“I say, madam!” he called, in something like an English accent. “Are you in need of assistance?”

“Yes!” I shouted back, and pointed at Oliver’s body. “Is that man dead?”

The Indian glanced down and toed Oliver in the buttock. Oliver twitched, groaned, and reached back to swat away the nuisance.

“No,” he said, and put a hand to his belt, where I now saw that he carried a substantial knife of some sort. “Do you want him to be?”

I got to my feet and edged crabwise down the slope until I was in conversational range of the stranger—and Oliver, whose eyes were squinched shut, but who was plainly conscious and wishing he weren’t.

“Having you dead would solve a good many problems,” I told him. “But I’m told that two wrongs don’t make a right.”

“Really?” said the Indian, smiling. “Who told you that?”

“Never mind,” I said. “At the moment, I need to look at this man and be sure that he isn’t badly hurt, and if not, then I need to go back up there”—I jerked a thumb over my shoulder—“and finish digging up the man who’s buried, so I can take care of him.”

“He’s not dead?” the Indian asked, shading his eyes with his hand as he surveyed the slope. “He looks dead.”

He did, but I was hoping that appearances might be deceiving. I was about to say this when a slight rustle in the wet brush betokened another arrival, and Young Ian stepped out, holding a little boy who was sucking his thumb and regarding me warily.

“Oh, there ye are, Auntie,” said Young Ian, his face lighting at sight of me. “I thought I heard your voice!”

I felt as though I might just dissolve with relief, and flow downhill myself, to puddle at the bottom.

“Ian!” I waded out of the mud and seized him in a one-armed hug. “How are you? Is this Oggy? He’s so big! Where’s Rachel?”

“Ach, all the women are havin’ a pish in the woods,” he said with a shrug. He nodded at the elderly Indian. “I see ye’ve met the Sachem. This is my auntie, Okàrakarakh’kwa; the one I told ye about.”

“Ah,” said the Sachem, and bowed, hand on his embroidered waistcoat. “It is my pleasure, honored witch.”

“Likewise, I’m sure,” I replied politely, twitching my mud-clogged hem in the ghost of a curtsy. Then I turned back to Ian.

“What do you mean, ‘all the women’? And who,” I added, suddenly catching sight of a larger boy of perhaps seven or eight, hovering shyly in the shadow of the wood, “is this?”

“This is Tsi’niios’noreh’ neh To’tis tahonahsahkehtoteh,” he said, smiling as he put his free hand on the boy’s shoulder. “My elder son. We call him Tòtis.”