He resembled his siblings, but didn’t look as much like them as they looked like each other, she thought. His face was lively, but charming rather than beautiful, and his eyes didn’t look like his mother’s. Dark, but with a glint of hazel that the others didn’t have. He was tall for his age, but thin.

“This is my eldest son,” Emily said, introducing the children with a smile of pride. “We call him Tòtis.” Tòtis looked curiously at the visitors, but seemed mostly interested in Oggy and asked his name, in English.

“He hasn’t yet got a real name,” Ian said, smiling down at the boy. “We called him for the governor of Georgia, a man named Oglethorpe, until his proper name should come.”

The children were taken away, and they made conversation over the food. After they had eaten, Works With Her Hands said she must go to the longhouse for a few moments—and invited Ian to come, saying that perhaps it had been a long time since he had been in such a place. She said nothing about Rachel, leaving it to her whether to come, too, but Rachel nodded politely and said she would feed Oggy and then perhaps follow them.

“I confess to curiosity,” she said, smiling directly at Works With Her Hands. “I should like to see the sort of place that my husband called home for so long a time.”

She had a very good idea as to Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa’s motive in inviting Ian to attend her in the longhouse. This was the setting in which Ian had first become attracted to her, the sort of place they had lived in together. The thought made her heart beat faster.

For the first time, she wondered whether Ian had desired her to come with him as a form of protection.

“God knows,” she said to Oggy, undoing her laces. “But we’ll do our best, won’t we?”

IAN COULD SMELL it long before she pulled back the bearskin that hung over the door of the longhouse. Smoke and sweat, a trace of piss and shit. But mostly the smell of fire and food, meat and roasted corn and squash, the tang of beer—and the smell of furs. He had done his best to forget the touch of cold winter on his skin and the smell of her smooth musky warmth in the furs. He shoved the memory aside now, with the ease of long habit, and stepped inside. But the heavy air touched him and followed him into the dark like a hand laid lightly on his back.

It was a small house, only two fires. Two women sat by one of them, tending a couple of pots, while three small children played in the shadows and a baby’s squeal was cut short by its mother putting it to her breast.