Prologue
July 15, 1757
The Ohio Wilderness
“They’re going to burn us, aren’t they?”
Nicholas Kenleigh ignored the panic in Josiah’s voice and Eben’s frightened whimpering, strained in vain to free himself from the tight leather cords that held him to the tall wooden stake. His hands, bound fast above his head, had long since lost any feeling.
There would be no escape.
“I don’t want to die!” Eben sobbed, his freckled face wet with tears.
Nicholas took a deep breath, sought for words to comfort the two younger men, found none. He had taken them under his wing shortly after he’d joined Washington’s forces, tried to teach them to track and to shoot well.
None of that mattered now.
“I have no wish to die either.”Especially not like this. “But if death is all that is left to us, then we must face it with courage.”
His words sounded meaningless, even to his own ears, but seemed to calm them. Josiah was nineteen, Eben only seventeen. They reminded him of his younger brothers—Alec, William, and Matthew. They didn’t deserve this.
No one deserved this.
Nicholas had known from the moment they were taken captive what the Wyandot would do to them. He’d warned Josiah and Eben, but they had not listened. Instead, they’d allowed themselves to be deceived by feasts, promises of adoption, and the pleasures of sex with comely, young Wyandot women. But those promises were false, food and sex merely part of the ritual of sacrifice.
Nicholas supposed that caring for the physical needs of their prisoners and bringing them pleasure took away some of the guilt the Wyandot must feel at torturing people to death—if, indeed, they felt guilt. But he had seen the deception for what it was, had eaten his food in silence, turned the woman away. Dark-eyed and pretty she had been, but he would not risk getting her with child and leaving a piece of himself behind to grow up here. Nor would he betray Penelope, his fiancée.
Fidelity when death was imminent might seem strange to most men, but Nicholas had been raised to keep his word and to put loyalty to family and friends above all else. He would try to die the way he had lived.
Washington’s force had been encamped near the Ohio when the Wyandot had attacked under cover of night. Nicholas had been discussing the next day’s march with George over a bottle of Madeira when they’d been interrupted by the sounds of war cries, shouts, and gunfire. He’d fought his way across the camp toward Josiah’s and Eben’s tents and spied them in the distance, wild with bloodlust, pursuing a group of fleeing Wyandot into the forest.
He’d charged after them, shouted for them to stop, warned them it was a trap. But it was too late. They had been ambushed and overcome before his words reached them. And though Nicholas had managed to kill several warriors in an attempt to free them, there were simply too many. One blow to the temple with a war club, and Nicholas had found himself a prisoner, too. Now they would die together.
His mind flashed on his mother, and he felt a moment of deep anguish. His death would be hardest on her. She had opposed his decision to join Washington and serve as a tracker, had begged him to stay at home, take up his role as heir of the Kenleigh shipbuilding empire, and produce an heir himself. But at twenty-six, Nicholas had felt certain there was still plenty of time for such things. Besides, Washington was a good friend and a fellow Virginian—and his need was dire. The outcome of this war would make or break British authority on this continent.
Jamie—Nicholas’s elder by four years and his uncle—had served with Washington during his march north in 1754 and had fought beside George in the blood and mud of Fort Necessity. But Jamie now had a wife—lovely Bríghid—and two small sons. He would not leave them. Nicholas had reasoned he could do the job just as well as Jamie, as they had been taught together by Takotah, the old Tuscarora healer who had made her home with his family since long before he’d been born. It had seemed right that he fill Jamie’s shoes.
And now?
Now he would need every ounce of strength, every bit of courage he possessed. He was not immune to fear.
Eleven fires had been lit in fire pits running down the center of the enormous longhouse. Old women busied themselves building up the fires, adding wood until the lodge was uncomfortably warm in the already stifling July heat.
As the fires crackled, Eben again began to weep, Josiah to curse the Wyandot.
“W-will it be quick?”
Nicholas had heard stories, accounts of the French priests who’d first encountered the Wyandot a hundred years before. He prayed the priests had lied. “I don’t know.”
“Bloody savages!” Josiah spat on the dirt floor. “It’s good they like fire, because they’re goin’ to burn in hell!”
Wyandot villagers began to drift through the low entrance—men, women, children. Soon the longhouse was packed from end to end. The Wyandot stared at their prisoners with solemn eyes, and Nicholas could sense an undercurrent of expectation.
Last to enter was the Wyandot war chief, Atsan, who had dressed in ceremonial garb, a great bearskin cape draped over his bare, aged shoulders, a single eagle feather in his scalp lock. He held up his hand to silence the murmurs and whispers of his people, began to speak in Wyandot.
His words floated just beyond Nicholas’s comprehension, strangely familiar and yet utterly foreign. He did not speak Wyandot, but it sounded somewhat like Tuscarora, which he knew well. Several times he thought he understood a word or phrase—Big Knives, fight, river—but the words were spoken so quickly that Nicholas couldn’t quite catch them.
And then Nicholas recognized one:“See-tah.”
