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.”
“Oh,” Night Rain mouthed in return.
Pine Drop reached for her kirtle and gestured. Night Rain dressed silently and followed as Pine Drop ducked out the door. The house was new, built on the ruins of her old structure. It had been on this spot that Blue Feather’s dead body had been processed before the ritual cleansing. Now nothing remained of him except his Dream Soul. Had it been prowling around the house, watching this new man as he slid his manhood into her? Had Blue Feather known that she was dreaming of him, that she had willed White Bird’s hard member to be his?
Night Rain turned her young face up toward the cloudy sky. A
faint misty rain was falling. It speckled the young woman’s hair in silver specks. “Remember how we used to talk when we were little? How we swore that one day we would have a household together, that we would marry the same great warrior? That we would live on that way forever? Now, here it is, and it’s not like I ever thought it would be.”
“No.”
“Will I ever enjoy coupling with a man?”
“Perhaps, with time.” Pine Drop reached out and placed an arm around her sister’s shoulder. “Did he hurt you?”
“No.” Pine Drop felt Night Rain’s shrug. “It just wasn’t what I thought, that’s all. I expected lightning, and joy, and some great experience like riding on clouds.”
“And instead?”
“It was uncomfortable. He’s …”
“Big.”
“Yes.” She glanced sideways at Pine Drop. “I thought it would feel more like a finger.”
“I’m sorry.”
Night Rain shrugged. “Do you think I’m going to get pregnant?”
“Eventually.”
“You didn’t. I mean with Blue Feather. And you were married for almost six moons before …”
“Yes, well, sometimes it doesn’t happen right off in first moons you spend as a woman.” She tried to keep the regret out of her voice.
“We have done our duty to our lineage and to our clan.” Night Rain smiled sadly. “We are the granddaughters of the Clan Elder. That is all that matters.”
How could she say it with such simple faith? “That doesn’t mean that we must like it. What has possessed the Elder and the Speaker? We have always been adversaries of Owl Clan, especially that haughty Wing Heart. She acts so superior to everyone else. Did I ever tell you about the time she kicked me out of her path? I was little then, maybe four winters old. She treated me like dirt.”
“Now we are married to her son.” Night Rain’s eyes were on the long lines of houses that surrounded them. Cattails were waving green fronds above the dark water in the borrow ditches that separated the house ridges. “I wanted to marry Saw Back, of the Alligator Clan.”
“Well, you had better forget him—and hope that White Bird remains alive,” Pine Drop cautioned. “At least he is a Speaker, young
though he is. He has war honors that will transfer to our children and clan. He has prestige and status, and from the looks of things, it will only grow greater.”
“That is supposed to reassure us?” Night Rain asked hollowly.
“Yes, because the alternative is that if anything happens to White Bird, we go to that witless Mud Puppy! Think about that the next time our husband crawls on top of you and parts your legs.”
Night Rain chewed her lip thoughtfully. “What could Grandmother have been thinking? I don’t understand this new alliance with Owl Clan. It makes no sense.”
Pine Drop sighed, looked furtively back at the doorway to make sure that White Bird hadn’t awakened, and whispered, “We are to learn what we can about Wing Heart and help our clan gain ascendancy, silly gosling! The Speaker didn’t talk the Elder into marrying us to White Bird to make us happy. We are here to serve the clan, and that, Little Sister, is what we will do.”
Night Rain nodded. “I understand, Sister. When it comes to the clan I will do my duty.”