each footstep she heard Gentle Rain’s voice in her mind.
Keep your head down. Never let them see your eyes.
So the young woman kept her head lowered when she slid down the dry, sandy bank. She hit the ground hard, bumped her cheek against the dirt with such force that her lip split. She tasted blood. Flinging her left arm up, she covered the back of her head with the crook of her elbow and tucked her right arm beneath her, hiding the knife she still clutched in her hand.
Tonight I was to become White Painted Shield’s wife.
The dream she’d cherished for so long had become a nightmare.
As the onslaught wound down, single gunshots rang out here and there in the distance. Except for fires crackling as dwellings burned, the world became deathly silent. The sky was filled with billowing spirals of smoke drifting like flocks of black vultures, obscuring the late-afternoon sun.
She thought she was safe until the ground began to shake as mounted riders thundered near. Their shouts drifted to her, strange words in a language rough and foreign and yet the words haunted her, conjuring flashes of nightmarish memories. Images that confused and frightened—flames and smoke and blood—much like everything she’d seen today, but different somehow.
Hide your eyes.
A few of the riders passed by, but then there came a shout. Nearby, a horse whinnied. She recognized the creak of a leather saddle before she heard heavy footfalls above her. When the sandy soil gave way beneath a man’s tread and a rain of pebbles and dirt sifted down on her, she didn’t dare look up.
More shouts as the man called out to the others. Though she couldn’t understand him, he sounded excited. She bit her swollen lip, swallowed a scream when he roughly jerked her to her feet.
Refusing to look up, she trembled as she stared at the bloodstains on her beaded moccasins and was ashamed of her cowardice. The front of her long doeskin shirt was stained with blood, the blood of her little brother.
He died bravely today.
So would she.
My marriage day.
A good day to die.
The man in front of her stank of sweat and fear and hatred. He grabbed her chin. Forced her to raise her head.
Never let them see your eyes.
She tried to keep her eyes closed, but what did it matter now? What did anything matter? Her family, her betrothed, were dead. Everyone she loved was gone.
Filled with anger and defiance, she raised the hidden knife, intent on plunging it into his heart. But he was bigger, stronger. He grabbed her wrist and twisted. She cried out at the shock of pain. Her fingers uncurled and the hunting knife fell to the ground at her feet.
She raised her head at last and stared into his cold, hate-filled eyes and willed the bearded white man to take her life. There was fury in his gaze, along with an anger that left no doubt that he wanted to kill her.
Do it now, she thought. Kill me, Blue Coat, so that I can join the others.
Suddenly, the hatred in his eyes turned to shock and he began shouting to the others. This new excitement in him frightened her more than his hairy, sun-burned face, his foreign scent, his rough hands.
Three men on horseback watched as he struggled to drag her up the shallow ravine. His fingers bruised her upper arms and his grip twisted her shoulder, but she refused to cry out.
The smell of death tainted the air. The Blue Coats had killed her family—her mother, her father, her husband-to-be, her little brother. Her many friends, the wise elders, Bends Straight Bow, her grandfather.
The Nermernuh, her people, were scattered, dead, dying.
The Blue Coats had captured her.
It was a good day to die.
Chapter Two
S pring was Hattie Ellenberg’s favorite time of year. A time of beginnings when the snow and ice turned to warm rain, trees swelled with the buds of new life and God’s promise of a bountiful fall harvest was evident everywhere. The coming of spring tempered the bleak, desolate bite of winter with its dark memories and images of bloodstained snow.
Hattie took joy in the small gifts of spring, the way the birds sang with riotous pleasure at the break of day, the early morning sunlight that flooded her bedroom. Somehow the puddles of sun, warm as pools of melted butter, made her feel more alive and less isolated.
Each year, as the first spring wildflowers bloomed, she asked her son, Joe, to move the old kitchen table out of the barn and onto the shade of their wide covered porch. There, they would take their meals beneath the roof of the low, wide overhang, even through the dog days of summer.
When she woke this fine morning, she had no idea Jesse Dye would be paying them a visit. Now here she was, sitting on the porch at that very table with the former Confederate soldier and seasoned war veteran.
She smoothed her work-worn hands across the faded gingham tablecloth, absently wished she’d mixed up a sage-scented salve to smear into the reddened cracks around her knuckles. She’d never been a showy woman and her looks certainly didn’t matter anymore. Certainly not to Jesse, a man in his late thirties who had been raised on a ranch a few miles south of their own Rocking e Ranch. They’d known Jesse forever. Now he was a U.S. Army captain fighting the fierce Comanche, a plague on the Texas frontier for nearly a century.
The sight of her chapped hands embarrassed her almost as much as the wide scar above her forehead. The minute she’d seen Jesse riding into the yard, she’d grabbed her poke bonnet off a hook by the back door and wore it to hide the puckered swath of baldness.
“Will you do it, Hattie?” Jesse leaned back in his chair, casually resting one booted foot over his knee and propping his wide-brimmed hat atop it. A wisp of warm breeze barely ruffled the hem of the tablecloth as he added, “Will you take her in?”
“You know what you’re asking, don’t you?” She couldn’t believe one of the few friends they had left was laying this challenge at her feet.
“If I didn’t think you were exactly what she needs—if I didn’t think you could do this, I wouldn’t be here.”
Her pulse accelerated and a wave of dizziness assailed her. Hattie closed her eyes for a heartbeat and waited. As always, her panic eventually abated.
“It’s been eight years, Hattie.”
“Joe will never agree.”
“Why not ask him?”
Her own emotional concerns aside, she knew how deep Joe’s bitterness ran. He not only blamed himself for not being there when she’d needed him most, but he’d lost his faith in himself and, worse yet, in God.
Hattie clung to her faith now more than ever. Faith filled the hollow places, banished the darkness that might have otherwise taken her down. Faith gave her the strength to forgive, the will to get up and face each new day knowing the Lord was always
