Authors: Judith Stanton
And at least one of them, she vowed, would not live to see tomorrow.
“Hold her, damn it! I can't see,” Scaife shouted. Blood streamed down his face.
“God willing, you never will,” a deep voice growled.
It was Jacob's voice, rich and strong and furious. Her heart leaped with gratitude and recognition. He had come for her.
In an instant, she was free, Scaife's repulsive weight lifted off her body. There was an awful churning in the water, and despair swamped her sweet relief. What could one man and a boy do against armed soldiers? She tormented herself as the green, watery world around her went black.
Jacob's heart compressed in horror in his chest the instant he comprehended Retha's state. Drenched in blood, the very thing she feared the most, she lay broken on the rocks, unconscious in the shallow stream. Water lapped around her sodden skirts, and her braids floated like twin water snakes around her head.
Her bruised and battered head.
He had come too late to save her.
With a roar, he spun Scaife around and rammed his belly with a fist powered by the full force of his massive arm and shoulder and his outraged heart.
The man doubled over, blood from his head dripping into the stream. Jacob heard grunts and splashing behind him.
“The rest are mine!” Andreas shouted.
“Nicholas!” Jacob ordered. “Into the cave.”
Scaife staggered up, clutching his stomach. “No rules this time, Blum. Just you and me. And her. She ain't dead yet.”
Hope drove Jacob to check, to see. Retha's arm
floated in the water. Her hand twitched. Her eyes fluttered open. Relief flooded his heart.
“Jacob! Look out!” Andreas yelped.
Too late. Something cracked across the back of Jacob's neck, and bodies tumbled into him, forcing him down on one knee.
“I got one, Papa!”
Jacob glanced up. A very large, frenzied Nicholas rode Calloway like a young bear on an ill-fated buck.
Feet sliding off wet rocks and finding little purchase in the sand, Jacob managed to right himself and join the fray.
“Into the cave,” he bellowed, tearing his fiery son off the private's back. Nicholas resisted Jacob as hard as he had fought the private, but Jacob caught him in a chokehold and pointed him toward the cave. Without warning, someone plowed into Jacob, tackling his legs. Scaife. Jacob had no choice. He released his son and engaged the captain. Locked in combat, they fought close, each landing a volley of short jabs into the other's body, thrusting and parrying to the edge of the falls.
Jacob saw the danger first and reached to pull Scaife back.
His old enemy dodged him, slipped on a mossy stone, and grabbed Jacob's arms. For a precarious moment, Jacob balanced them both on the slab of shale that defined the fall's rim.
Under the soles of his boots, the shale shifted.
Jacob gestured with his head. “One move will do us in, man. Leap back,” he urged. “Together.”
Eyes aglitter with insane purpose, Scaife tightened his hold. “Water'll even my odds.”
The shale crumbled. Then there was only air and arms and knees and a punishing wall of water, and then no air at all. End over end, they tumbled into the pool, plunging down to its hard rock bottom.
Unexpectedly, unaccountably, Jacob found himself free, upside down, and struggling against torrents of raging water. At last his feet found rock again, and he pushed off and up, lungs heaving.
“Papa! Papa!” Nicholas's screams descended on him as he broke the surface.
“Get back!” Jacob choked out. What was Nicholas doing at the fall's edge? He could not give way to despair. He sucked in precious air.
Scaife was not in sight. Jacob dove back into the churning, clouded pool. Searching blind. Searching for the enemy. To save his wretched carcass. Something heavy butted Jacob's hip. A tree limb? An arm? A leg? He reached for it. It rolled away. Bursting through the surface of the water, he gasped a lungful of air and dove in again.
The pool was ceaseless turbulence and opacity. He crawled along the bottom, along rock worn smooth. The falling water pummeled his back until his lungs shrieked for air. A third time he broke the surface. Scaife's body floated in the eddies, his yellow eyes dull but open wide. Jacob stroked his way to calmer water and eyed Scaife with profound loathing.
“You're a dead man if you raped my wife,” Jacob said through clenched teeth.
Scaife spit up water. “Just wantedâ¦one more chance atâ¦little Lillibet, Blum.”
