Instead she pushed through the long smoky room toward the back, where the man she sought was sitting. The air was thick with tobacco smoke-and the smell of the quids some men chewed and spat, plus sweat and cooking and sour spilled beer and piss from the alley out back. Still, she thought he’d probably seen all there was to see; those smoldering blue eyes didn’t look as if they missed much.
“Heya,” she said, and to her dog, “Down, Slasher.”
“Heya, missie,” he replied formally, as the big wolfish-looking beast went belly-to-earth.
“You Hunter Robre? Robre sunna Jowan?” The form of a question was there, but there was certainty in her voice.
“Him ’n’ no other,” the young man said. “You’d be Sonjuh dawtra Pehte, naw?”
His brows went up a little as she sat uninvited, pulling over a stool that was made from a section of split log, flat side sanded and the other set with four sticks. The rushes on the hard-packed clay floor rustled and crackled as she plunked it down and straddled it.
“Yi-ah.” She nodded, a little mollified that he hadn’t used her father’s gift-names. Nobody wanted to be called the daughter of the Stinker or the Friendless. “There’s no feud between the Alligators ’n’ the Bear Creek people, or quarrel between our kin.”
“No feud, no quarrel,” he acknowledged; both clans were of the Cross Plains folk, which meant they didn’t have to assure each other that there was no tribal war going on either. It was more than a little unorthodox for a woman to go through the ritual, anyway.
“How’d you know who I was?” she added, curious, as she tore off some of the wheat-and-injun bread he had before him, dipped it in the salt and ate it; that satisfied courtesy, in a minimal sort of way.
He was supposed to be a sharp man, but as far as she knew they’d never met-her family had lived solitary. Robre was famous, after a fashion: Sonjuh dawtra Pehte had begun acquiring a little notoriety only in the last few weeks.
“Figured. Old Pehte had red hair like yours before he went bald, ’n’ ’sides that, you favor him in your looks.” He ate a piece of the bread himself, which meant he had at least to listen to her; then he went on: “He was a dab hand with a tomahawk, too; saw him win the pig ’n’ turkey here at Dannulsford once when my father brought me, must be ten years ago now.”
Sonjuh tossed her head, sending the long horse-tail of her hair swishing. Being unmarried-likely she would be anyway at nineteen, even were her father someone else-she wore her hair down and tied back with a snakeskin band, in a torrent the color of mahogany reaching to between her shoulder blades; a thick band of freckles ran across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Any man of the Seven Tribes would have accounted her comely, snub-nosed face and red lips and the long smooth curves of her figure as well, until he saw the wildness in those haunted leaf-green eyes.
“Nice throw, too, missie,” Robre continued. “Pehte must’ve taught you well.”
“I missed, ” she snapped. “Wanted to split his ugly face!”
Robre laughed, a quieter sound than most men’s mirth, then stopped when he realized she wasn’t even smiling.
“Welcome to a share,” he said a little uneasily, indicating the pitcher of corn beer and clay jug of whiskey.
“Didn’t come to drink,” she said, after taking a token sip from the beer jug; refusing a man’s liquor was a serious insult. “I came to talk business.”
The young man’s black brows went up farther. “Shouldn’t your…oh.”
Sonjuh nodded. “My father’s dead.” Oh, merciful God, thank You he died first of all. “So’s my mother. So’s my three sisters. I saw-”
Of itself, her hand shot out and grabbed Robre’s glass. She tossed back the raw spirits and waited with her eyes clenched shut until the sudden heat in her stomach and a wrenching effort of will stopped the shaking of her hands and pushed away the pictures behind her eyelids. When she looked back up, Robre was frowning at her left forearm, where a bandage had slipped from a healing wound. A patch of skin had been removed-neatly, the way a skinning knife would do it in skilled hands.
She tugged the sleeve down over the rawness and went on: “Didn’t come for sympathy, either. Like I said, I’ve got business to talk with you, Robre Hunter.”
