is it then? Of the seal woman?"

"Selkie. That's what Blind Maeve called your long-ago grandmother. Daughter of a seal man and mortal. She says this grandmother is why you have dark hair."

His mouth twitched again, but suppressing a smile this time. "She or a Norman usurper, or a wrecked Spanish sailor. Let me see the paper, then, before you destroy it in your great strength." Rachel loosened her grip, and placed it into his hands. He sniffed, scanning the document. "Crois na Slanaightheoir. That's not my given name either!"

"It's not? I-I have never seen it spelled out, so I wrote it out the way it sounds to me."

"Darragh," he insisted. "D-a-double r-a-g-h."

"But—"

"Irish! I'm Irish, woman!"

His eyes were sparked by the moon's light and his anger. She could see the whites of them curving under the deep gray of the balls. She had offended him in her ignorance. Nothing she'd done was right. Rachel felt her lower lip trembling, but she kept a steady gaze on those sunken eyes of his.

"I know only the spellings of American English, which is simpler than your language, or the language of England, I think. D-a-r-e. A word that means brave. I thought—"

"Bloody English," he muttered, walking away from her.

Rachel followed, wishing he'd loosen his hold on the certificate and let it float out to sea, instead of crushing it between those fingers that had stroked her back with such tenderness.

Then she was ashamed of the thought, and of wanting to be free of him and his ghosts. "I will change it. The ink is here, see? Tell me the proper way again. I'm sorry."

He turned, looked down at the marriage paper, at her hands offering the inkwell and pen. "Dare Swimmer," he said, his voice so weary it made her want to weep. "Rachel LeMoyne Swimmer." He grabbed the inkwell from her hands and slammed it on the first flat surface he found, a signal flag box. He leaned over, signed the paper with a burst of his own language. Were they curses, those strange sounds? Would she have to burn sage against their power? He realized her puzzlement and gave her a short, courtly bow. "Pardon me, wife. I said, 'Christ and his saints help us.' "

"Yes," Rachel agreed, breathing easier. No sage, then, except perhaps in thanks, that her new husband was not cursing her already.

He took up her hand. She felt his long suffering, his hunger through the bones. Perhaps these were the last things still feeding him, these short bursts of anger. She could bear them, if so.

"Rachel," he said her name gently. "I respect our circumstances, and your brave generosity, though I feel it was wasted on me. This thing we have accomplished. This shipboard marriage. My religion requires more than the paper your captain has given us. It requires vows before a priest, and consummation. I will look after you as best I am able for as long as you can stand my company. This I promise you before God. But I will neither priest-wed nor touch you as a husband. Please do not you be afraid of me."

"I'm not afraid." It did not occur to her to be afraid of him, not since the first time she'd seen him under the great oak with his bones and skulls. But the strangeness of that fact only now struck her. She did not even think of Darragh Ronan, Dare Swimmer, as a white man: rapacious, always taking, the kind from whom she'd been warned since she was a child. Why was that? What did it mean? This man clouded her mind with questions. Now he looked relieved. Too relieved. She tilted her head,annoyed with him. "Does your religion allow divorce?" she asked.

"No."

"Mine does. It is very simple. I put your belongings outside our dwelling, we divide our blankets. We are divorced."

She saw the shadow of a pout crease his unshaven chin. "And does washday count?"

She swiped the handsome fitted shoulder of Mr. Combs's fine coat. "No."

"A smile is it I see out of you, Mrs. Swimmer? If you can smile this day you've been saddled with me, there's hope for us, I'm thinking. At least until your mighty brother kills me."

She frowned. He loved courting death, this man, this very white, glowing-like-the-moon's-face Irish man. She didn't like having such a husband. It reflected badly on her. "Now why would Atoka harm you, when he's been badgering me to marry for years?"

"Has he? Why?"

She couldn't tell him about the children they would never have, because he was not her true husband, and slept only with his dead wife. She was furious with that dancing woman and her children, suddenly, for not staying in those beautiful hills. Why should they follow her husband, Dare Swimmer, to the territory that belonged to the Choctaw, begging comparison?

His curious, intelligent eyes were searching her face for an answer to his question. She turned away, leaned over the rail. The moon led a shining trail through the water to itself.

"Rachel?" her husband called again, softly, beguiling her, if such a thing was possible. "Tell me why your brother badgers you?"

"I—I like it when you're not all questions. That was a good marriage gift. And now you have spoiled it."

"I'm sorry. Please don't cry."

"I'm not crying. It's cold. I'm cold and tired, and Miss Wake-field has locked us out of the cabin."

"Might I hold you then, making myself useful?"

She nodded, sniffing, feeling ridiculous, like a child. And he held her like one, though he was as rough and brittle as a diseased tree that the next storm might bring down for tinder. He spoke softly into her hair. To her. Not to a child.

"Ach, Rachel. Were I to die this night, it would be the one thing that grieves me, bidding you good-bye. Why is that do you think, wife? When all you've done is—what is this good word of your brother's? Badger me?"

"You've deserved it."

"Aye," he agreed, and she felt the warmth of his deep sigh in her hair. "But, no more weeping out of you. First let me make myself worthy of your tears, Queen of the Choctaw."

The cabin boy gathered up the inkwell and tapped his shoulder. "Mr. Swimmer?"

He was answered with a whirling turn and a stream of Irish invective.

The boy stepped back, startled. He looked to Rachel. "Mrs. Swimmer?" he tried.

"Yes?"

"Captain Lawes has made a gift of his cabin. It is now ready for you both as his guests over the voyage to New Orleans. I'm to say there's fresh linens on the bed and a hot tea awaiting."

Her bear had heard Miss Wakefield's key in the lock, too. Astonished, Rachel smiled. "That is very kind of him."

"Oh, aye. He's kinder than most, ain't he, ma'am?"

"Isn't. Isn't he," Rachel corrected, out of schoolteacher habit.

"Isn't. Beg pardon, ma'am, sir."

Rachel pressed her fingers to her mouth willing her voice to work, to not frighten the child with her tears.

"The kindest man on board, we're thinking," her Irish husband said softly.

The boy straightened his stance further, even as he peered into their faces. "Captain Lawes, he says you require his space because you are royal company he's wed together this night. Are you really an Indian princess like Pocahontas, ma'am?"

Rachel loved the way the boy looked at her differences withwonder, because of the story her great bear captain had planted in his head. She went to one knee beside him, her skirts billowing in the night air, awing him further.

"Well, my new husband has notched me up. He's made me a queen now, as he's the king of Ireland."

Dare grunted. "Just of Connacht. Not the High King. Just a king."

"Wait until I write to my mother on this! Imagine!"

Dare touched the boy's head. "Aye, lad," he directed. "Imagine."

The child was about the size of his son in Mr. Combs's last drawings, Rachel realized. Dare watched the lively form of the cabin boy until it disappeared in the night mist. But he tried mightily not to, Rachel surmised, just as she'd tried not to hear her sister in every baby's cry.

"Tea's waiting," she said softly, touching his arm.

Once the cabin boy had removed the tray the new Dare Swimmer sunk deeper into the captain's chair. He unbuttoned Mr. Combs's colorful embroidered vest and rubbed his middle.

Rachel touched his sleeve. "Are you unwell?"

"I may not swim a stroke, but I don't get seasick. I've taken on the highest swells of Loch Allen in a storm without a twinge. Damned laudanum," he murmured.

"May I—"

"No. Leave me alone."

These were their quarters. She couldn't leave him alone. Perhaps he didn't mean for her to go, she decided as he looked away from her, moving nothing but his thin fingers along his middle. He'd drunk the strong tea, but only finished half the rich cakes of their wedding tea. Eating seemed to pain him. Perhaps it did, after he'd lived on so little for so long.

Captain Lawes's cabin, under the soft glow of the whale oil lamp, mahogany woods, maps, and a library of a dozen books, beckoned with its warm comforts. Rachel removed her travelingsuit, then placed her dressing gown over her shift before she unpinned her braids. She sat at the edge of the bed to brush them out, then rebraided her hair in a single loose plait, the tradition among Choctaw married women. Her husband's face had lost its surliness when she dared look upon it again.

