Susan Johnson by Silver Flame (Braddock Black)

amount (it was poisonous) to reduce the chance of fever; another portion of sleeproot in the rich, chilled eggnog.
    “Don’t ask me how it works,” Empress told them once, “but my mother saved a man once who was ravaged by gangrene with her eggnog. It makes new tissue, she says, and heals the old.” Then, a half hour later, another serving of yarrow tea, which slowed the flow of blood, sedated the nerves, and served also as an anesthetic.
    Afterward the poultice on Trey’s back was exchanged for an application of monarda oil, an antiseptic.
    Then a brew of araica to reduce swelling and the chance of infection.
    And so it went.
    They spelled each other routinely, hardly speaking, weary with fatigue, but bound by their determination to keep Trey from slipping away.
    Hazard often talked to his son in a low murmur, altering occasionally into a quiet, melodic chanting that twice caused a faint eye movement beneath Trey’s closed lids.
    They all noticed the almost imperceptible reaction, for each in their own way were watching Trey with vigilance. Hazard looked up at Blaze both times. “It was always his favorite,” he said the first time with a sad smile, and when it occurred again very near morning, he murmured, “The People are watching over him. I can feel it.” Hazard went off by himself shortly afterward to a darkened corner of the large room, sat on the floor, closed his eyes, and remained motionless, as if in a trance.
    “He’s praying to his spirits,” Blaze explained. “He sees them and hears them. I wish I had his faith; it gives him infinite strength. He talks to them with reverence, and they to him. It is the mind that leads a man to power, he always says, not strength of body.”
    When Hazard returned to Trey’s bedside, he took a thin gold chain with a small bit of rough stone wrapped in fine gold wire from around his neck and carefully placed it around Trey’s. It was the most important spirit medicine in his life, his talisman, which had always kept him safe. And now, in his son’s greatest extremity, he gave it up to save him. “
Ahbadt-dadt-deah
,he is in Your hands,” the Absarokee name meaning “The one who made all things.”
    Empress and Blaze were near exhaustion, and at Hazard’s insistence they lay down on cots set up near Trey’s bed. Hazard didn’t sleep but sat in a chair close to Trey and watched the faint rise and fall of his son’s irregular breathing. He had already made all the promises and offerings to the spirits, and now he sat silently and willed his son to live.
    Empress woke first, her sleep fitful and light, her subconscious brain racing over the remedies and potions, racking her memory for anything that would help Trey survive. He must live! her mind insisted, an emotional response so powerful that she sat bolt-upright on her narrow cot and opened her eyes to find herself already half out of bed. She owed him her life, she thought, still dimly enveloped in sleep although both her feet were on the floor, sensitive to the softness of the carpet. She would repay him by saving his life. Her eyes finally focused on the electric light over the bureau mirror. Electric lights! She hadn’t noticed in the frenzy of the past hours. Hadn’t expected them on the isolated prairie. But why not? the logical part of her brain reminded her. Helena prided itself on its technological progress; their first streetlights went into operation in ’82, and the mines had used generators before that. The Braddock-Blacks had everything else, why shouldn’t they have electricity, and the lights were dismissed although the phenomenon was startling so far up-mountain. Single-minded, Empress’s only concern was that Trey must live, and that purpose overwhelmed even minor miracles of technology.
    Trey’s silvery eyes continued to haunt her even though she’d not caught the slightest glimpse of them locked tightly away behind his shuttered lids. She could still see their luminous beauty, the