There were a few shocked gasps; a respectable girl didn’t walk into a man’s den like this unaccompanied. Some of the gasps were for her dress-she’d added buckskin leggings and boots, which made her maiden’s shift look more like a man’s hunting shirt, and so did the leather belt cinched about her waist, carrying a long bowie and short double-edged toothpicker dagger and tomahawk. A horseshoe-shaped blanket roll rode from left shoulder to right hip, in the manner of a hunter or traveler.
One man sitting on the wall-bench, not an Alligator clansman and the worse for corn-liquor, misinterpreted and made a grab for her backside. That brought the big dog walking beside her into action; her sharp command saved the oaf’s hand, but Slasher still caught the forearm in his jaws hard enough to bring a yelp of pain. The stranger also started to reach for the short sword on his belt, until the jaws clamped tighter, tight enough to make him yell.
“You wouldn’t have been trying to grab my ass uninvited, would you, stranger?” Sonjuh said sweetly. “’Cause if you were, after Slasher here takes your hand off, these clansmen of mine will just naturally have to take you to the Jefe for a whuppin’. ’Less they stomp you to death their own selves.”
The man stopped the movement of right hand to hilt, looked around-a fair number of men were glaring at him now, distracted from their disapproval of Sonjuh-and decided to shake his head. A sensible man was very polite out of his own clan’s territory. If he wasn’t…well, that was how feuds started.
“No offense, missie,” he wheezed.
“Loose him,” Sonjuh commanded, and the dog did-reluctantly.
The man picked up his gear and made for the door; several of the others sitting on stools and rough half-log benches called witticisms or haw-hawed as he went; Sonjuh ignored the whole business and walked on.
The laughter or the raw whiskey he’d downed prompted the man to stick his head back around the timber door-frame and yell, “Suck my dick, you whore!”
Sonjuh felt something wash from face down to thighs, a feeling like hot rum toddy on an empty stomach, but nastier. She pivoted, drew, and her right hand moved in a chopping blur.
The tomahawk pinwheeled across the room to sink into the rough timber beside the door, a whirr of cloven air that ended in a solid chunk of steel in oak. The out-clan stranger gaped at his hand, still resting on the timber where the edge of the throwing-ax had taken a coin-size divot off the end of the middle finger, about halfway down through the fingernail. Then he leapt, howling and dancing from foot to foot and gripping the injured hand in the other as the mutilated digit spattered blood; after a moment he ran off down the street, still howling and shouting bitch! at the top of his lungs.
Most of the men in the beer shop laughed at that, some so loud they fell to the rush-strewn clay floor and lay kicking their legs in the air. She went and pulled the tomahawk out of the wood, wiped it on her sleeve, and reslung it; Slasher sniffed at something on the floor, then snapped it up. The roaring chorus of guffaws and he-haws was loud enough to bring curious bypassers to the door and windows, and send more hoots of mirth down the street as the tale spread; several men slapped her on the back, or offered drinks-offers she declined curtly. The older men were quiet, she noticed, and still frowning at her.
Instead she pushed through the long smoky room toward the back, where the man she sought was sitting. The air was thick with tobacco smoke-and the smell of the quids some men chewed and spat, plus sweat and cooking and sour spilled beer and piss from the alley out back. Still, she thought he’d probably seen all there was to see; those smoldering blue eyes didn’t look as if they missed much.
“Heya,” she said, and to her dog, “Down, Slasher.”
“Heya, missie,” he replied formally, as the big wolfish-looking beast went belly-to-earth.
“You Hunter Robre? Robre sunna Jowan?” The form of a question was there, but there was certainty in her voice.
“Him ’n’ no other,” the young man said. “You’d be Sonjuh dawtra Pehte, naw?”
His brows went up a little as she sat uninvited, pulling over a stool that was made from a section of split log, flat side sanded and the other set with four sticks. The rushes on the hard-packed clay floor rustled and crackled as she plunked it down and straddled it.
“Yi-ah.” She nodded, a little mollified that he hadn’t used her father’s gift-names. Nobody wanted to be called the daughter of the Stinker or the Friendless. “There’s no feud between the Alligators ’n’ the Bear Creek people, or quarrel between our kin.”
“No feud, no quarrel,” he acknowledged; both clans were of the Cross Plains folk, which meant they didn’t have to assure each other that there was no tribal war going on either. It was more than a little unorthodox for a woman to go through the ritual, anyway.
“How’d you know who I was?” she added, curious, as she tore off some of the wheat-and-injun bread he had before him, dipped it in the salt and ate it; that satisfied courtesy, in a minimal sort of way.
He was supposed to be a sharp man, but as far as she knew they’d never met-her family had lived solitary. Robre was famous, after a fashion: Sonjuh dawtra Pehte had begun acquiring a little notoriety only in the last few weeks.
“Figured. Old Pehte had red hair like yours before he went bald, ’n’ ’sides that, you favor him in your looks.” He ate a piece of the bread himself, which meant he had at least to listen to her; then he went on: “He was a dab hand with a tomahawk, too; saw him win the pig ’n’ turkey here at Dannulsford once when my father brought me, must be ten years ago now.”
Sonjuh tossed her head, sending the long horse-tail of her hair swishing. Being unmarried-likely she would be anyway at nineteen, even were her father someone else-she wore her hair down and tied back with a snakeskin band, in a torrent the color of mahogany reaching to between her shoulder blades; a thick band of freckles ran across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Any man of the Seven Tribes would have accounted her comely, snub-nosed face and red lips and the long smooth curves of her figure as well, until he saw the wildness in those haunted leaf-green eyes.
“Nice throw, too, missie,” Robre continued. “Pehte must’ve taught you well.”
“I missed, ” she snapped. “Wanted to split his ugly face!”
Robre laughed, a quieter sound than most men’s mirth, then stopped when he realized she wasn’t even smiling.
“Welcome to a share,” he said a little uneasily, indicating the pitcher of corn beer and clay jug of whiskey.
“Didn’t come to drink,” she said, after taking a token sip from the beer jug; refusing a man’s liquor was a serious insult. “I came to talk business.”
The young man’s black brows went up farther. “Shouldn’t your…oh.”
Sonjuh nodded. “My father’s dead.” Oh, merciful God, thank You he died first of all. “So’s my mother. So’s my three sisters. I saw-”
Of itself, her hand shot out and grabbed Robre’s glass. She tossed back the raw spirits and waited with her eyes clenched shut until the sudden heat in her stomach and a wrenching effort of will stopped the shaking of her hands and pushed away the pictures behind her eyelids. When she looked back up, Robre was frowning at her left forearm, where a bandage had slipped from a healing wound. A patch of skin had been removed-neatly, the way a skinning knife would do it in skilled hands.
She tugged the sleeve down over the rawness and went on: “Didn’t come for sympathy, either. Like I said, I’ve got business to talk with you, Robre Hunter.”
He took a pull at his mug of beer, wiped the back of one big calloused hand across his mouth, and nodded. “I’m listening, missie.”
That was more than she’d expected, if less than she’d hoped. “I didn’t have brothers. My pa didn’t hold with hiring help, either, so from my woman-time I’ve been doing a son’s work for him. Hunting, too.” She took a deep breath. “I know my pa wasn’t well liked-”