"Feeling better?" she asked softly.

"Aye. I beg your pardon for my bad temper, Mrs. Swimmer."

She sighed at him slumped there in the spindle-backed chair. "Dare, come to bed."

His tired eyes brightened. "Might I?"

"Of course. Look. It's big enough for both of us."

"Aye. Thank you, Mrs. Swimmer."

"Yalabusha."

"What is this word?"

"It is one of my Choctaw names. It means tadpole, good swimmer."

A little dance there, in the corner of his eye. A pocket of him where his humor slipped out.

"So, wife," he summoned her, *it's your own name you've given me?"

"Yes," she realized.

"Or is it that we always had the same name, and were searching for a common language, translator's daughter?"

"I like that better still. Dare?"

"Aye?"

She stood. "Get into the bed first. I favor the outside."

He grinned. "Done, madame."

He pulled off boots that were too big for him, making Rachel wonder if his feet had shrunk in his hunger. No. They were Mr. Combs's boots. He removed the artist's expensive gentleman's clothes like a Choctaw, without any hint of modesty, until he was down to the pearly cotton and linen shirt. She had seen her own people in starving times, and how thin their bodies became. His was worse than any, and his paleness made him seem even more fragile. The shadows of purple bruises showing through the shirt's light weave spoke of captive punishments beyond those that caused his cracked lip. He caught her staring. Men wereproud creatures. God, let him not think I feel pity, Rachel prayed as he spoke.

"Changed your mind?" he asked her pointedly.

"No. But you're in sore need of fattening, husband."

"And I never asked if you can cook."

"Well enough."

"Anything besides those yellow flat cakes that burned my tongue?"

"A few things."

"Good. I have an appetite, I recall."

He climbed into a bed that hardly sagged under his weight. She followed. He was warm and alive, this bone picker, picked clean himself. "Do recall it," she urged.

He sighed against her hair. "Sweet dreams, wife," he said, as if he were amused at her taking his real wife's place, or as if he were a brother, indulging her in a marriage game. And of course, that's what it was. He kissed her temple before he turned his back to her and his face to the wall.

Rachel stared at the stars though the porthole. She touched her throat, remembering his kiss there, the delicate sweetness of it, even though it had not been for her. She had spent much of her life in the companionship of sleeping partners. Her brother. Other girls at the mission school. Why did this one's bony back discomfort her so? He was not her true husband. Perhaps he would never be. She realized the cause of her disturbance suddenly, sitting up. Her new husband had distracted her from her nightly ritual, praying over Atoka's braid to keep him safe until morning. She pulled it from the pouch she'd sewn into her shift. Her breath caught in her throat. The fraying cornsilk tie had broken. The braid was unraveling. Its woven-through bead slipped between her fingers. She uttered a small cry. Dare turned.

"Rachel? What is it?"

"My brother. Something's happened."

"What?"

She began describing what she saw, somewhere back behind her eyes. "He's breaking things. Furniture. Oh, Dare."

"Tell him to stop. Tell him you're coming. You're almost home."

"But look. The tie from his braid is gone! And I've lost the bead!"

"All right, then. Be still. Talk with Atoka. I'll find it. Work the braid tight again, will you do that?"

"Oke. A-all right," she stammered, feeling like a fool, though he wasn't treating her like one, wasn't angry with her for disturbing his sleep. He crawled around the captain's fine, wine-dark carpet until his fingers retrieved something, held it between her eyes and the moonlit porthole.

"Is this the bead, then?"

"Yes!"

"Work the braid, work the braid," he reminded her, "I'll keep a grip on this fine piece of midnight until you're ready to weave it in."

"I'm ready."

He climbed back into the bed, handing her the shimmering glass. "Aye, and a fine job of it you've done, Mrs. Swimmer," he soothed. "Now, shall we put a bit of Mr. Combs's shirt to better use than shrouding your near useless bag-of-bones husband?"

"Oh, Dare—"

"Weave, and hold that heathen talisman fast," he warned, ripping the hem of the long shirt until he had two thin strips rolled between deft fingers. "Now, then, one end at a time, lift for me, there's a good lass. Now, if you'll place your smallest finger here?"

Rachel watched the spiraling crown of his lank, depleted black hair as he concentrated/on the task of securing Atoka's braid at each end. He did it without losing a strand in the process, as if this was a task he was used to. Was he? Did he secure his wife's, his young daughter's hair? Had he braided his mother's as she lay dying? Rachel realized she was seeing these things, in the same place, back behind her eyes.

"Did I not do it up proper?" he asked softly, alarmed by her tears.

She touched the high, sharp cheekbone of his ravaged face.

What right had she to add to this man's torment? She felt suddenly unworthy of his concern. "You've made it better than it has ever been. Dare. Look." She held it higher. "Your hair is almost the same color as my brother's."

"Is it? Do you think selkie people travel up your mighty Mississippi, then, Mrs. Swimmer? Or might Atoka make me a relation by way of St. Brendan the Navigator and his amorous crew?"

"He won't need to. We are all of us related."

He turned his face into the curve of her hand, and rested it there. His stubbled beard was soft, surprising her. "He's well, now," his voice soothed. "You'll see him soon. You'll set everything right between you."

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak until he took her into his arms, and bolstered them both snug against the pillows. "I am not sorry. For anything," she whispered against his brittle collarbone.

"Nor am I," he admitted. "May God, His Mother, and all the saints forgive us both then, Rachel LeMoyne. I fear we are some kind of married."

eight

Rachel expected no help in getting her husband safely on American soil from Miss Wakefield. Her teacher was furious that this punishment she'd devised—marriage to a heathen Irishman— was not proving a punishment at all. Instead of being shunned in disgrace, the newlywed couple were, beginning with the awestruck cabin boy, doted on. Officers, passengers, and crew alike claimed they were the cause of everything from the unseasonably balmy breezes that ferried them across the Atlantic to the company of laughing dolphins off the bow.

Dare had more than endured Miss Wakefield's shunning. He'd never failed to greet her without a tipped hat and shower of pleasantries. He'd grown up bowing to the Manor Hamilton gentry every day and seldom being acknowledged by them. He was used to Miss Wakefield's icy countenance, he'd assured Rachel.

Though her Irishman walked slowly and bore the ravages of his hunger, Rachel sometimes felt very plain and shy beside him,he dressed in Mr. Combs's finery, with his affable manner among all the ship's passengers. Other times she was less shy, like when she held his coat and vest as he crawled close to ask his questions and sigh with wonder at the workings of Captain Lawes's fire-bellied bird.

"Sweet dreams," he repeated every night. Turning away each time. But he would turn back again in his sleeping, dreaming of his life with his Irish wife perhaps, or of soothing one of his children. Rachel didn't mind, and sometimes dreamed herself—that Atoka was holding her on the trail after the others had died, the earth scent of their graves still under his fingernails. Every morning she and Dare awoke to find themselves spooned in each other's arms. At first Rachel saw the hot blush rise up his neck and color his face as he apologized. But this morning he'd kissed her forehead and bade her good morning, without an expression of regret.

When three mast men broke bones during the only storm on the crossing, Rachel and Dare helped the ship's surgeon tending them. The captain proclaimed their efforts publicly at the main dining -table that night. Rachel slipped her hand in the crook of Dare's arm then, and he patted it fondly, as if they'd been married years instead of days. Tender gestures were part of his game, like their marriage itself, of course. But Rachel liked the game.

The cabin boy sent children in small flocks of three or four to view the royal couple as they took walks around the forecastle. Dare's eyes would get that haunted look at the sight of them, making Rachel wonder if he would ever visit her classroom. If she had a classroom, or was a teacher any longer. The missionaries ran her school, not the Choctaw.

He listened intently to the stories she told of her people, from the days of the Choctaw's first spirit guided journey eastward, to the time of the Mound Builders, to their exile in Oklahoma. He asked open, simple questions, not his teasing ones. He was like a child seeking knowledge at those times, and not like any white man she had ever met.

