The Journey of Runs-Far: a Kindred novella by Lori Benton

Author:Lori Benton [Benton, Lori]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

It was getting on toward morning, the third night traveling along the Yadkin River, when Blue-Jay heard the horses coming on the road behind them. Though not the first time it had happened, Blue-Jay’s shoulders stiffened beneath Thomas’s coat, which he wore along with breeches and a shirt tied at the throat with a strip of matching cloth, like a white man.

He had worn them since the previous night when they passed a man on horseback who stopped them. That man had found it strange, Thomas doing the driving while Blue-Jay sat in the wagon bed beside his father, atop the board under which Esther hid. Taking him for a white man, he had addressed Blue-Jay, who tried to answer as a white man would while his heart pounded, afraid for his father and the hidden girl.

Though the man had not asked about runaway slaves before going his way, Thomas soon halted the wagon, gave over his coat, and found the garments that fit Blue-Jay well enough to pass in the dark as his own. Blue-Jay had donned Thomas’s hat then taken over driving the team, leaving his father and Thomas in the bed, ready to hide the girl again at need. There had been none until now, past a village where the rattle of the wagon had alarmed a dog into barking.

Blue-Jay glanced back. Only a gray stripe on the horizon marked the coming day, but his eyes were accustomed to the dark. There were two horsemen, coming up fast.

“Steady,” Thomas said above the wagon’s rattle. “Drive like you’ve every right to be on this road.”

The words were barely out before one rider called ahead. “Halt that wagon!”

Crouched behind the driving bench, Thomas groaned. “I can’t be seen.”

The lines bit into Blue-Jay’s clenched fingers. “Why can you not?”

“No time. Pull over!”

Forest hemmed both sides of the narrow road beyond the village. Blue-Jay obeyed the urgency in Thomas’s voice, edging the team toward the thickest shadows. Before the wagon rolled to a halt Thomas vaulted over its side and slipped into the trees. Neither rider gave a shout, as if they had not seen. Blue-Jay heard his father murmuring. Praying? Reassuring the girl?

Pray for me, Edo’da.

The riders were upon them. One moved his horse to stand across their path. The other—Blue-Jay had the impression in the coming dawn of a man well-dressed in the way of the unega—edged his tall horse close to the wagon, peering at Blue-Jay, then at his father, seated among the barrels and crates in the bed, still wearing breechclout and leggings under his shirt.

“An Indian,” the man said in surprise. “Yours?”

Blue-Jay’s mouth had dried. He fought the urge to slap the lines across the horses’ backs and let them bolt. That would do no good. He must brazen this out.

“He is mine. Is that what you stop us to ask?”

The man’s gaze sharpened on him. Blue-Jay had not sounded like Edmund MacKinnon, or Charlie Spencer, or any man who called this land east of the mountains home, though he had tried.

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