The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn by Lori Benton Page A

would it never lift? It stole her will to breathe and pushed her down … down to some mired place, black with shadow, where unseen things chittered and rustled and swooped at her head.
    “Tamsen. You got to wake up now.”
    She woke up. She wasn’t on the horse. The rocking was a hand, shaking her. Under her was hard ground. She hurt all over. And her mother was dead. That was the weight. Not on her chest. In it. As though her heart had been replaced in the night by stone, her ribs by iron bars. She had a powerful thirst and a throbbing in her head.
    She opened bleary eyes to a day she’d as soon never face.
    Seeing she was awake, her rescuer held out a canteen. “Reckon you’re thirsty. Couldn’t get you to drink a lick when we stopped. You fell on the ground asleep.”
    She pushed up to an elbow, took the canteen. The water was cold, sweet on her tongue. She gulped it so fast that it dribbled down her chin. She wiped her mouth with a hand, then offered back the canteen. He wouldn’t take it.
    “You keep that.” He moved to where a small fire burned, giving her the privacy of an averted gaze. He was wearing that long fringed shirt openat the neck. It was a faded, muddy shade, with faint stripes in the linsey-woolsey weave. She tried not to look where his leggings bared his thighs as he squatted to tend the fire.
    “Morning’s nigh spent,” he said.
    It was. The sun beat down, dappled through leaves. Despite the sense that they were high in the mountains, the air was warm. Tamsen felt clammy beneath her stays, which had pressed the folds of her shift into her flesh where she’d lain. Enduring the discomfort, she untied her cloak and let it fall to the ground.
    The past night was a blur. The lurch and sway of the horse, the clatter of hooves on stone, the chill damp on her face. And him. Her rescuer. Her guide. Always he was there, the triangle outline of his hat black against the stars, moonlight catching the tail of his hair hanging between broad shoulders, bow and quiver at his back, rifle in the crook of his arm, as he trudged on and on into that endless night, never seeming to tire. He looked tired now. His sun-browned face was haggard, the lower half shadowed with a day and night of beard.
    “We might yet be followed,” he told her, still with his back turned. “If that fellow, Spencer, tells what he’s seen, down in Morganton. I aim to put a heap more miles behind us afore nightfall.”
    Looking around, Tamsen found she had no memory of stopping in that place. Trees draped in woody vines surrounded a break in the forest just large enough for the horse to graze. The man’s bedding, a blanket and a black pelt, lay by her cloak. Had he slept so close beside her?
    Not for long, by the look of him.
    “There’s the stream,” he said into her silence. “If you fancy a wash.”
    She’d been hearing its chatter since waking, she realized. A tiny fall spilled where laurel brush closed in. Ferns edged the clearing, their fronds browning at the tips.
    “And here’s corndodgers.” He held out a cornmeal cake he’d cookedon a rock in the embers. She took it unthinking and put it to her mouth. Instantly her stomach rebelled.
    She made it to the ferns before she vomited. It went on and on, burning, humiliating, until her stomach had no more to heave. Drool and worse ran down her chin and clung to her trailing hair. She had nothing with which to clean herself but the hem of her petticoat. She reached for it, and stared. It was rent to her knees, baring her shift and the snagged remnants of her stockings. She remembered, back in Morganton, the man’s knife in the dark, how for a terrible moment she’d thought he intended something different.
    Tamsen crawled back to the fire where he sat, knees bent, head in his hands, fingers buried in his unbound hair. The sun-bleached strands at his crown stirred in the breeze that shivered the greenery surrounding them.
    She waited, too miserable to wonder what he was