His interest in her people gave her courage to ask him whythey would hang him in his own country. He enumerated his crimes, from running a printing press for an outlawed political movement that sought more rights for Catholics, to helping desperate neighbors in need with food and shelter. For these things he would be admired by the Choctaw, she'd assured him. He'd put his head in his hand and stared off toward the place over the water where the sun had risen.

The dark circles under his eyes looked like bruises to her then. He missed his country. Of course, she must allow him that. And what had she to offer to replace it? She would lose her place at the mission school, surely. Atoka would have to take her in, and Dare as well. To the council, Miss Wakefield would paint their time in Ireland a failure, and Rachel a disgraced menace. Would the council agree? Would Dare be safe from Miss Wakefield and her fury? Would they have to leave? What could Rachel offer him then? A hiding place in the hills, where the American and Spanish, French and Mexican renegades sought refuge? No. Atoka would help her find a better path than that one. Rachel tried to calm herself with that thought, as she clung tenaciously to the notion that she had done something right in freeing Dare from the Sligo prison, that even a hard life in his new country would be an improvement.

As they entered the port of New Orleans, Rachel's Irish husband gathered up their small bag of belongings. If she'd married a Choctaw man, that would be her job. Atoka wouldn't know this was her husband if he saw them together in this way, she thought. She longed to see her brother. She eased her longing with a touch of his braid, now secure again thanks to her clever husband who was once rich in his own braided women, but was now Oisin indiaidh na Feinne, Oisin after the Fianna—a man out of his time, his family and friends all dead. Or was he reborn? That would be for him to decide.

Captain Lawes had been right—the fresh-minted Dare Swimmer escaped a rigorous customs examination in light of their first-class passenger status and her great bear's intervention. But she must be vigilant. Once on shore Dare's sanctuary would end.

Rachel caught sight of Miss Wakefield lifting her umbrella touse as a wedge in the crowd. She was working her way toward a uniformed man on the dock. Captain Lawes saw too. He sent forth his cabin boy. The boy served as the captain's wedge. He managed to trip Miss Wakefield, then sat on her umbrella until she pulled him off by his hair. "Go," the captain whispered, before squeezing Rachel's hand. He interceded between the boy and woman, holding the missionary secure in his iron grip. Rachel fought back the fear freezing her mind as she grabbed her husband's hand and bolted.

Dare must not go back, not before he'd had a chance in America. They would hang him in Ireland. There was only one direction from here. Away. From the commotion on board the Hammersmith. From the high-pitched orders from the anchored woman who Rachel had once thought her friend.

When they reached the street, Rachel ran into a red woven shirt, and the sage-scented man it contained.

His gruff embrace felt warm with love and relief. Atoka, as if he'd been waiting at the dockside since he'd chanted her into her new womanhood. She took his hand, linking herself to both her brother and husband for the first time. The air charged with possibility.

"Atoka! How—?"

"That woman wailing there sent word of your return. I came, watching the ships since that letter."

"We must get this man away."

Atoka's brow arched as he surveyed Dare. "Without her?"

"Yes," she whispered, "I... I have done with her." Rachel felt her new husband's short, winded breathing, his fingers trusting hers. He struggled, as she did, for balance on newly landed legs. "Please, Atoka. Help us."

Interest sparked her brother's face. "Can you ride a horse?" he asked Dare.

"Better than I can walk, at present."

Atoka nodded toward the three horses standing in the shade near the crowded dock. They'd advanced only halfway to them when another shout to halt was followed by a shrill whistle. "Don't turn," Atoka warned. Rachel needed the warning, but theman who could barely keep pace with her brother's strides did not. He was more used to running.

They mounted. Atoka made a polite request in French, and the crowd behind them filled the gap and slowed the movements of their pursuers.

Dare leaned over his mount, speaking softly at the horse's ear. His ways went far to ease Raven Mocker into his task over the streets of New Orleans. Her sharp-eyed brother noticed it too, even as he led them through a maze of cobblestones, then out onto an open course of countryside.

They rode hard for an hour until they approached another Mississippi dockside, piled high with chopped wood. A few men were watching downriver. None noticed them. Atoka sidelined them among some moss-laden trees before he slid off Sassafras's back. Rachel and Dare dismounted, still shipboard, with less ease.

"Who is after this mart?" Atoka asked.

"Immigration authorities. The magistrate. Miss Wakefield."

Her brother grinned. "Powerful enemies." He turned to his saddlebags and pulled out a bundle of clothes. "Here." He shoved them at Rachel. "Out of those skirts. We must save fare money."

"Fare money?"

"Change. Remake yourself. This next journey we take together, as we rode away from your missionary school together some nights long ago, remember, little sister? In the time before you became one of them?"

"Oke." She nodded and began to pull on the trousers under her skirts. Dare stared until Atoka shoved his shoulder, making him face forward to give her a privacy shield for her transformation. Rachel stepped out of her skits and hoop, then yanked her corset higher, so that her breasts were within its confine. She loosened the strings until her waist was no longer pinched. She donned Atoka's blue gingham shirt then, hoping the shirt's tucks and generous fit would further render her breasts obscure. As she pulled out her combs and pins, freeing her thick braid,she grinned, feeling twelve again, about to sneak out of the mission to ride with her brother, to swim with him under a full summer moon. Finally she called to the broad-backed men: "Done."

"She doesn't look like a boy," Dare protested.

"It's not your eyes we need to fool."

Atoka stood back and looked doubtful himself. "Put your braid inside here," he advised, throwing her a boatman's cap. Rachel did as he asked, stealing a look at her husband, who was frowning. Her brother then went to his knees and rolled up the too-long trouser legs. Next Atoka scooped some dirt off the ground and smeared her cheek. "There. You were too clean, that's all, Tadpole."

He turned to Dare. "This way, we can all travel topside, third deck. And we two can look out for our little brother."

"That makes sense," Dare agreed reluctantly.

"Who—"

A shrill whistle sounded from the river.

Atoka shook his head. "Come," he commanded. He led them down to the dockside. Rachel and Dare held the horses, which helped keep them steady. The man supervising the woodpile surveyed them quickly, removed his hat. Rachel smiled politely, forgetting his cordiality was not for her. He addressed only Dare. "Fine-looking horses, sir!"

"Thank you."

"Do you all seek passage on the Carolina Mist, master?"

Rachel saw her husband's slight flinch at the word. "Aye."

"Your boy, he can earn himself two dollars off the topside fare if'n he helps us haul this firewood aboard to feed those mighty boilers. Captain might take a dollar off the small one's fee as well, if he can manage a half load. We could use the help, sir. Time's money, on the river."

Rachel watched her husband and brother exchange quick glances. When Dare spoke with the man again, his accent changed. There was no singing in its new tones. "We need our Tad to look after the horses. But Atoka and I will haul wood,gladly." He was imitating the language of his enemies, the English, Rachel realized. He sounded like Mr. Combs.

The man raised his eyebrows. "You? Times as hard as that, sir?"

Dare nodded, smiling. "Fully as hard."

"Well. Pleased to have your company, then." The whistle of the steamship Carolina Mist blew again. The vessel came in sight around the river's bend. Rachel stared at its massive form. It was not like the deep-keeled ocean ship, or the river steamboats that had helped to bring them to the new nation. The Carolina Mist was grand, full of fancy carved woodwork and two tall black smokestacks powering its stern wheel. Rachel felt Dare's excitement as he watched its approach, too. A new vessel for him to learn, she thought. He handed his fine coat to her, just as he had done before inspecting the engine room of the Hammersmith.

"They think us your servants," Rachel whispered as their fingers made contact.

"Why?"

"Your clothes. Your whiteness, compared to us."

He sighed. "Aye, then. And shall we let them think as they wish?" he asked both herself and her brother.

Atoka glared, but nodded curtly, handing the reins to Dare. "Go up the gangplank first, with the horse. Keep her calm."

Rachel felt her husband's hand at her elbow. "He meant the horse, Dare," she told him with a wan smile.

"Did he now, little brother?" His smile disappeared. "Take longer strides," he advised. "And stay close by the horses, until we come for you."

"I will. Don't worry."

He gave her arm a small squeeze, then turned to join her brother.