In the heat of the day, the warmth of shallow water, Jacob froze. “Little Lillibet? One more chance? What do you mean?”
“Came this close before. When she wasâ¦little girl.” Half-strangled, half-dead, Scaife taunted him still.
Jacob cursed the black oath. He hadn't guessed. All along, Retha had protected him from knowing it was Scaife. From his own wrath. “You never had her, you perverted monster,” he growled.
Scaife grinned feebly, unrepentant. “Sure as hell tried.”
Jacob erupted from the pool, water streaming down his body, lunging for the man with a mind to murder him.
Scaife did not resist. Could not resist. The captain's body was as uncooperative as a sack of sand. Jacob hauled him up to the creek's bank, reminding himself he was a Christian man, reciting chapter and verse. The wrong verse.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth
ricocheted in his mind. He looked down on his loathsome burden's narrow, corrupt face. His wife's tormentor. Her family's murderer.
Against Jacob's abdomen, Scaife's body flopped strangely, the head lolling back. The man was losing consciousness. Jacob arranged his uncooperative body on the rocky shore.
Jacob fought a raging urge to smother the man in the humus of the forest floor.
“Can't move, Blum,” Scaife mumbled. “Can't feel aâ¦blamed thing.”
Jacob bent over him and checked his arms and legs for movement, for feeling. Nothing. He sat back on his heels.
“Your neck's broken, Captain Scaife,” he said, against his will granting the man some final dignity.
Scaife gazed at him unsteadily. “Well, then, the joke's on me,” he grunted. “See that myâ¦niece don't cheatâ¦you out of the damned land.”
He was incoherent, Jacob thought. Scaife's eyes rolled back, one last breath rattled out, and he was gone. Solemnly Jacob closed Scaife's eyelids and stood, feeling both avenged and thwarted, both relieved and unsatisfied.
Retha. He wanted, needed Retha, the consolation, the assurance of her touch. He climbed the rugged incline to the cave, pulling himself up the thickly growing vines hand over hand.
Cautiously. He had no weapons, and he hadn't heard a sound since Nicholas last screamed. Hidden by bushes at the top, Jacob paused, heart thudding with new alarm. The stream was quiet, the stones flat, the water low, the sun glancing off ripples. But there was not a soul in sight.
No soldiers. No cousin. No children. No wife.
“Retha!” Jacob howled in anguish.
“Get us out of here!” Andreas's angry voice yelled back from inside the cave.
God help us all, Jacob prayed, charging in without a second thought. Whatever had gone wrong, they needed him. His children needed him. His wife needed him.
Or, if they had been somehow carried off and Andreas left behind, he had to know. He ducked
under the overhang and stood, his head bumping into the low ledge. Slowly his eyes adjusted to the light, but nothing was immediately clear.
“Where is everyone?” he called out.
“Shhh!” The warning hissed under the cave's dome.
“What? Who is in here?”
“Jacob, shhh! 'Tis us, your family. All of us.”
And there was Retha, standing to one side, a child sheltered under either arm. He looked around the shallow cave, remembering its shape from the day Retha brought him here. Along the opposite wall, Andreas and Nicholas stood pressed stiffly against damp moss. At their feet, bound together back to back, Pickens and Calloway hunched miserably.
Only a couple of paces away stood Retha's wolfâfor, with a sudden lift of his heart, Jacob knew it could be no other. Its hackles raised, it guarded its four prisoners, at attention, in complete control.
“What is this?” Jacob whispered to Retha.
“I have to get her out of here,” she whispered back. “She thinks all men the enemy. I thought you were dead.”
Anna Johanna giggled. “Mama Retha was afraid the waterfall would hurt you, Papa. But I told her that it couldn't.”
“We tried to drag her out of the water, but she got mad,” Matthias added.
“I did not. 'Twas not the thing for you to see me that way.”
“Right,” Matthias said with approving relish.
“She was wet, and she got blood all over and had to wash it off. But she's all cleaned up now.”
“
Kusine
, get us out of here!” Andreas barked.
Retha scrambled to the floor, ransacking what looked to be remnants of a bundle of supplies. “If I could just find something!”
“We're out of bacon,” Matthias said unhelpfully. “That's the only thing she eats.”
