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Struggling against Fire Thunder’s hold, she looked desperately up at him.
“Have I said too much?” she cried. “Have I begged too much to be set free, so much that you will place me in that dreadful cage again? Please, oh, please don’t.”
She wiped frightened tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “I thought that you cared for me,” she sobbed. “And now you are going to punish me again. I . . . don’t . . . understand. Never shall I understand.”
“I will never cage you again,” he said thickly. “As I told you before, I caged you only that once so that you could experience what my sister experienced. It is a lesson taught, learne
d, and surely never forgotten.”
“Yes, I have learned many lessons while at your village,” Kaylene said guardedly. “And I understand why you had the need to teach me. But now I wish to leave.”
Fire Thunder’s eyes met hers and held. “This is now your home,” he said softly, yet with finality. “Accept it.”
Kaylene felt suddenly weak.
She was too lethargic to argue anymore.
And she had to admit to herself that the thought of staying with Fire Thunder forever made her insides grow warm with the wonder of this possibly being the place that she had sought all of her life, where her roots could be planted.
She would make a good wife. She would make a good mother.
Yet there were too many unanswered questions!
She . . . had . . . to find the answers.
But later.
Right now, all she wanted to do was sleep. She was sorely tired. And there was a pounding ache in her shoulder. She could feel the blood as it seeped from the corners of the bandage.
Her head spun as she started drifting . . . drifting....
“Where . . . are . . . you taking me?” she managed to whisper.
“Where I should have taken you earlier,” Fire Thunder said thickly as he saw her eyes close, her cheek resting against his chest.
Fire Thunder broke into a soft run and stopped when he reached a lodge at the far end of the village from where his lodge was. A spiral of smoke rose from the smoke hole. A faint chanting sound wafted from the wigwam.
Fire Thunder knew that his village shaman, Bull Shield, had other things on his mind, with his duties to Good Bear to tend to today before the burial rites. But Bull Shield was always there for his chief.
Carrying a limp Kaylene in his arms, Fire Thunder stepped inside Bull Shield’s lodge, where a fire burned softly in the fire pit in the center of the floor.
Bull Shield was sitting with his legs crossed before the fire, his long, gray hair flowing down his bare, thin back. He wore only a breech clout and armlets and a necklace of animal teeth.
Bull Shield was elderly. His eyes sank into his cheeks. His shoulders were hunched. His legs and arms were bony.
“You have brought the white woman to my lodge for curing?” Bull Shield said as he turned pale, almost sightless eyes of wisdom up at Fire Thunder.
Bull Shield’s gaze went to the blood-soaked bandage. He rose to his feet and motioned with a hand toward a pallet of furs beside the fire. “Place her there,” he said softly. “I will do what I can to make her well.”
“I would have brought her sooner, but she seemed to be healing well enough,” Fire Thunder said as he gently lay Kaylene on the pallet. “And I did not want to startle her by bringing her to you. As you know, white people are hesitant to accept shamen. They do not see shamen in the same light as they see their white doctors.”
“Yes, I know,” Bull Shield said, bending beside Kaylene. “And the white men and woman are wrong not to see that we shamen can work wonders that white doctors are ignorant of.”
Fire Thunder knelt down beside Bull Shield as the shaman slowly unwound the bloody bandage from around Kaylene’s shoulder.
Fire Thunder winced when he saw the bright redness of Kaylene’s wound, and how it was strangely puckered. “The herbs did not work their magic enough on the wound,” he said, scarcely in a whisper.
“What I do today will begin the process of healing her,” Bull Shield quickly reassured him. “But tomorrow a Buffalo Dance must be held in her honor to guarantee her full recovery.”