On a boat again. On the Mississippi. Where were they going? Did her brother know? She'd needed the calming touch Dare gave to her and the horses, Rachel realized as she watched him join Atoka and the other men. Together they loaded firewood that would enable the ship to steam up the river at astonishing speeds. Rachel worried that her husband would be humiliated bythe others for not carrying the full loads that her brother was. But it seemed that most discomfort stemmed from his fellow workers, at having a man clad in gentleman's clothing working beside them.

Suddenly, a rough-looking man who smelled of pork fat grabbed her arm, startling her. "What are you doing here? Where's your ticket?" he demanded. Her throat went dry. "My brothers—" was all she could manage before she heard Atoka give a soft war yelp. He appeared, looking ready to break the man's neck. Dare reached him first. "Tad's waiting for us," he said calmly, "holding the horses, like a good lad, before we purchase our tickets." Pork Fat backed away. "Oh, is that the way of it? Beg pardon, sir," he muttered at Dare's choice boots.

"Come on then, little brother," Dare half-soothed and half-demanded in his new English tones. His fingers twitched. She nodded quickly, tying the horses secure, then following her husband and brother up the stairs.

Once on top of the ship, they all scanned the dockside and the road beside it. No one was coming, searching for them. Jumping in the muddy waters of the Mississippi would be the only escape route if the authorities found them now. And Dare Swimmer would sink as fast as Darragh Ronan would. Was the fear in his eyes caused by that prospect? There. He did love his life enough to be afraid, Rachel decided, and deemed it good. The whistle sounded again. The great tiered steamship pulled away from the dock.

Atoka led them to a deserted corner of the deck to stake their claim for space.

"How long will we be on board?" Rachel asked. "Where are we going? How did you know to bring clothes for me to—"

He frowned. "No more questions out of you. I will ask the questions now. Who is this man?"

"My husband."

Dare, winced. "Dia Dhuit, Atoka LeMoyne. Patrick and Brigid keep you well all your days," he said, offering his hand.

Her brother stared. Long. Hard. He knew a challenge when he heard one. He put his brown hand into the blue-veined one ofthe Irishman, pressed hard, closing his eyes. In the space of seconds, they shot open, fierce.

"You!" he claimed, startling Rachel with his chanting voice. "I have seen you!"

"Have you?" Dare asked evenly.

"You are a chopped oak, scarred with hatchet marks, like your country. A woman of the Choctaw people walks in your soul. You must remake yourself, or she will cast you aside."

Dare smiled. "Aye. I've heard as much from your sister."

"Look down there," Atoka commanded, a flash of annoyance in his voice. "Do you see my horses?"

Dare's eyes scanned the decks below, squinting, though the sun was not strong. Again Rachel wondered if his hunger had damaged his sight. "I see them," he finally said.

Atoka sighed out, almost snorting. "They are Coosa, Raven Mocker, and Sassafras. I saddled Raven Mocker for a missionary woman who now has daggers in her eyes for my sister, worse than the ones she's always had for me. And that missionary woman cannot sit a horse with any grace. You are an improvement over her in that, at least."

"Thank you."

"Go down to them, your rich man's clothes will give you passage. Greet my horses by their names while I ask my sister if I should welcome you or cut your heart out."

Dare turned, hesitated, and turned back to them. "You were supposed to add a saint," he told her brother quietly.

"What?"

"I greeted you with the blessings of Patrick and Brigid. You were supposed to respond in kind, adding another saint. That's the proper way of it where I come from, you see?" He grinned suddenly, with that flash of white teeth. "But I take pleasure in your horses' names salutation all the same, brother."

Rachel watched her husband's comfortable, seafaring gait launch him down toward Atoka's skittish horses. But there was no evading her brother's eyes boring into her soul.

"Is Red Clay still in your stable?" she asked quietly.

"No. Can this husband of yours race horses?"

"You've lost her again." Rachel clucked her tongue at his gambling, making her feel at home in this loud vessel full of white people's smells—steam, machinery, pork, whiskey. There, her husband emerged below. Dare greeted Atoka's skittish horses. Another man touched his back, began a conversation, a man in a high hat, with boots like Dare's. Rachel held her breath in fear until the man offered him a brush to use on Sassafras's whithers. She leaned into her brother's side, relieved. He pushed her away gently.

"Be a man," he admonished with a frown of amusement.

Rachel suddenly did not like that men and boys did not touch each other except to fight.

"From what tribe are your 'breeds, son?"

Dare turned, smiled affably, out of habit with the English. "Tribe, sir?"

"Cheyenne? They're said to be splendid horsemen."

"They are Choctaw," he said, hoping the man would go away. He handed Dare a grooming brush instead.

"Ah, you've got yourself a couple of civilized ones. Very wise."

"Civilized?"

"You know, missionary-tamed. They say some of them can even read. Yours?"

Dare stopped brushing midstroke. "They are not mine," he maintained in the careful, precise English of his blasted teachers at the national school. Sometimes he cursed his own gift for mimicry. "And my brothers and I are all literate, yes."

Expecting to enjoy the man's shock, he received a slow nod of understanding. "It's that way, is it? Been put out with only those splendid horses and the family bastards to look after you? What are you recovering from, then?"

Dare resisted saying "hunger," but didn't know what would make the man loose interest in him.

"Nothing catching, of course?"

"No, sir."

He looked relieved. There. Would that make him go away?

"Well, your servants, they're in better health by half. Your Red Indian brothers are not doing so well by you at present."

Dare was growing more perplexed by the minute, but knew enough to keep listening.

"Allow me to guess," the man speculated further. "You're a third son? Fourth? What did you do to displease them so? Did they give you a trade over there, or on the plantation? Pushed you out of the nest and into the world with some training, at least?"

Mildly amused eyes. Dare had seen those eyes on so many of the damned gentry, looking at him like a monkey who could do tricks that gave him the semblance of humanity. Not here. Not in this new country that was called the cradle of liberty, by God.

"May I ask to whom I make my answer, sir?" he asked.

"Oh, I beg your pardon! I am Albert Chambers, Mr.—?"

"Swimmer, Dare Swimmer. And I am set out into the world with some training, as you say, Mr. Chambers, yes. In fact, I believe if you had the parts of this fine vessel dismantled, put in a box and shaken well, I could get her on the water and running again in the space of a day."

To Dare's continued astonishment, Chambers threw back his head and laughed, before offering him a cigar.

What did a person in this strange country have to do to insult Americans?

Rachel watched. Her husband wore his false face, the one he'd always greeted Miss Wakefield with aboard the Hammersmith, as he stroked the fear from Atoka's horses. The laughing man beside him unsettled her. She looked away from them, and out over the trees, the green islands and houses on the Mississippi's shore. All of them were drifting past as though they were the things moving. The marvel of it. Everyone on board, regardless of fare, shared these beautiful, continually changing vistas. But there would be no kiss, no "sweet dreams" out of her husband this

night, she thought sadly, when they slept among all these rough men. Atoka brought her out of her thoughts quickly.

"Does this stray dog in winter of yours have a name?"

"Dare Swimmer," she said, facing her brother. "He thinks you very rich, even with three and not four horses. He's forbidden to own them in his own country."

"Forbidden? Why didn't he leave sooner?"

"Atoka—"

"He is very white," her brother interrupted, claiming control of the conversation's pull. It was his right, as her elder.

Rachel bowed her head. "Yes."

"And not in good health."

"No,, Because of the great hunger."

"I choose my horses better."

"Your horses choose you," she claimed. Quietly. With her head down, still.

"Will he darken in the sun?"

"I don't think so. On the ship, his skin burned red, then he turned white again."

Her brother considered her words. "I have met this kind of white man," he said. "He is like Lieutenant Connor, at the horse soldier's fort. Dare Swimmer will need a hat. Not like yours, little brother. One with a wide brim. I will buy him one, a marriage gift."

"Oh, Atoka." She pressed her hand to her mouth.

"Are you full of tears?" He looked down at the waist of her rope-tied pantaloons and lowered his voice. "Is there a child coming already?"

"No."

"Then where is your brash tongue?"

