Bright sunlight ahead warned her that they were coming to a clearing, but when they passed through the thick bushes that took them inside it, she found herself blinking in surprise. Before her astonished gaze were eight cabins virtually identical to Aunt Jinny’s place, one much bigger one in the center, and one smaller, off to the side of the others, all surrounded by a ring of productive gardens. And there were people everywhere. She had suspected that there were more Cherokee than just the Ravens and Young Raven’s wife deep in the Holler, perhaps as many as a dozen, but she’d had no idea there was an entire tribe back here.

“This is not what a traditional village would look like,” Young Raven said, as she stared at more people than she had ever imagined were hiding back here. “A traditional village would have summer and winter houses for each family, and a sweathouse for the sick for each family as well. But there was no point in building summer and winter houses, when the kind of cabin we knew how to build at the time of the Removal was much better in both halves of the year, especially after your great-grandfather showed us how improve our own, and how to build his wonderful stove. The center building is the Council House. The little one is the sweathouse we all share, because thanks to my father, my grandmother, me, and my wife, we are all seldom sick.”

There were children everywhere, from toddling babies to ten- or eleven-year-olds. Some were doing chores; some were just playing. There didn’t seem to be any men around; the women were dressed in a practical outfit of a kind of long smock with a belt or sash and leggings, often in a mix of leather and colorful calico, and were mostly engaged in all manner of work. Except for the oldest women, who were supervising the children. The boys wore outfits like Young Raven’s, the girls like their mothers, the toddlers wore nothing at all—which, after a moment of shock, seemed eminently practical to Anna. Given how dirty very young children liked to get in play, what could be more sensible than just leaving them in their skin as long as the weather allowed it? After no more than a glance or two at her, the adults went back to their work, which was everything from working in the garden to smoking meat in racks over smoldering fires, to working on hides stretched over curing frames, to what she presumed was grinding corn the hard way—by hand. But the children came pelting over to stare at her as soon as they spotted her.

Reckon I’m a reg’lar circus, she thought wryly. “O’siyo,” she said, politely, as all those grave little faces looked up at hers.

“This is Anna,” Young Raven said. “She is hiding from an enemy of hers, and ours. You must all be very careful and stay within the boundary until she leaves. Only then will you know the enemy is gone. We do not want to discover you have been stolen away from us and sent far away as our brothers and sisters were.”