“The woman who came to me was named Lyda, the daughter of their war chief, Atsan. Her mother’s line was likewise powerful. I knew none of this at the time. I knew only that I would not risk getting her with child. I refused to leave any part of myself with the Wyandot, nor could I betray my fiancée, Penelope. So I sent Lyda away untouched, even though I knew it would be my last chance to enjoy a woman.”
He told Bethie how he’d sought for a way to escape and had failed, how the next evening they’d been tied to stakes in the war chief’s longhouse, how the entire village had gathered to watch as the women cut them like cattle, shoved burning embers one at a time beneath their skin.
His body began to shake as the memories he’d tried so hard to forget were unleashed. “Lyda took the lead in my torment. She was angry that I had rejected her. I tried not to cry out, knew it would be worse for me if I did. But Eben and Josiah—they were just boys! I couldn’t bear their suffering, felt I ought to have been able to prevent it. I shouted something at Atsan—I can’t remember exactly what. My mind was... the pain... I couldn’t think clearly.”
He told her how confused he’d been when Lyda and her grandmother had stopped burning him and instead had begun the horrendous process of treating his wounds, every bit as painful as the torture itself. But even as they’d given him cool drinks of water and rubbed salve into his blistered and charred flesh, it had soon become clear that what he’d endured was only the merest hint of what still lay in store for Eben and Josiah.
Nicholas turned from the window, sick to his stomach, sat in a chair before the hearth, buried his face in his hands. Though he could hear Bethie’s quiet weeping, the sound of it was all but drowned out by the echoes of screams and curses, of cheering bystanders, of roaring flames.
“Nicholas, you bastard! What did you say to them? Help me! Oh, God, help me!”
He fought to put the horror of it into words, willed himself to speak. “They smeared their bodies with pitch... forced them into the fire pits... burned them alive, but slowly, so slowly. Whenever they would pass out, the Wyandot women would douse the flames, spread salve on their burns, weep with them over their pain. Then, when they were revived, they would cover them with pitch and start again.”
Raw emotion surged from his gut—rage, grief, deepest remorse.
“My God, Bethie! They begged me again and again to help them! They begged me to kill them, begged me to end their agony, but I was still bound and could do nothing! Nothing! I shouted to Atsan to take me in their place, to set them free, but he didn’t listen.”
He took a deep breath. “At dawn, they dragged the boys, horribly burned but still alive, outside, tied them to racks, and burned them to death as a sacrifice to their god of war. I did not see it, but I heard it. Eben and Josiah died believing I had betrayed them, that I’d persuaded the Wyandot to spare me, but had abandoned them to torment. They died cursing my name.”
Bethie knelt before him, tears wet on her cheeks, her violet eyes soft with sympathy. “It was no’ your fault, Nicholas. There was nothin’ you could have done.”
He took her face between his hands, all but shouted at her. “Are you sure of that?”
She did not pull away or shrink from his anger. “Aye, Nicholas. You almost died tryin’ to save them. You did more for them than most men would have done. Can you no’ see that?”
He stood, afraid her compassion would shatter him, and stalked back toward the window. “There’s more. You wanted the truth.”
She whispered. “Aye.”
He stared unseeing into the darkness. “I later learned Lyda had arranged for me to be spared for one reason—she wanted me to play the stud, to give her my get.” He heard Bethie’s gasp, forced himself to continue. “But, of course, I was badly burned, and the wounds quickly festered. Lyda and the women of her clan fought to heal me, kept me bound hand and foot to a berth in their longhouse. For the rest of the summer, I lay there, more dead than alive and out of my mind with fever, while they forced me to drink, forced me to eat, cleaned my burns.”
Bethie waited for him to continue, tried to comprehend what he’d already told her. She’d known he’d been tortured. But to hear him describe it, to imagine how much he had suffered, how much those two boys had suffered—it nearly made her sick. She wanted desperately to comfort him, to wrap her arms around him, but she sensed he did not want to be touched.
“The first time it happened was only days after my fever broke. I’d grown so accustomed to pain that it seemed a reprieve sent from heaven. I awoke to find myself already hard, already inside her. I was still tied to the berth, but even had I been cut free, I doubt I could have stopped her. I was very weak, and it had been so long since I’d felt anything but agony. It was over quickly. She walked away with a smile on her face while her mother’s family watched and laughed. There is no privacy in a longhouse.”
Bethie listened, stunned and horrified, as he described how again and again Lyda had taken advantage of his bonds and his physical weakness to arouse him and use his body for her own ends. Bethie hadn’t thought such a thing could happen to a man.
“I tried to refuse, tried to keep my body from responding, but I couldn’t. Not until I was strong enough to stand and they cut me free was I able to keep her from taking what she wanted from me. But it was too late. She was already carrying my child. That fact kept her alive—for a while.”
Bethie could feel the tension inside him, his hatred for himself. She understood that hatred, that deep shame. “So you stayed with her.”
He nodded. “I hated her as I’ve hated no one, and I would not leave my child to be raised by her. I had planned to stay until the child was weaned, then escape with it back to Virginia. So I began to live as one of them. I ate with them, hunted with them, joined the fellowship of their warriors. Atsan accepted me as his son, honored me as a warrior. I smoked, and drank, and joked with him—the man who had ordered Eben and Josiah’s deaths.
“But I rejected Lyda utterly. I brought meat to her fire for the child’s sake, but I refused the other duties of a husband. Yet, the more I turned from her, the more desperate she became to have my attention. Purely for hatred’s sake, I began to dote openly upon other Wyandot women, to bed them, to give them everything I would not give her.”
Nicholas laughed, but it was not a pleasant sound. “Her own people began to reject her, even the men who’d once followed her like lovesick hounds. They felt she had become unnaturally attached to me and that if she were unhappy with me as a husband, she should divorce me in the Wyandot way by putting me out of her mother’s longhouse.”
“But she didn’t because she wanted you.”
“Aye. No man had ever rejected her, and she simply wanted what she could not have. She didn’t love me, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t know if she was capable of love.”
“If she had loved you, she wouldna have hurt you. She wouldna have stolen from you.”
“At first I’d thought she’d merely stolen a baby. By the end, she’d stolen my soul.”
Nicholas steeled himself for what he knew was coming, described how one afternoon in late winter, Lyda, her belly swelling, had come inside to find him buried between her youngest sister’s thighs. Aware she was watching, he’d taken that moment to plunge her sister into an intense orgasm. Lyda had turned and run out of the longhouse in tears.
“It gave me pleasure to see the hurt upon her face. I was happy to cause her grief.” He could feel it as if it were yesterday—the rage, the hate, the urge for vengeance. “When she wasn’t back by sundown, I searched for her. I expected to find her pouting somewhere, or perhaps rutting with some young warrior still fool enough to fall for her pretty face.”