"Quieted by your acceptance of this man."

"Not beaten out by him? He is good to you?"

"Yes."

Atoka's eyes found her husband below. The man in the tall hat was finally gone from Dare's side. His stance relaxed as he put the brush away and rubbed Atoka's horses behind their ears.

His lips moved, but she could not hear his words. Rachel thought of his language, full of bursts and gutturals, not soft like Choctaw. Did he speak to them in Irish, or his new, clipped and precise English? Whatever language he used, the horses listened.

"He is tall. Taller than I am," Atoka commented begrudgingly now. "When he gets meat on those bones he will be strong. That will keep me stronger, of course. But Yalabusha, it is a hard thing to be uncle to a white man's children. They think they own them, like they seek to own the ground. You have not chosen an easy way for me. But you have chosen, at last."

"You see too much. I married him in haste, to save his life. He sleeps as a brother beside me. He dwells still in the black, in that scarred place you saw when you took his hand."

"Well. I will make a ceremony to help get him out of this place."

"Thank you." Rachel smiled, grateful for the straightforward way her brother saw the world. It was good to be in his company again.

"You look tired. Sit," he commanded, making a place for her between the saddlebags. She sank down gratefully.

He pulled off her hat. "Make two braids of your hair, until you are a true wife. Do not presume on our customs. And try to muddy up some," he advised.

"Atoka, don't you want to know why Miss Wakefield sent the police after us? Why my husband is a criminal in his own country?"

He shrugged, slouching down beside her. "Later. Braid. And rest. We made a good run, in the right direction, I know that."

"Reverend Wakefield is dead."

"I know. Word of it reached us. That is how I knew to come. I do not mourn him. He had only duty. He followed a strange path. Is his death the cause of his sister's madness?"

He watched her fingers do their work on her hair, and waited for her to find the words. Patiently, her headstrong brother. That was a wonder to her. "That may be true, the cause of Miss Wake-field's madness. But, Atoka, I caused her great grief. I gave our corn to the hungry, without, question, without insisting they become the Presbyterian kind of Christian. Then I married Dare, on the ship. She has disowned me for these things."

Atoka snorted like his horses. "The council would have put you in disgrace if you had not done the task required, without foolish conditions. You left the Irish their honor, and their own god. And you may marry whom you please." Rachel wound her new braids around her head, and replaced the cap. Atoka came closer, his eyes angry. "What is this? Tears?" he whispered furiously. "That woman never owned you, how can she disown you?"

"Atoka, they raised us."

"Our parents raised us in the ways that mattered. The missionaries did not love us for who we were, but for what they might make of us, fearful people full of dreams of burning. I do not grieve the loss of them. I will not waste my time on people not worthy of your beauty."

"I must carry my disgrace alone, then?"

"You should carry it not at all. You have other burdens now. And will someday have another, if that man of yours can make Choctaw children."

"Atoka, you must not talk with him on this!"

He smiled at her burning cheeks. "Only to you?"

"Yes, to me if you must. But you must welcome him without condition."

"Now, what negotiator does that?"

"One who loves his sister, and respects her mind on this."

"Mind or heart?"

"Do we come in pieces then, like the white people?"

He held up his hands. "When will I learn not to argue with you?"

She sighed, her burdens lightened by her brother. "Atoka, please. Do we have an agreement on this?"

"Oke," he muttered.

"Good. Now. Tell me where we are going?"

"Upriver. North to St. Louis. In the spring, west." He grinned wide. "We jump off."

nine

"St. Louis?"

"Gateway to the West."

"I know what the city is called, brother. I have not been away that long. What I want to know is why."

"That needs a story."

"I am listening."

He looked about the deck, where a few of the black roustabouts had set up, away from the flat boatmen. Atoka had chosen a quiet square over the ladies' cabin for their territory. Perhaps too quiet. She felt herself getting drowsy. She moved closer to her brother's warmth.

He shoved her from his side, the way he never would have his sister, but might a brother, growling.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Do not do things so ... softly," he finally decided on the word.

"I will remember," Rachel promised.

He grunted.

"The story, Atoka?" she asked, as if he were about to tell her Alligator and the Hunter or -How Poison Came into the World.

He looked ahead, vigilant, as he spoke. "It begins with me, visiting the mission every day to look for mail from you. With the Wakefields gone and Slips in Cider collecting mail—"

"Mary Ross, Atoka, not Slips in Cider! Must that poor woman live in the story of her early bad housekeeping her whole life?"

"She slipped again when I saw a letter addressed to us both, in care of the Reverend and his sister. A letter from the Oregon Territory. I was glad for her bad housekeeping then."

"Letter? From—?"

"Our Uncle Bridges."

Rachel felt all the breath push out of her lungs. "Atoka, is this possible?"

"More than possible. When Slips . . . when Mary Ross saw my face as I read his name and words, she gave the letter up. She braved the missionaries' wrath to do this."

"Why?"

"I did not seduce her. Her husband is my friend, and I have enough trouble with single women who are good housekeepers."

She smiled at her charming, wayward brother, glad that his charm was wedded to his honor. "Does our uncle live, then?"

"He wishes to know the same about us. If we live. If we want nothing to do with him, as our silence and the missionaries' letters have claimed."

"Our silence? How could we write when we never heard from him since he went away?"

He bowed his head between his arms as he spoke. "Do you remember that day in Nanih Waiya, little sister?"

"I do, though I clung to our mother's leg, not yet reaching her hip."

"For many months he'd asked Daddy and Mama to come before they took our lands and desecrated the mounds of our ancestors."

"To walk to the country not owned by Americans. To come to the big salt water," Rachel remembered.

"Yes! To this corner of the world, where the land is rich as our homeland, where the French, Spanish, Russian and English and Flathead and Nez Perce people trade and farm and marry each other in peace."

"You remember more than I do."

"You were only three. I was eight."

"But I remember our uncle's cabin porch, and wide smile," Rachel claimed.

"He has a porch now, Tadpole, and a big house and rich river bottom land in the Willamette Valley. He has a Nez Perce wife. They have no children but us, who have been so cruel to them."

"Cruel? But Atoka—"

"There were many letters! And maps. And books on the overland passage. All pressed with—what are they called? Provisionals—glued on, words saying that the postage was already paid, so the missionaries couldn't refuse their delivery. Someone kept them hidden away from our eyes, Rachel. Kept them from us for years, tied in corn silk cord by that woman you grieve for. The one who has shunned you."

"Why did Miss Wakefield do this?"

"To keep you tied to her, I think. When I broke up the missionary rooms, their chairs and stools and crockery ware, it was as if I could break up the world, I was so angry, until..."

"Until?" Rachel prompted, her heartbeats sounding in her ears.

"Until I felt you stroking my head, like on that night, that bad night on the trail—remember?"

"I remember. And what did I tell you, in your vision?"

"To stop this destruction of things. You told me that you were coming home, I was not alone. Rachel, you know this part of the story," he whispered.

She smiled, wishing she could touch him. She reached into her shirt and pulled out his hair token from its place pinned to her camisole. "Your destruction reached me on the great Atlantic. I cried and prattled in my confusion until my husbandfound your hair's blue bead, and wove it back into your mourning braid."

Atoka looked up at the circle of a gliding hawk before he continued. "The Christian Choctaw denounced me. Until I allowed them to see the letters, see what this woman and her brother have kept from us these years."

He leaned his head on his arm. Rachel wanted to hold him, comfort him, left to go through this trial without her. Almost without her, for they'd had each other through his braid, and her patient, hair-weaving husband. She tried to send Atoka the message of her soothing through the hawk.

"I have the letters here." Atoka reached into his pack, then dropped an oilcloth packet in her lap. "You must read them, Rachel. See if you think it was best to keep us from knowing the heart of this man, our uncle."

Rachel opened the oilcloth, then stroked the corn silk tie pinning the stack of correspondence. Miss Wakefield might have destroyed these links to their uncle. As it was, she must have thought the letters not worthy of a piece of her lace or ribbon or scrap of cloth. Rachel was glad she had chosen the corn silk. Her brother smiled, though it was a womanly act, her stroking. It didn't matter. No one was paying attention to them in a corner of the top deck of the Carolina Mist.