He took a pull at his mug of beer, wiped the back of one big calloused hand across his mouth, and nodded. “I’m listening, missie.”
That was more than she’d expected, if less than she’d hoped. “I didn’t have brothers. My pa didn’t hold with hiring help, either, so from my woman-time I’ve been doing a son’s work for him. Hunting, too.” She took a deep breath. “I know my pa wasn’t well liked-”
Across the table, a polite lack of expression said as plainly as words: He was about as disliked as a man can be and not be outlawed. Or just plain have his gizzard cut out.
More than one had tried, too, but Stinking Pehte had been a good man of his hands, and it had always gone the other way. All fair fights and within the letter of the law, but killing within the clan didn’t make you any better liked either. One or two was to be expected, in a hot-blooded man, but public opinion thought half a dozen excessive; the clan needed those hands and blades.
“-but he was a good farmer, ’n’ no one ever called him lazy. We got our crop in before we were hit. Not much, but we sold most here in Dannulsford. Deer hides ’n’ muskrat, too, ’n’ ginseng, and potash from the fields we were clearing, ’n’ soap ’n’ homespun me ’n’ my ma ’n’ sisters made. The posse got back most of our cabin goods ’n’ tools, ’n’ our stock; then there’s the land, that’s worth something.”
Not as a home-place; too ill-omened for that, and too exposed, as her family’s fate proved. But someone would be glad to have the grazing, plus there was good oak-wood for swine fodder, and the Jefe would see that they paid her a fair share. That would probably amount to enough ham, bacon, and cow to put her meat on the table half the year.
“Glad to hear you’re not left poor,” Robre said.
“What it means is I can pay you,” she said, plunging in. This time his eyes widened, as well.
“Pay me for what, missie Sonjuh?” he said.
She reached into the pouch that hung at her hip, supported by a thong over the shoulder; it was the sort a hunter wore, to carry tallow and spare bowstrings and a twist of salt, pipe or chaw of tobacco and a whetstone and suchlike oddments. What she pulled out of it was a scalp. The hair was loose black curls, coarser and more wiry than you were likely to find on a man of the Seven Tribes.
Robre whistled silently. Taking scalps was an old-timey, backwoods habit; Kumanch and Cherokee still did it, but few of their own folk except some of the very wildest. These days you were supposed to just kill evildoers or enemies, putting their heads up on a pole if they deserved it. And for a woman…
“I expect that’s not some coast-man out of luck,” he said.
“Swamp-devil,” she said flatly. “Not no woman nor child, neither. That was a full-grown fighting man. Slasher ’n’ I took him, bushwhacked him.”
“Well…good,” Robre said, with palpable uneasiness, blinking at the tattered bit of scalp-leather and hair. “One less swamp-devil is always good.”
“That’s what I want to hire you for,” Sonjuh went on in a rush. “I can’t…I swore ’fore God on my father’s blood I’d get ten for my ma, ’n’ ten for each of my sisters. I can’t do it alone.”
“Jeroo!” Robre exclaimed, and poured himself another whiskey. “Missie, that’s unlucky, making that sort of promise ’fore the Lord o’ Sky! Forty scalps!”
“Or that I’d die trying,” she said grimly. “I need a good man to help. All the goods I’ve got is yours, if you’ll help me. Jeroo! Everyone says you’re the best.”
“Missie…” There was an irritating gentleness in his tone. “A feud, that’s a matter for a dead man’s clansmen to take up. It wouldn’t be right or fitting for me to interfere.”
Her hand slammed the table, enough to make jug and bottle and cup rattle, despite the thick weight of wood. “The gutless hijos won’t call for a war party! They say the ten heads they took were enough for honor! Well, they aren’t! I can hear my folks’ spirits callin’ in the dark, every night, callin’ for blood-wind to blow them to the After Place.”
Some of those nearby exclaimed in horror at those words; many made signs, and two abruptly got up and left. You didn’t talk openly of ghosts and night-haunts, not where the newly dead were concerned. Naming things
