Thieving Forest by Martha Conway Page A

means to their home.
    Seth shakes his head and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. It is humid, worse than yesterday even. The clouds are one long paintbrush stroke across the sky.
    “What should we do?”
    “Keep looking,” Seth says. “Ransom them if we can.”
    “I tried to tell Susanna but I couldn’t.”
    “What would you say? We don’t know anything.”
    They walk not looking at each other. Seth’s horse blows air out from her nostrils and stretches her neck.
    “What are you looking for here?” Cade asks.
    He isn’t sure. Signs that people have been here, have traveled this way. Mud clings to his boots, and the horse’s legs are splattered up past her forelocks. “Maybe they got hold of some canoes.”
    “Is it deep enough for a boat?” Cade looks at the water, which is as flat as tar.
    “It was deeper a ways back.”
    Frogs are everywhere in evidence, most of them the same color as the mud. They rise up in unharmonious noise like they are mocking Seth’s thoughts. Like Cade, he doesn’t know what to say to Susanna. He wants to give her the money for her wagon and team, but how would he explain it? And if he says nothing, how can he give her the money? Back in Severne Aurelia is considered the prettiest Quiner, but Seth has always favored Susanna. He had a standing hope that she would be the one to come into the shop to get any little thing Sirus might need: new iron nails, a dent in their kettle pounded out. Before he moved to Severne Seth had seen only one red-headed woman in his life. She was thin and tall and ancient, thirty at least, and unmarried. She carried a small bucket in lieu of a purse. Miss Anders. They said she was a poet. To Seth she looked like a bird in winter, all beak and wing bone. He thought all red-headed women must be ugly until he got to Severne and saw five of them, all of them pretty, and all, according to the farmers, bad mannered and not worth the effort it might take to claim one as wife. Barren, too, they said later, or at least not able to give birth to a son. And the Quiners for their part looked down on the farmers. They might look down on Seth, too, the son of an ironmonger, but Seth hopes not so much. Susanna herself greeted them on the day the Spendloves arrived in Severne. She was only ten or eleven and came around as bold as a boy to see the new folks. She looked Seth straight in the eye, and then she looked at Cade, and then she looked back at Seth. Most people when they meet them look at Cade and stop there. He is the handsome one. Seth is the one no one could figure out where he got his looks. But Susanna looked at Seth more than she looked at Cade. That first summer they even played together sometimes around one of the brooks that fed into the Blanchard. By the next summer they were too old.
    Seth halts his horse. He kneels by the stream and splashes water up onto his face and neck. There are no signs of any natives: no canoe marks, no prints. Cade is right, this water is too shallow. He feels the ring in his pocket, which now feels insubstantial. He should go back to Severne and confront Amos. Or he should take a new route, ride more slowly, look more carefully. Or he should ride as fast as possible to Fort Wayne with ransom money in hopes of finding the women there. If the Potawatomi want ransom and they didn’t stop in Risdale then that’s where they would go. Fort Wayne to the west or Cincinnati down south. But the Potawatomi are northern people, most comfortable in forests, which means Fort Wayne.
    He glances at Cade, whose blond hair is plastered to his neck in the heat. “How is Aurelia?”
    “She can’t hardly speak,” Cade tells him. A muscle moves in his cheek. Seth can see how worried he is, how he carries it on his skin. A man who keeps all his big feelings to himself.
    “Used to be I’d hear her talking even before I rounded the cabin,” Cade says. “Now her whole face looks different. Not young exactly. Soft, but not