“Well, I know that,” Retha shot back. “She will like something, but I don't see a thing but sugarcake.”
“That's my sugarcake! Besides, wolves don't eat sugarcake.”
“We better hope she does, Matthias, because 'tis all that we have left.”
Jacob's heart swelled with pride as he heard the ease of their exchange. Something had happened between Retha and his children in all the times he had been away. And this time. Something wonderful. In the year since his children had lost their mother, they hadn't laughed or joked or even complained with such lightness of heart. And here his starved son Matthias was, arguing over his right to keep his sugarcake from a wolf.
“We just want out!” Andreas reminded them impatiently.
“Andreas.” Retha heard her own voice echo in the small chamber. “If you would but sit down and be less
threatening
, my friend the wolf would back down. I promise she won't hurt you.”
“With all due respect,
Kusine
, I prefer to take my chances standing up.”
Speaking softly, Retha edged up to her wolf, a
step at a time as always, and placed a small square of sugarcake on the ground.
The wolf lowered its head, sniffed, and gulped the food.
Retha stepped back, set down another bit, and waited, trusting in the bond she had forged with the animalâand its weakness for pantry scraps.
With a hasty look back at the men it had guarded, the wolf abandoned them and followed until Retha's trail of food led it well beyond the cave. The sun struck Retha's eyes, blinding her for a moment, and the wolf slipped away with scarcely a sound. Retha blinked into the underbrush, seeing nothing, until the wolf lunged through the bushes up to the top of the cave. Then she heard panting and a whimper from above the cave's dark mouth.
Another wolf, taller, more robust, with silvered fur. Her wolf's mate, come for her? Their wagging, snuffling reunion gave Retha a tingle of pleasure. She had saved her wolf so it could have this match. They disappeared together into the forest foliage, the wolf she had befriended, whose freedom in the wild had made her long for freedom, too, with its chosen mate.
She herself had found new freedoms, Retha thought, turning eagerly to her family. Inside the cave, Jacob had a son under each arm and a daughter on his back.
“I can help with these appendages,
Kusine
,” Andreas said gravely, taking Anna Johanna's hand and bowing formally to her. “If madame would like a ride.”
She giggled and flung out her arms. “Gallop?”
“I'd best stick to an old nag's trot. This poor horse has been galloping since the break of dawn.”
But Andreas hoisted her up onto his broad shoulders as if her weight and his fatigue were of no consequence.
Retha turned to her husband. “My wolf is gone,” she said, feeling a little sad. “My wolf found her mate. I suppose I have seen the last of her.”
“I think you know where to find her now,” he answered, and gave her a hungry, searching look. He meant that she could come back and find the wolf here. Come back with him. Here, where they had met the wolf. Here, where they had found their passion.
“I hope we do find her again,” Matthias said, oblivious to the emotion that flowed between his parents. “That is, if she doesn't want any more of my sugarcake.”
“What I want is to go home,” Nicholas said wearily.
Retha could see Jacob hug his prodigal son closer. “I want you home, too, son,” he said in a choked voice. “You fought like a tiger for our family today, but now we need you safe at home.”
Nicholas's arms tightened around his father. “I'm so sorry I ran off with the soldiers, Papa. I thought if you wouldn't fight, somebody in the family had to. But I missed you.” Over his father's broad shoulder, his eyes sought Retha's. “I missed you all.” Her heart swelled at the tentative invitation in his look. This proud, belligerent boy was now hers, too.
He blushed to be caught out. “Besides, the
food was awful,” he added. “Not like yours.”
She grinned back at him, seeking words to assure him of her love without embarrassing his boy's pride. “I need you around to keep my portions right. Without you, we've had twice the bacon and twice the beans left after every meal.”
Andreas trotted back with his blond-headed rider, a conspiratorial smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Nick and Matty,” he boomed, in a voice not unlike Jacob's, “you come help with the real horses.”
What in the world? Retha wondered.
“We left two horses in the hollow to bring you children home. Let's go fetch them while your parents pack up.”
With a telling nod to Jacob, Andreas winked at her. She understood the sweetness of his conspiracy. He was giving them some precious time alone.