Chapter Text
May19th, 1805
The village slept the way it always did, lightly.
Even in peace, no one slept without listening.
The homes were wetus, low and rounded, frames of bent saplings lashed together and covered in bark and woven mats. Smoke breathed out through the tops in thin, steady threads.
The night smelled of ash, damp earth, and the river carried faintly on the wind. Beyond the clearing, the forest pressed close, dark and protective, roots tangled deep with memory.
Wunnegen lay curled beside her younger brother, Pahquos, their blankets pulled up against the spring cold. She could hear her mother’s quiet breathing nearby, the soft shift of bodies as people dreamed.
The dogs were the first to know.
One lifted its head. Then another. Low growls rippled through the village, hesitant, uncertain.
Wunnegen's eyes opened.
Then came the sound that didn’t belong.
Boots.
Not moccasins. Not soft-soled. Heavy. Uneven. Many.
A musket fired.
The sound cracked the night in half.
Screams followed, sharp, sudden, panicked. Another shot. Then another. Fire bloomed where there should have been darkness as torches were hurled onto bark walls. Flames caught fast, licking greedily along dry edges.
“Get up,” her mother hissed, already moving. “Now.”
Wunnegen grabbed her brother’s wrist, yanking him upright as smoke coiled through the wetu. Outside, shapes moved in the firelight, too tall, too broad, men in long coats with muskets glinting. One kicked open a neighboring wetu, dragging an elder out by the hair. The old man’s scream was cut short by the butt of a rifle.
Her mother shoved a knife into her hands, bone handle, sharp as winter wind. “Run,” she said, eyes flicking to the mat-covered entrance where shadows now pulsed. “Not the path. The blackberry thicket.”
Wunnegen knew without asking. The thorns would tear their skin, but white men wouldn’t follow.
Wunnegen's fingers tightened around her brother’s wrist. “Where’s—”
Her mother’s hand clamped over her mouth before she could finish the question. The answer was in the way her mother’s eyes flicked toward the center of the village, where the war cries had already turned to gurgling coughs. Where the heavy boots were loudest. Her father had been on watch tonight.
The wetu’s mat door was ripped aside. Light and smoke poured in, and with them, a man, broad-shouldered, stinking of gunpowder and sweat, his face shadowed by a tricorn hat.
He lunged, fingers like iron around Wunnegen's arm, hauling her up so fast her feet left the ground. Her brother shrieked, high and raw, as another man seized him by the knot of his hair. Their mother moved like a darting fox, slashing with her own knife, but a rifle butt caught her temple with a wet crack. She dropped without a sound.
Dirt and embers stung Wunnegen’s bare feet as she was dragged into the chaos. The village was a nightmare of flame and screams. Two mercenaries held a young man down while a third hacked at his scalp with a knife.
A woman crawled, half her skirt aflame, before a boot silenced her thrashing. Wunnegen twisted, teeth sinking into the hand gripping her, iron and salt flooded her mouth, but the man just laughed, shaking her like a rabbit in a snare. “Feisty little savage,” he spat, before hurling her face-first into the mud.
Her brother’s wail cut through the roaring fire, not a child’s cry, but something feral, desperate. He writhed in his captor’s grip, small fists battering the man’s stained waistcoat.
The mercenary backhanded him hard enough to send teeth skittering across the ground. “Quiet!” Blood slicked Pahquos' chin, but he kept screaming, reaching blindly for Wunnegen, fingers clawing air.
She lunged, but the man holding her jerked her back, twisting her arm until the bone threatened to snap. Firelight glinted off the silver ring on his finger, a peculiar jewel, crude and heavy.
Behind him, silhouettes moved through smoke, dragging others toward the treeline where ropes and shackles waited. A woman stumbled, her belly round with child; a boot sent her sprawling. Wunnegen’s throat burned with bile.
A rasping voice cut through the din, old Nanepashemet, his face streaked with ash, one arm hanging limp at his side.
He staggered between two mercenaries hauling baskets of stolen corn. "You cannot!" He wheezed in broken English, voice cracking. "Treaty... signed with... Boston men!" The words were barely out before a rifle stock slammed into his ribs, folding him like a gutted deer.
