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planning a counterattack? “I am lost already! Get the men out of here!”
    Even in the dark, he could see the anguish and horror on his brother’s face as Connor realized he would not be able to reach him in time to keep him from the swarming French.
    His strength all but spent, Morgan met Connor’s tormented gaze, his chest swelling with regret, grief, love. So long they’d been together, the four of them—Morgan, Iain, Connor, Joseph. And now…
    Gathering all his breath, Morgan shouted. “Beannachd leat!”
    Blessings go with you, brother!
    And dinnae mourn me overlong. Tell little Iain—
    But Morgan never finished the thought.
    The last thing he heard before darkness claimed him was Connor’s anguished cry.

Chapter 2
     
    A malie crawled out of bed early the next morning after a fitful sleep, dawn peeking through her window, the night’s shadows still clinging to her mind. She poured water from a porcelain pitcher into its matching bowl and splashed her face, the water’s chill helping to wash away her weariness and her lingering sense of dread. Although last night’s fighting had ended quickly and the enemy had been driven away, war had followed her into her dreams, her slumber troubled by cannon fire, dying men, and that terrible, haunting cry.
    It had risen out of the forest like the howl of demons, sending chills down her spine, making her blood run cold.
    “It is the Mahican war cry,” Bourlamaque had told her, seeing her fear. “The Abenaki have one very similar. Have you never heard it?”
    “N-no, monsieur,” she’d answered.
    He’d looked down at her for a moment, seeming to consider her. “I forget that you’ve never actually lived amongst your mother’s people.”
    Then he’d dismissed her, sending her to her room to await the outcome of the skirmish, while he’d gone with his officers.
    Determined to put the night and its fears behind her, Amalie dried her face with a linen towel, then sat on her bed, loosed her braids, and began to work out the tangles from her hair. The mère supérieure had tried many times to get her to cut her locks, but Amalie had steadfastly refused—not her only rebellion. Unable to understand why God should care how long her hair was, she’d resisted even when she’d been warned that pride was a grave sin.
    “A woman should be humble in all she does, Amalie,” the mère supérieure had scolded. “Such willfulness endangers your soul.”
    Amalie had tried to explain that her long hair was but a way of knowing her mother, a way of being close to her. Though she could not remember her mother, her father had told her many times how her mother’s dark tresses had hung to her knees.
    “Like a river of black silk,” he’d said.
    But the mère supérieure had brushed this aside, saying it was far better for Amalie to know God than the woman who’d borne her. It had taken a letter from Amalie’s father to decide the matter, though the mère supérieure had required her to wear her hair up lest its beauty stir envy in the hearts of the other girls.
    Of course, the other girls hadn’t envied Amalie at all, but had teased her about her darker skin and the strange color of her eyes—neither green nor brown but both. The few times she’d seen her Abenaki cousines —her female cousins—they’d done the same in reverse, calling her pale, laughing at her eyes, and teasing her about her hair, which was more brown than black and hung not straight and smooth like her mother’s, but in tendrils.
    Amalie did not resent their teasing, for she could see for herself that what they said was true. She was different. Her mother had been half Abenaki, Amalie but a quarter. Her features were neither French nor Indian. She was truly as her mother had named her—Child of Twilight.
    “In her eyes, you were neither day nor night, sun nor stars, but a mingling of both,” Papa had explained.
    Sweet heaven, how she missed him!
    Fighting a sudden pricking of tears, Amalie