Touchstone Season Two Box Set by Andy Conway

Author:Andy Conway [Conway, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction historical, gaslamp, urban fantasy series, Box set, teen & young adult time travel, fantasy historical, alternative history
Publisher: Wallbank Books
Published: 2019-06-16T22:00:00+00:00

The white ghost

BIGHORN MOUNTAINS, JUNE 28TH, 1876. We rode for a day till we came to the foot of the Bighorn mountains and there we stopped to bury our dead.

Many erected scaffolds for dead warriors, some placed the dead in the branches of nearby trees, some, I noticed, chose to bury their fallen under rocks. We were many bands, with different customs, united by grief.

For many hours, we stayed and sang our songs of mourning and did not care if the soldiers caught us.

I took Little Star’s body from the travois, still wondering if he might blink, look around him, smile and ask what had happened since he’d fallen asleep. But he would wake no more.

His eyes gazed at the sky and I tried to close them but they stayed open, a grey film clouding them.

Death had taken him, as it takes all living things.

But Death had taken him to a better world. A world where there was no more pain, where blueshirts came only to be killed in battle and never to kill. In the Spirit Land, he would already be respected as a great warrior, and The Men who are Talked About would come worship at his feet and admire his good looks and great feats of bravery.

I took the travois poles and built him a scaffold to encourage his journey into the sky.

He would go to the Spirit Land like a warrior.

He wore the dress in which he’d set out to battle, but I changed into my own dress and gave him back his man’s clothes, so he might go to the Spirit Land as both a man and a woman. Then I wrapped his best blanket tight around him so he might never feel the cold.

Unable to lift him onto the scaffold on my own, I went looking for Surrounded, and he was happy to come to my aid, fussing around me and puffing out his chest in that way White Cow Bull did around Monahsetah — a man helping a woman and thinking it meant she was his wife. I brushed aside his manner, keening and crying my death song, till he wandered off and left me alone to my grief.

I noticed him go help another grieving woman, Red Flea, whose husband was dead. I could see, even through my tears, that she was flashing him sad eyes to lure him, to claim a new husband, and shooting a poisonous glance at me, thinking I was her rival. She could have him. I wanted no man.

I placed Little Star’s best moccasins on the scaffold beside him, along with his knife, his pipe, his medicine bundle, and every other thing he possessed.

Many of the women around me who were burying their brothers and husbands had already cut their hair short. But for some of them, that wasn’t enough to show their grief. They drove wooden pegs through their arms. One cut off half of her little finger, screaming in agony and holding its spurting stub high in the air.

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