Atoka's voice softened. "I think the reverend did not always agree that this was a good path. Perhaps he kept his sister from burning all this. But you were his sister's prize, before you went across the water with our corn. You taught the young ones the way the Wakefields cannot, with love, and stories. That's the only way to hearts."

Her brother began answering questions her overwhelmed mind could not even form. "Once I'd read the letters, I sold Red Clay, the horse you think I gambled away. We traveled to New Orleans, the other horses and I, determined to wait, watching each ocean-faring ship for the one that brought you home. To capture you a little while, as I used to steal you away from the mission when we were children. I needed to tell you these things the way I saw them, to show you these letters. To seek your counsel on them, away from the missionaries. Your new husband has done that part for me, gotten you away from them. For that I will thank him. so he knows he has not married into a savage race.

"Enough," he decided, looking deeply into her eyes. "Sleep now, sister." His brow arched. "Your eyes are very heavy with burdens. You are sure your husband did not once turn to you during the night?"

"I'm sure!"

He held up his hands at her shout, showing his palms, an apology. "Rest," he urged again, gently amused this time, "we have a long journey ahead."

"To St. Louis."

"Yes. It will take three days. Do you think we can keep the horses healthy and your husband out of trouble for three days?"

"It is not work beyond us, brother."

"Good. Then, come spring, to Oregon."

He kissed her forehead the way he used to each night for the year of mourning after their sister's and parents' deaths. Even if he were beat for coming to 'her window at the orphanage, he came. And now he was going to welcome her husband into their family. How could she not walk to Oregon, if he asked her?

Rachel dreamed about the misting, rolling hills that she'd left in the east. Of her mother's ceremony, of saying good-bye to the oaks and elm. When she woke, she smelled the fine tooled leather of her brother's saddlebags under her head. And the birds' songs. It was almost dawn. The Carolina Mist was slowing beside another riverside landing. She stretched, realizing that Dare's black coat was serving as her blanket. Both it and Atoka sleeping beside her were wound in ceremony scent. Rachel slipped the coat over her shoulders and went to the rail. Below, she saw her husband with a fine wide-rimmed felt hat on his head. Its grosgrain ribbon band had faded to purple and danced along the rim as he helped black men load bales of cotton onto the dock. The strongest of the men had partnered with him. Rachel felt like weeping at the sight of them, her pale, scrawny husband and hisopposite in coloring and strength, who'd taken pity on him, grateful for his help, but protective of his limited abilities.

She felt Atoka's presence beside her. He touched her back lightly as he took in what was capturing her attention.

"He has lived only as long as I have, your man."

"He told you that? He has only twenty-five years?"

"Yes. It's the look of death that carves him so deep. He lost a wife and children in his country. When were you going to tell me that?"

"Atoka—"

"I burned sage, but his grief for them lies like a stone in his heart. Will it make him cruel to you, this grief?"

"It has not. And I have been entirely myself with him," she added, giving her brother a sideward glance, "which you know can prove trying to some men."

He smiled. "This is good. A good beginning. And he can make children, if he has fathered these lost three already. If he can heal himself, he will make .some for you. For our clan. Good choice, sister!"

She frowned. "You have few requirements."

"The rest I can read on your face. You like him. You have the beauty that comes with pride in your mate."

Rachel felt herself blushing. It was a pleasant, new sensation. She would never be able to hide from her brother. "My husband wears a new hat."

"Not so new. It used to belong to a French trapper, who bought it from a Hungarian miner. Its top is varnished. It's a good hat. The Frenchman said your husband can use it to wash, drink, or carry ore samples, besides protecting his tender skin from the cold and sun."

"He wears your gift with pride. He likes you, Atoka."

"He-doesn't yet know our ways. That I have bought his children with that hat. And that he still needs to purchase you yet as befits your station as a peace chief among the People."

That day she and Atoka took turns reading the letters to her husband. When they finished, Dare Swimmer sat back and ran his thumbs along the rim of his wedding gift.

"Like letters from America they spun. A person in the village would get one, then we'd all gather to hear it read. Letters that spoke of impossible wages, strange and wondrous sights, and freedoms."

"Atoka wishes to go to this place Oregon in the spring," Rachel said quietly.

"To leave your homeland?"

"The Oklahoma Indian Territory is not our homeland," her brother explained. "It is a place the soldiers have put us. It is surrounded by the United States, who are warring with the Mexicans, and might some day be at war with each other over the blacks who are slaves. The Americans have wasted our people with war and disease since before their Revolution. We have gained nothing from it but our exile, where we have to make new peace with the Comanche and Kiowa, Caddo and Osage and Wichita—people who lived in that place before us."

Rachel touched her husband's arm. "My brother and the lighthorsemen police cannot even bring to justice the criminals who take their refuge in Indian Territory. They have made our new land their haven from the United States law."

Dare shook his head. "And after this long walk, will Oregon Territory be any different?" he asked.

Rachel remembered her uncle's letters, and her geography. "It is in the corner of the continent, against another water, not the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic, but the Pacific."

"Who owns it?"

Questions. This man was so full of questions. "It... it has been claimed by many nations."

His sharp eyes bore into;' her. "Who owns it, Rachel LeMoyne?"

"The British said they did. Along with the Americans, but—"

He let out a stream of his own language that made Atoka raise his eyebrows.

"But they do not settle there, husband! The endless people, the people from the United States go there, to make farms, as my uncle has. It will belong to this new country, the one not ruled bykings. Soon. That's what the council, no, the congress in Washington is deciding. It takes them a long time to decide anything, because there are so many states. They are like us in that, my father used to say, with many leaders, all needing to talk. Oregon. It is waiting in Oregon, Dare. A farm. In a cool land, like your own country."

"You invite me? You and your brother invite me on this journey?"

She looked to Atoka, who only narrowed his eyes a little before he nodded. "Yes. You will have the winter in St. Louis to think on it. Will you think on it?"

Dare watched the snakelike turns of the muddy Mississippi ahead before he answered. "I will, aye." The same words he'd used when Captain Lawes had asked if he'd have Rachel LeMoyne as his wife.

"Thank you."

He took them both into that hollow-eyed gaze. "It will be your time too. To decide. It may be you will not wish me along, after the winter."

"That I doubt." Rachel smiled. "If you'll eat. I would like to see your true form."

"You're a brazen thing, wife," he teased. His face's shadows could not hide the creases of mirth. Even Atoka smiled.

"Folks?"

The roustabout who'd been working with Dare stood before them.

"You and yours look like you could use some nourishments," he offered a linen-wrapped bundle quietly.

That night her men slept sitting up against their belongings, with Rachel between them. She must have followed her shipboard habit of nuzzling under the crook of Dare's arm, for when the long, cold shadows fell over them, she heard her husband's heartbeat accelerate. "Mr. Swimmer?"

Rachel instinctively wrapped her arms around his middle and held tight. Too tight, making him cough before he gave out a small, confused laugh. "Easy, Tadpole." She released him, letting her fingers glide over his ribs. Atoka's hand anchored at her shoulder.

Rachel stared hard at the men, recognizing High Hat and his mean-looking walking stick. The smaller man in the blue coat and whiskers looked friendlier. But the remaining two blue coats were out of sorts. She recognized the three as the captain and two pilots. Their steamboat was quiet and stock-still, unlike the night before, when it chugged along, slow and sure. The captain spoke first.

"Mr. Swimmer, we have run aground on a sandbar, and our rudder has become deranged, and rendered unserviceable."

High Hat interceded now. "I took the liberty of making your astonishing claim of engineering ability known to Captain Harris and the ship's pilots, Mr. Swimmer. They would like to hire a man of such prodigious talents to repair it."

Rachel didn't realize she had hold of Dare's shirt until he tried to rise. He laughed again, more easily this time. "Let go of me, you little pest!" he chided in that voice without music, one that went with his false face.

"I can swim," Rachel offered, thinking only that he could not. "I can help, too!"

The captain gave her a smile for a child. "Your indulgent brother is lucky to have such a willing apprentice." One of the pilots crossed his arms in front of his chest, but the other said," "The rudder is much lighter in the water, sir."

