The Guardian by Elizabeth Lane Read Free Book Online Page A

white trapper who bought my mother,” he said.
    â€œHe bought her? Like he’d buy a horse?”
    â€œSuch things happen where there are white men andno white women. Because my mother was a widow with a child, her price was lower than the price for a maiden, but she was pretty and a hard worker. A bargain, as your people would say. We stayed with him for nine years.” Black Sun spoke carefully, hiding the bitterness that gnawed at his spirit whenever he thought about those nine years.
    â€œWas he good to you?”
    â€œNot so bad at first. He’d gone to school, and he taught both of us to speak English. I even learned to read from some books he had. But then the drinking started. It made him…vile.” He had to grope for the last word, which he had read, but never heard spoken.
    Charity was silent for a time. Black Sun could feel her shifting behind him. “What happened at the end of those nine years?” she finally asked. “How did you get away from him?”
    Black Sun sighed. “You ask too many questions, Charity Bennett. And your questions knock on doors that I choose not to open.”
    â€œI’m…sorry,” she said in a low voice. “I meant no offense.”
    â€œYou are a Nih’oo’oo, a white person, and not expected to know better,” he said. “Among my people it’s disrespectful to ask such private questions. Let’s be still for a while. Stillness is good.”
    She did not reply and, after a few moments, he knew she would not. Had he hurt her? Thinking back on his words, he realized they had sounded pompous and sillyin English—not the way they would sound in Arapaho, as spoken by an elder to rebuke an unruly child. Not the way they had once been spoken to him.
    In truth, he mused, he had never mastered correct Arapaho behavior. The Arapaho life way was something that had to be learned day by day, year by year, moving through the lodges, the lessons, games and rituals and ceremonies with one’s own age mates. Living apart for nine years, as the stepson of a drunken white man, had taught him to speak and read English. But it had robbed him of an Arapaho boy’s education.
    His accident of birth, during the time of the black sun, had marked him for a life as a healer and medicine man. But on returning to his people after his mother’s death, he had discovered that the gift was gone. In his life as an adult, he had performed the sun dance four times. His chest was laced with scars where his flesh had hung from the sharp bone hooks while he’d danced in a slow circle around the sacred pole. He had fasted countless days while he pleaded for a vision. But the beetee, the spiritual power he needed to serve his people, hadn’t come to him. Maybe it never would.
    The darkness lay like a quiet lake around him, its silence broken only by the movement of the horses and the low, edgy sound of Charity’s breathing. Had his words made her weep? No, that would not be like her, he thought. She was too strong for that. But she would be weary and in pain. Soon, regardless of the danger, he would need to stop, make camp and tend her burns.
    To the west, the mouth of the forbidden canyon cut like a deep black gash into the foothills. He turned his eyes away, struggling to ignore its call. There were other canyons, other shelters, he reminded himself. But none of them were so temptingly near.
    Lightning flashed across the dark sky, followed by a shattering boom of thunder. Rain began to fall around them, first in stinging drops, then in sheets of water that streamed off their hair, their shoulders, their backs and down the flanks of the horses.
    â€œC-can’t we stop somewhere?” Charity’s teeth were chattering with cold.
    â€œSoon.” Black Sun willed his gaze away from the canyon, despite the fact that the weather seemed to be driving them toward its shadowy entrance.
    â€œPlease, I’m so—