The Dagger X (The Dagger Chronicles) Read Free

Ontoquas came back around the bend. She beckoned to Sarah with urgency. Sarah pursed her lips, but made her way up the last several yards, surprised to see a flash ofteeth on the Indian girl when she reached her.
    She is smiling! Sarah drew closer. The look on Ontoquas’s face was more than just a smile. The girl’s face beamed with love and joy and pride so radiantly that it brought Sarah to a shocked standstill. The girl pointed toward the ground just a few feet ahead. There lay a tiny clearing in the wood, a circle bordered with stones, fallen logs, and brush shrouded in dark shadow.
    Sarah peered toward the circle. In the middle of it, bathed in pale moonlight, slept a baby, a tiny African infant. The baby slept on his back, his arms up by his head. His stomach gently rising and falling with his breath. Sarah gasped when she understood what she was seeing.
    “A baby! What is an infant . . . where did . . . is the baby yours?” Ontoquas held a finger to her lips. She knew the baby would be very angry if awoken in the middle of the night.
    Now Sarah was even more confused. How did this baby come to be here? The girl was too young to be a mother, and even in the dim light Sarah could see that the two could not be directly related. The girl’s lighter skin, her straight hair—she had to have been a native of the Americas. But the baby was much darker, with a thin layer of curly black hair and a wide nose that flared with each breath.
    He was beautiful.
    Ontoquas watched the wompey woman step over the barrier she had built to make sure the baby could not escape—not yet necessary since he did not crawl,but she could not bear to leave him in the open woods, even if this island had no animals that would show an interest. Sarah squatted down and scooped the child up expertly. The baby gave a startled jerk and his eyes shot open, but Sarah immediately rose and began to bob him up and down and run the tips of her fingers over his tiny black curls. The child’s eyes drooped, then shut again.
    “He is beautiful,” Sarah whispered.
    Ontoquas nodded. “Weneikinne.” Sarah stepped about the enclosure with the child in her arms, bouncing gently with each rhythmic step. Ontoquas felt a pang in her stomach as she watched and knew it to be jealousy. Whether the jealousy was aimed at the baby or the woman she did not know. She felt pride, too. Without her, the tiny one would be at the bottom of the sea.
    When she looked up again at the woman, she could see her cheeks were wet with tears. Ontoquas said nothing, but let the woman walk her little one around the circle, bobbing as she went. She knew the wompey nitka was thinking of the other child, the son of hers who they had said was somewhere lost out on the sea.
    Finally the woman wiped the tears away and stepped close so as not to wake the baby. “He is so young. How have you fed him?”
    Ontoquas shrugged. “I chew turtle in teeth,” she said, pantomiming the words. “Then I . . . I kiss it to Bucket.”
    “Bucket? That is his name?” Sarah smiled.
    “A bucket saved his life. And me.”
    Sarah looked back at the shining baby in her arms. “You have done so well, Ontoquas. He looks quite healthy. I would never have thought a girl of your age . . .”
    Again silence won out.
    “I helped my mother with my netchaw , my . . . brother. Before.”
    Before. Sarah nodded, wondering what horrors this child had faced. “Your mother taught you well. But I must know, Ontoquas, how did it come about that you and this baby are here together on this tiny island with no other soul in sight?”
    Ontoquas sighed and lowered herself to a fallen log that formed one barrier of the pen. She puzzled, staring hard at the floor of matted palm fronds.
    “It is long, our story. And my English . . .”
    “Your English is excellent, young lady. Astonishing. You should be proud of it.” Sarah looked back down the rise in the direction they had come. “Kitto is asleep and will