“Forget I said anything.” Mud Puppy picked up his paddle, refusing to meet their eyes. “I shall tell no one that you were lost. The Masked Owl seals that bargain.” He turned his canoe. “Come, it is this way home.”
“I said, wait.” Hazel Fire lifted a hand, those foreign eyes pensive. “You really believe this, don’t you?”
Mud Puppy said nothing, but his eyes must have betrayed him, for Hazel Fire said, “We believe you, Mud Puppy.” He gestured toward the alligator. “It takes a special person to talk to the likes of him. Your brother has been away from you for over a year. Perhaps he does not understand the changes in his little brother.”
“Changes?” Mud Puppy was puzzled.
Hazel Fire smiled. “It took me a while to understand that my little sister had become a woman. It wasn’t until I saw your brother’s child growing in her womb that I knew. Two Wolves and I, we will speak to your brother. I don’t know that we can change his mind, but we are willing to try.”
Mud Puppy nodded, a sudden feeling of relief building in his belly. “I thank you. For this, I shall always be in your debt.”
“Then we are brothers,” Hazel Fire added. “May our bonds strengthen over time despite the distance that will separate us.”
“May it be so,” Mud Puppy agreed. “Come, let us go. There may not be much time.”
Sixteen
Pine Drop lay on her side, the hard pole of the bed frame under her hips. She could feel the heat from White Bird’s body. Her own skin remained damp from the joining that had consummated their marriage. Careful not to wake him, she eased off the bed, squatted, and wiped herself with a handful of dried hanging moss.
She turned, studying the face of her new husband in the half-light cast through the doorway. The stranger slept on her bedding, his muscular left leg raised and braced against the mud-daubed wall. The right arm lay beside him, his left lax on his damp chest. His lungs filled and emptied with a slow regularity; the dancing of his eyes under smooth lids reflected obscured dreams.
How could this have happened? She ran a callused hand down her face, then glanced at Night Rain, where she, too, dozed on the bed adjoining Pine Drop’s. Her sister rested on her back, her young breasts flat, a length of cloth covering her hips. She couldn’t be sure if Night Rain slept, or just had feigned it during the time Pine Drop had been coupling with White Bird.
White Bird? Her husband? Who was this man? Two days ago she had been a young widow, heartbroken, her souls aching with grief. Today she was married—she and her sister. Together. It might have been a tornado that had uprooted her life.
Just now she had lain with a stranger. In defense she had closed her eyes when he mounted her, wrapped herself in the past, filled her imagination with Blue Feather. In her fantasy, it was Blue Feather who moved inside her. It was Blue Feather who brought her to ecstasy. As waves of pleasure rolled through her hips, she had tightened her arms around him—not this strange new man.
Time seemed to ebb and flow like stretched cattail dough in Pine Drop’s memory. Through the whirl of events, she had glimpses: Blue Feather’s body, hot and bright with fever; his eyes, racked by pain, losing focus as she held his hand; those last moments as he gasped for shallow breaths and his souls loosened for the last time. Had it been she who had set fire to the house she had shared for those few moons with Blue Feather? Had it been right on this very spot that she had burned their dwelling down to a ring of charred cinders? She glanced at the tamped ash-laden soil before the doorway. Blue Feather’s bones had been there, a tied bundle of them stacked atop a pile of white ash, oak, and hickory wood. He had been of the Alligator Clan. Members of his lineage had come afterward, picking through the bits of charcoal and ash to retrieve the broken and spalled slivers of fire-whitened bone.
Now I am married again. To a man of the Owl Clan, of all things. The hollow ache in her loins for Blue Feather had barely subsided; how could Mud Stalker and Back Scratch think this stranger could fill that place she had shared with Blue Feather?
“Is he asleep?” Night Rain whispered cautiously.
“Yes.” Pine Drop glanced at her sister, seeing one eye peering from under a lax brown arm.
“Snakes! Is that what it was all about?” She lowered her arm and swung into a sitting position. “Not like I imagined.” She glanced down, her hair falling around her in a tangled black mass. “Not like it sounded when he lay with you.”
“I wasn’t with him,” Pine Drop mouthed words, glancing uneasily at the sleeping man. At the question in her sister’s eyes, Pine Drop soundlessly said, “Blue Feather.”