"And I swim too," Atoka claimed, rising. "Let's go."

The water was cold, dark, and muddy. Rachel was glad to have Atoka's help with untangling the coots from the ship's rudder. Too glad even to argue that he was the horseman, she the better swimmer. She was glad for the clouds before the moon too, casting her drenched form and corset stays in shadows as she climbedback aboard the vessel. Dare growled low, dropping his coat over her shoulders.

"All right," he told them both sternly, "my work starts now. Go."

Atoka glared at him. Rachel took her brother's arm. "I'm cold," she said.

The captain smiled. You two might find some warmth around the fire in the galley while your master helps us here, how would that be?"

Rachel squeezed her brother's arm. "That'd be good, wouldn't it, Atoka?"

He grunted, but she would not let go of him as she tried to talk as a servant might. "Could I fetch a little something for Mr. Dare, sir? Keep his strength up? He's been poorly for a time now."

"Of course, little one."

Suddenly, without warning, the captain pulled off her soaked cap. Her braids descended. He stepped back, startled. He blinked twice, then laughed, directing his remarks to Atoka. "Good this wee one keeps those braids inside that cap. You can look after yourself and your wild mane, boy, but your brother here is as pretty as a girl. A flat boatman would love to pin those braids to a tree trunk, good targets for his knife throwing."

Rachel looked to Atoka.

The man with the high hat laughed at her shock. "How old are you, boy?"

"Seventeen, sir," Rachel tried, in the deepest voice she could muster.

He frowned. "Nonsense. Didn't the missionaries drum that heathen lying out of you? No trace of a beard. Maybe fourteen. Your little brother's memory is faulty, isn't it?" he asked Atoka.

"Yes, sir," he bit out, his arms tense. Her brother had little of Dare's cunning.

Rachel began to shiver.

"Stevenson, give me your cap," the Captain demanded suddenly.

"But, Captain—"

"This boy has done us a service, and you have two others. Give it here."

He took the black wool watch cap from the pilot's hand and placed it on Rachel's head, tucking her braids in its confines. "There. Warmer?"

"Yes, sir. Thank you."

"Now, you little scoundrel," his tone became stern. "The truth for this kind gentleman. How far was your memory off?"

Rachel raised her eyes to High Hat's eyes. "Three years, sir."

"There. Just as I said, eh? Good boy. You people can tell the truth when you want to!"

The captain took her shoulder. "Now. Have your master charm a few hairpins from the ladies downstairs from your quarters if you want to keep wild locks like your brother's. They work wonders, hairpins."

Rachel shot Dare a quick glance, and, despite their peculiar predicament, enjoyed the roll of his eyes.

Dare rifled though the toolbox, wishing the marf Chambers would leave him to his work as the captain and pilots had. What did Chambers want with him? Rich men always wanted something. Or to make a joke. Perhaps that's all Dare was to him. A source of amusement. That made his insides gnaw a little softer.

"You are too good to them both, you know."

"Sir?"

"The little one is devoted to you. But that blue-eyed devil, I'd watch your back around him, son."

"Why is that, sir?" Dare asked, not looking up from his task.

"There have been terrible murders, even among blood-tied servants and their masters."

"I see."

"No, I don't believe you do. Dare, were you very pampered before being kicked out of the nest?"

What did the man take him for? "Is it that obvious, sir?" he tried to question it out of him.

"It is, quite!" Chambers trumpeted, pleased with himself. "Now, whatever you've done, is there no possibility to go home and ask your family's forgiveness?"

"Why would I want to do that, sir?"

"Why?" He laughed. "Why, indeed! When you're of such comfortable means to sleep among niggers on the top deck alongside your own red servants? Dare, I'm trying to befriend you. Is it a gambling debt that's put you so out of favor with your family? A duel? A woman? Are those the effects of a beating by one of these riverboat thugs on your face? Who have you angered? Might I intercede in someway? Confound it, man!"

Chambers had taken him for gentry. Anglo gentry, maybe. Transplanted to America. Was that it?

"I'm trying to help, and you're being as slippery as a damned Celt!" Chambers exploded now.

Dare cocked his head, grinned. "Do you think so, sir?"

Albert Chambers hid his twitching mouth by sighing hard. His thick silver hair had some of the moon's light in it. "All right then. I'll speak no more of your family troubles. But tell me. Where are you going, with your Choctaw and those splendid horses, all of which are eating better than you are?"

"St. Louis, sir."

"And what are you after, son?"

He went on with his work, resorting to the truth now, the man had confused him so. "A job. Usefulness is what I'm after, sir. I appreciate your help in getting my brothers and myself this position."

"Can the Carolina Mist be running again by morning?"

"That will depend on this sandbar and the river, Mr. Chambers. But the rudder is fixed."

"It... it is?"

"Yes, sir. So I believe my kin need to be called from their repast for another dunking. This time I will hold Tad's new hat for him."

"As you wish. But then you will leave those two with their Indian gruel and come with me, for a decent meal. And we'll talk about your future in St. Louis."

When Dare returned from his time below with High Hat, Atoka left the ship's upper tier to check on his horses. Rachel heard jangling music and rough amusements on the below decks. She was glad for Atoka's time with his horses, for the disgruntled man who'd slumped beside her was challenge enough.

"Our fares are forgiven, for services rendered. I've got your brother's money returned to me."

"That's wonderful, Dare."

"And I accepted a job in this city, St. Louis."

"A job?"

"Aye. At a newspaper Mr. Chambers owns."

"I—I don't like that man," she whispered.

"Neither do I. Chambers would hate me if he knew who I am. But these damned clothes have made me into a relative of the damned Englishman who first they were made for, it seems. So I have a job."

"It does not honor you to speak of our friend Mr. Combs in that way," she reprimanded him. "He was haunted by your country's troubles. He was doing the best he could to have them brought to light."

His look softened. "I forgot that you knew him too. He . . . he was better than most of them, I'll grant you that. And I should watch my casual blasphemies around my sensitive, missionary-raised little brother. I apologize."

She grunted.

He reached into his coat's deep inside pocket, handing her a bundle smelling of savory smoked ham and rich cheeses, different from the hard tack crackers the roustabout had procured for them. Dare reached into the other side of his coat. Were there pockets everywhere in Mr. Comb's fine clothes? A fresh apple, and some dried peaches appeared in her husband's hands from his magic pockets.

"Thank you."

He grunted. "For you, little brother."

"There's plenty, Dare. Won't you—"

"No. I ate too much, down below with that — that... man Chambers. It has fogged my mind into considering your two thousand mile walk back into the hands of the British."

Rachel approached closer, as their corner of deck was empty. "You do not look over full. Only tired."

"The colors, the gilt and scarlet, the chandeliers," he groused. "So overblown, Rachel. Damned floating palace is what it is below, I'm thinking. Distracting the passengers from the fact that they can all be blown to kingdom come at any moment from those great bloody boilers, so clogged with mud that I shamed the engineer into cleaning them out."

"That was most good of you, Dare."

His hand skimmed her newly acquired watch cap. "Not nearly so good as your grace in the currents of this endless changing river, little brother."

She lent him more of her warmth as she felt his weary fingers skim her cheek. "Ach, Rachel," he breathed. "Down there, in the great dancing room—even the patterns of the ladies' dresses make me dizzy."

"Your eyes seem to pain you, sometimes," she ventured quietly.

He sighed. "No. It's not pain. I don't see into the distance as well as I once did."

Rachel touched his arm. He nodded curtly. It was the first time he'd described this thing that the hunger had done to his eyes, she surmised, and she was grateful for his trust.

"Oh, here. The ladies did redeem themselves for causing my distress with their garish finery." He fished into his vest pocket for a thin paper containing hairpins.

Rachel smiled. "You weren't distracted by their finery enough to forget to charm them out of these."

"To allow my beautiful brother to keep his hair, I'd do anything. Now pin them up, like a good girl."

"Boy," she corrected. Had he really called her beautiful?