The man with the silver ring, the one who'd thrown Wunnegen, stepped forward, his boot crushing Nanepashemet's trembling fingers into the mud.
"Ain't got no treaty with us," he sneered, then pressed his musket barrel to the elder's forehead. The shot wasn't clean. Half the old man's skull painted the wetu behind him in a wet arc, brains and bone fragments sticking to the bark like grotesque ornaments.
Smoke clogged Wunnegen's throat. She couldn't scream, couldn't breathe, only stare as Nanepashemet's body collapsed, his good arm twitching once, twice, before stillness took him. The mercenary spat on the corpse, then turned to his men. "Load 'em up. Any that fight, put a ball through their knees. They'll fetch half-price as cripples."
Her brother had gone silent now, shaking in his captor's grip, eyes wide and wet with terror. Wunnegen's fingers dug into the mud where her mother's knife lay half-buried, the bone handle slick with dew.
The man holding her shifted his weight, distracted by the commotion near the burning longhouse, some fool trying to run, cut down mid-stride by a pistol shot.
Thirteen winters had taught her stillness. Thirteen winters tracking deer, learning how a leaf's rustle could betray movement. She went limp, not fighting, not struggling, just dead weight in his grasp. The mercenary grunted, adjusting his grip, and in that split second, her hand closed around the knife.
She drove it backward into his thigh.
The blade slid between thick wool and straining muscle, meeting resistance before sinking deep. Hot blood pulsed over her fingers as the man bellowed, his grip loosening. Wunnegen twisted free, scrambling toward her brother, but hands grabbed her from behind, another mercenary, his breath rancid with rum. She kicked, her heel connecting with his shin, but he only laughed, dragging her toward a line of shackled villagers.
Her brother’s captor had him pinned now, looping rope around his wrists while the boy thrashed like a caught fish. Blood from his split lip painted the man’s sleeve in smeared crescents.
Wunnegen screamed, not words, just sound, raw and jagged, and lunged again, teeth bared. The mercenary holding her yanked her back so hard her neck snapped, vision swimming.
A voice barked out, deep, commanding, and the men hesitated. Through the haze of smoke, a new figure emerged: tall, broad-shouldered, his coat darker than the others, trimmed in silver that caught the firelight.
His boots sank into the mud with deliberate weight as he surveyed the carnage, his eyes lingering on Wunnegen with something like appraisal.
"Easy with that one," he said, nodding toward her. His voice carried an odd lilt, not Boston, not New York, not English. Dutch, maybe. "She’s got fight. Fetch a better price undamaged."
Hands wrenched Wunnegen’s arms behind her back. Cold iron clamped around her wrists, the shackles biting deep. She kicked out, catching a man in the knee; his curse was worth the blow that followed, a fist cracking against her temple.
Stars burst behind her eyes as she was lifted, limp as a gutted trout, and hurled into the waiting cage. Her body hit the wooden slats hard enough to splinter skin. The carriage stank of old blood and piss, straw scattered thin over filth-crusted planks.
Several others were shoved in after her, two women, a boy younger than Pahquos, their elbows and knees jabbing as the cage filled. The space became a press of shuddering limbs and stifled sobs. Wunnegen twisted, ribs grinding against the bars, searching for her brother’s small form in the chaos outside.
Smoke stung her eyes, turning faces into smudges. She couldn’t see Pahquos. Couldn’t see her mother’s familiar shape among the prisoners being roped together. Couldn’t see her father at all.
The mercenaries moved like wolves after a kill, laughing as they rifled through wetus, tossing woven baskets aside, pocketing anything metal or glass. One man pried a copper kettle from a woman’s grip, backhanding her when she clung to it.
The cage smelled of sweat and fear, the air thick with the tang of blood and burning pitch. Beside Wunnegen, the younger boy trembled, his breath coming in short, wet hitches. She recognized him, Tisquantum’s grandson, but his name stuck in her throat like a bone.
“Shut that bitch up,” snarled one of the men outside the cage as Wunnegen screamed again. A fist slammed against the bars inches from her face, rattling the wood. She barely flinched. Her wrists burned where the shackles chafed, but the pain was distant, unimportant.
