“Uncle,” she said through a halting exhalation, “I bound myself to The Panther because it was his price for helping High Fox. And I—I love High Fox.”
Aunt Threadleaf said, “You have seen four-and-ten Comings of the Leaves. You are not yet a woman. You know nothing of love! Not only that, your precious High Fox loved this Flat Pearl woman. Did you not know that?”
“I knew.”
“High Fox never returned your adoration, not that I saw,” her aunt continued. ‘Oh, you were friends, that’s true, but nothing more. Anyone could see that.”
“Even I saw. it her mother murmured, and gazed up at Sun Conch through tear-filled eyes. Long black hair framed her oval face and highlighted the breadth of her cheekbones and the fullness of her lips. She lowered her shaking hands and clasped them in her lap. “I told you, Sun Conch, did I not? I told you that he was not the man for you. He—”
“Thank the gods,” Aunt Threadleaf interrupted, “that my family would not allow me to marry the man I loved when I was a girl. He turned out to be a worthless, shiftless sort. Ran off to be a Trader for some unknown people among the western wild men. If I’d married him I’d be out there to this day, starving and sifting manure for seeds to fill my belly!”
Love for High Fox swelled Sun Conch’s breast until she could barely breathe. “I would have gone with High Fox anywhere he wanted to go,” she said in a shaking voice. “I would not have cared what he wanted to be, or do. So long as I was with him, I—”
“Then you are even more of a fool than I thought.” Aunt Threadleaf’s expression turned icy. “But then I have proof of that! First you run off and give yourself to the wicked est man in the world—a night traveler!—and then you come striding home acting as if you have no relatives! You must be a blithering imbecile!”
To act as if you had no relatives meant you were being selfish and prideful, and deliberately hurting the people who loved you most. Nothing worse could be said about a person—except an accusation of incest. Sun Conch lowered her gaze to the leaping flames in the fire pit, and mustered her courage. She could not let them see her pain. Aunt Threadleaf would pounce on her at the sight of weakness, like a gull spying a skittering hermit crab.
“Uncle,” she said, stiffening her spine. “I cannot take back the words I told The Panther. I said them. I made my offering, and he accepted it. If you wish to go to him and tell him that he cannot have me, that is your right.
You are my family. But I ask you not to do that.”
Sawtooth tipped his wrinkled face up, and blinked sadly. “And why is that, niece?”
“No matter how many Comings of the Leaves I have seen, I know my heart, Uncle.” She removed a hand from beneath her cape and placed it in the middle of her chest. “I made a promise to High Fox that I would help him. And I made a promise to The Panther that he could have me, body and soul. I will not break those promises. So, if you go to The Panther and tell him he cannot have me, I will still be his. I will go with him wherever he wants, and do whatever he says. I—”
“Body and soul?” Threadleaf’s filmy eyes widened. “What does that mean? Has the old man shoved himself inside you, girl? Is that what you’re trying to tell us? That you’ve shamed us again?”
“Oh, no. Blessed Spirits,” her mother murmured. “He hasn’t, has he?”
Sun Conch’s knees shook. “If he wished to, Mother, I would not stop him. I belong to him. But he hasn’t harmed me—hasn’t so much as touched me. Not yet. He—he has been very kind to me.”
“She needs to be beaten!” Threadleaf bellowed at the top of her lungs, and the entire world seemed to die around Sun Conch. Heads jerked to watch. The startled birds in the trees went silent. “If I were your uncle, girl, I would thrash you with a green willow until you shrieked. I would leave scars that would never heal!”
“It would not make me break my promises, Aunt. Not to High Fox, or to The Panther.” Tears streamed down her mother’s face. “I tried so hard,” she said. “After your father died when you were five, only you gave me a reason to live, Sun Conch. You needed me. And I—I loved you so much. I tried to—”
“And you see what a fine job you did,” Threadleaf said, and thrust out a hand at Sun “Conch. “Girls are supposed to be obedient, modest, and hardworking. Sun Conch is everything but! Look at her standing there, that silly war club at her waist! You’d think she was like a Weroansqua, her nose in the air!”