"God in heaven, let's get off the waters. My head might then

stop spinning with the different looks of you, wife, brother, woman, child, fairy spirit of Tir na nog come to take me into the west."

She laughed as she glided the pins in place. But she did not replace the cap, because he was watching her. In a different way. Unguarded. Hungry, but not for food. He smelled of something else, under the cigar smoke and rich foods. Drink. Strong drink. He took her wrist and brought her hand against his cheek. It was stubbled with a beard, but he would shave in the morning. White men needed to do that every morning, to keep their faces smooth. But most of the ones Rachel had known did not. This one did. Every morning of their Atlantic crossing. Here, too, as crude as their conditions were, he'd borrowed Atoka's Bowie knife for his morning shave. Was it for her, she wondered as he kissed her palm. He was kissing her. Without being asleep and dreaming of his wife. The strong drink allowed his eyes to let go of a little of their sorrow. But she didn't think he was drunk. She knew what drunk men looked like, she'd seen too many of her own people like that. This man still knew who he was. And who she was. His wife, and not yet his wife.

"Rachel?" he called softly, sounding dense, her clever husband. Or young, maybe. Younger than he looked, so ravaged by his trials. His long fingers found, circled her waist. "Rachel LeMoyne. Might I taste your mouth?"

"I thought you were overfull?" she teased.

"Not of you. Please. I—I will not do more, I promise."

"Well," she said in her teacher voice, "all right, then."

His brows disappeared in his forelock of dark hair, hair that would someday have more substance. "Are you laughing at me, now?"

"Yes. Do I offend you in this?"

"No. Oh, no. I... used to laugh more, Rachel."

"I know. I can see the echoes."

"Can you?"

"Aye," she whispered, bowing her head, ashamed that she wanted them gone, those echoes, that she wanted all his dead away. He lifted her chin gently.

"Ach, the wonder of you," he breathed out before he kissed her mouth.

She did not taste the rich food he'd eaten, or the strong drink. She tasted the last of the season's wild berries Atoka had gathered on the shore that afternoon. He'd given them to Dare and to her, without eating any himself. Was there something magic in the berries, she wondered now. A charm? She wove her legs lightly across her husband's thighs, like when they slept. Was it the berries that made his heart race, that made the hardness between his legs that teased at the broad cloth of her trousers? She wished them gone from her legs. She wished this strange Irish man inside her. She soon lost herself in the texture of his tongue and the soft tingling at her breasts that their tastes of each other evoked. This is what led to making children. No wonder the taboos, the times men and women must dwell apart. There would come too many children. This was so pleasant. She could stay here forever, with his arms about her in a better way, even, than when they were sleeping.

"We should stop," he said, but did not. "If someone should see. Tad. Little brother ... we should stop."

"Yes," she agreed, but pressed her hand inside his rich man's vest to feel the bellows of his ragged breathing.

"Rachel, I drank a glass of American whiskey. And I am not nearly so noble as I sound."

There. Longer sentences. They put space between them. Allowed him to tuck her head under his heart and breathe more easily. He held her close, his fear of doing this thing—making her a more true wife in his own religion, gone. But his tenderness remained, as a comfort.

"Have you had a man before?" he asked her gently.

She shook her head. "I have not even kissed one. Like that. Because I was raised by missionaries. To be a teacher, one who lives for many children, and has none of her own. How is it in your country?"

"Well. We marry young."

"How young were you?"

"Seventeen. My wife was not yet sixteen." He took her arms

suddenly, and made her face him. "Rachel. You are not really the fourteen years they think you?"

"Oh, no. Though I did not lie when they pressed me for the truth. I was lying by three years. I'm twenty."

"Oh." He held her again there, under his heart. "That's good. That's fine, my shape shifter."

"Is it?" she asked quietly. "It does not displease you that I have lived so long and not been kissed?"

He smiled. "No. I am honored. Rachel, you have not chosen a man of the world. I had no woman before^-before my wife, and I was true to her." ,

"You are still," she sought to console the deep mourning that had crept into his voice.

"I—Rachel..."

He looked as if he might bolt, like Fears Thunder, the horse even Atoka could not ride in a storm. Rachel took his hand, felt the bones spread, panicked, beneath his pale white skin.

"You are safe with me, Darragh Ronan," she urged his grief forth.

"I— I need to go away from here."

"No. You need this place, this safe place I offer you," she insisted, barely having the strength to hold him, as he covered his mouth with the back of that swollen-with-work, blue-veined hand. It could only muffle the sound as his thin shoulders shook and his tortured weeping began. Rachel waited, stroking his hair, rocking them both.

"I'm sorry," he finally whispered. "It's the drink, you see ..."

"No. I do not see it that way at all. Do not be sorry, Darragh Ronan," she spoke his old, forbidden name again. "This is a thing for me to know. That you can love so well. You are a tender man who brings joy and honor to me." She rocked again, singing softly in Choctaw, a night song. One that Atoka sang, and, before him, their mother/Her husband's shudders finally stilled with the last notes. The song was a good thing, a holy thing, Rachel decided, for it even eased her own heart and the bitterness that dwelt there, ashamed.

In the morning Rachel woke to another wondrous sight of the ever-changing Mississippi riverbank—enormous sycamores. She stood, sensing their welcome, and wished she could climb their branches. Someone shoved her shoulder.

"You're looking at the wrong side, boy!" one of the flat boatmen chided, "Come with me to see the City of the French!"

"Get away from him," Atoka warned, fingering his knife's scabbard. The man backed up. "Just bein' sociable, chief," he said, and moved on.

Her brother glared at her. "It will be worse when you're back in skirts," he groused. "Where is your husband?"

"I don't know."

"Below. With his rich friends, I think."

"Below, looking after your horses, maybe. Atoka, he has already worked back our fares."

"All three of us did that. You and I in the cold water. But these backwards people paid him. He gave me the money. He should have given it to you."

"He doesn't yet know our ways—"

"He was throwing my gift of passage back at me!"

"Atoka, no. That is not the way of it. He is a stranger. Forgive him. Give me the money now, and I will explain—"

"I lost it. At the gaming." He looked down at the deck's planks. "It is not important. It was cursed already."

"It was nothing of the sort!" she fired back at him. "Do not blame your weakness on my husband's ignorance! You shame me!"

"I have the rest of my horse's purchase price. I was angry, and used only that money the captain gave him."

Rachel returned only stony silence until she caught sight of Dare below. "Well. It is done. Oh, Atoka." She sighed. "Give my husband a chance. Your horses are. Look."

She nodded down where Dare was combing the knots from Raven Mocker's mane and soothing the horse's wild eyes with the cadence of his voice. The silk-hatted gentleman, Mr. Chambers, her husband's new boss, greeted him with a rough handshake.

"You look," Atoka said at her ear.

Chambers pointed across the ship's rail. He swept his greedy finger rudely, as if St. Louis belonged to him. Her husband only showed his false face to this man, couldn't Atoka see that?

St. Louis rose out of the morning river mists. The city rivaled New Orleans in its structures' diversity of form, beyond its foreground dominated by limestone warehouses. So large a place, Rachel thought, so many roofs.

People were already on the streets, vendors hawking all manner of wares, men as well dressed as Dare, hurrying. Rachel tried to soothe herself with the intermingling green of trees among the structures and, far in the distance, a fine forest of shrub oaks.

None of them had ever lived in a city. Could they do it? Rachel was haunted by the dull eyes of Choctaw beggars wandering New Orleans streets reduced to ones and twos. Is that what city life always did to her people? She looked at Atoka's flowing hair, at her child's grip on the sleeve of his red shirt.

"We'll be all right in this place. We're a family," she whispered.

He looked down, touched her cheek with the back of three fingers, even though some of the flat boatmen were watching. "Oke," he agreed.

St. Louis, Missouri

1847-48

Contents

acknowledgments

prologue

one

two

three

four

five

six

seven

eight

nine

ten

eleven

twelve

thirteen

fourteen

fifteen

sixteen

seventeen

eighteen

nineteen

twenty

twenty-one

twenty-two

twenty-three

twenty-four

twenty-five

The Willamette Valley

epilogue

afterward

Selected Bibliography