The only thing that mattered was the gap between the cage slats, just wide enough to press her face against, her eyes straining through the smoke and drifting ash. Where was Pahquos? Where was—
A mercenary strode past, dragging a naked woman by her hair. Not her mother. Not her mother. Wunnegen’s breath came too fast, her ribs pressing sharply against the bars. The cage smelled of piss now, acrid and sour as one of the younger boys lost control of his bladder. She barely noticed.
Her fingers curled around the slats, nails digging into the wood, splinters catching under skin as she scanned the clearing again. A figure moved in the haze, small, stumbling, and her heart lurched. “Pahquos!” She screamed, but the name was swallowed by the crack of another musket shot.
The carriages moved out. Oxen lowed, straining against wooden yokes as the wheels groaned through mud thickened with ash and blood. Chains clinked where prisoners shuffled in single file, wrists bound, heads bowed. Wunnegen’s cage lurched forward, the sudden movement throwing her against the others. Someone sobbed.
She didn’t. She kept her eyes locked on the dwindling flames of the village, searching for any flicker of movement that might be her baby brother escaping into the blackberry thicket.
But the mercenaries were thorough. Torchlight swept through the undergrowth, steel glinting where blades slashed at dense brambles. No child could hide there now.
Smoke clung to the caravan like a shroud, threaded through with the stench of sweat and gunpowder. Wunnegen’s throat burned, but she refused to cough, refused to give the men walking alongside the cages the satisfaction.
One of them, his face ruddy with drink, smirked at her through the bars. “Gonna fetch a fine price for you, little heathen.” He reached in, fingers brushing her cheek before she snapped at them like a cornered fox.
The man yanked his hand back, laughing, and spat a glob of brown tobacco juice onto the cage floor. It landed near Tisquantum’s grandson, who flinched as if struck.
The wheels hit a rut, jolting them all sideways. Wunnegen’s shoulder slammed into the bars, pain flaring where the shackles had already rubbed her wrists raw. Through the gaps, she glimpsed the mercenaries leading the procession, their coats dark with soot, their hats tipped low against the rising sun. Somewhere behind them, her village still smoldered.
Then she saw him, the man with the silver ring. He walked ahead of the cages, his stride easy, relaxed, like a fox after a full meal. Moonlight caught the metal on his thumb, flashing bright as he gestured to another man. Wunnegen’s breath stilled.
She memorized the thick scar carving through his stubbled chin, the way it puckered when he laughed. The curve of his nose, broken once and healed crooked. The cruel tilt of his mouth as he glanced back at the cages, his eyes scanning the prisoners like a butcher inspecting livestock.
His voice carried, rough and mocking, but the words blurred together in her ears, English, but too fast, too thick with accents she didn’t know. A language she had heard before, from traders and preachers, but never learned. The sounds slid past her without meaning.
Only one phrase slithered through her confusion: fetch a price. He said it twice, grinning, before spitting into the dirt. Wunnegen’s fingers curled around the cage slats, splinters biting into her palms.
She didn’t understand his language, but she understood the way he touched the knife at his belt, the way his gaze lingered too long on the younger girls. She understood the dried blood crusted beneath his nails.
The cage rocked with the uneven rhythm of the road, jostling bodies pressed tight against hers. The boy beside her whimpered, his breath hot and uneven against her shoulder. Wunnegen barely felt him. Her eyes stayed fixed on the man’s back, the sway of his coat, the way his boots left deep prints in the mud.
She memorized the roll of his shoulders when he laughed, the gap between his front teeth when he turned his head. These were things she would need later.
The thought settled in her chest like a stone in cold water: She would be the one to end him. Not today. Not tomorrow. But someday.
When his guard was down, when his hands were slick with drink or greed, when he thought himself safe. She would find him. And she would make it slow.
Wunnegen pressed her forehead against the cage slats, letting the rough wood bite into her skin.
She had no prayers left, no pleas to the spirits, only the promise clotting in her throat like half-dried blood. To the ancestors who watched from the smoke-stained sky, to the earth that drank her people’s screams.
She swore it: his last breath would rattle through her fingers.