Twenty miles and two hundred years from where she'd been born, Sara had the dream again.

The sheets had been too clean. They'd felt harsh against her skin as she'd rolled over for the fifth time, unable to find a comfortable spot, unable to relax. Her black cat Jericho prowled persistantly around the perimeters of the strange room and her mind spiraled in crystalline circles, intent and unbalanced at once. Sleep danced tauntingly around her and the farm - the farm was so close again...

Coming back to that area, cornered between the unfamiliar room of the Bed and Breakfast with its pine floors and pink cabbage rose wallpaper and the quiet, she had known she would dream - dream the old dream.

She dreamed again that she was smoke, floating on the breeze. Conscious smoke, feeling herself coil and thicken and stretch and thin. She dreamed that her smoke-being crept in tendrils from the green shadows and wrapped around the slender blond woman watching from the steps.

She dreamed that she wrapped herself around and around until she melted into the woman who feared for the man, feared for his easy ways with the Indians whose land bordered their farm, as much as anything bordered them in that god forsaken wilderness.

Far along with child again and placid with it, the blond woman remembered her terror of the loneliness around her as though the fears of the year before had belonged to someone else. As had, for the dulling now of the memory, the baby she had lost not long after he had brought her there. But not her fears for him. Those had not faded. Fears both for him and of what could come of his actions.

Her eyes rested on the tall man with the long easy stride who vanished around the corner of the barn. Were he not fair and blue-eyed, he'd be mistaken for a savage, so easily did he fit into their green heathen world.

Day after day, she watched him ignoring what the others thought, what had happened before, ignoring all but whatever madness told him all men were good, all lands fair, all fate kind.

Or perhaps it was simpler. He chose not to turn aside from his instincts.

He chose not to pretend. Not to conform with those of his own kind to whom the Indians, what was left of them, were a threat, either of potential harm or of past guilts. Not to conform with the unspoken opinion that the Indians were a stain on the white soul.

Madness, that. He had seen - enough. Knew - enough.

But the same wide blue-eyed simplicity that had seen her trouble and been moved and unjudging, saw these - others. And no matter that he knew what such as they could do, it held no more reality for him than his wild ideas held for her. She could see the shape of them, see their solidity for him, but if she reached, she found nothing.

And for her beliefs, he would not even reach. He had decided them illusion and discounted them before he had brought her into this wilderness, while far away powers fought to own a place none had seen. That was human kind. These others with their bronze-colored skins and incomprehensible ways, they were no different.

He would not see.

Always it was the men who would not see and the women who paid the price. Men who looked at something distant and ignored the immediate. Women who were left mending the damage such blindness caused.

He was not the first dreamer she had known. Inside the dark rooms, a single trunk held all that had been left of a family by the dreamer who'd been her father. But Thomas Two's dreams were different and, dreamer or no, he HAD had rescued her. He had not been harsh with her, or treated her as he had seen those others treat her. He had not shown in any way that he had seen her shame. He had treated her kindly and worked hard to make this place for them, so crude beside what she had known, but better than many around them...

He was an odd, quiet man with strange ways, determined on setting himself apart from his own kind, endangering her, as her father had put them all in danger.

But he had been gentle with her.

Sweetened by gentleness, the smoke that was her was sucked out and back to the green shadows, to where HE watched the woman, mingling with him as he turned away to follow a game trail after a fat deer that would dress out well and carry them into winter.

Thomas Two knew Felicity's apprehension in the way he felt most everything around him. As he remembered everything, knowing neither how nor why. Maybe HE had told them - Thomas One - he whose name and face were a labeled blank space.

Thomas Two knew and remembered but only when he chose did the past sharpen and come clear, laying out before him like so many easy steps.

And remembering, he saw through other eyes, many other eyes. Some were young, some were old. Always the eyes were male. Always they were of the forest, of the people. A wild wolfish tinge colored all that he saw.

He remembered back to Phillip. King Phillip. He neither questioned nor worried why he knew what he did. It was simply a matter of blood. He followed the smell of blood. He knew that. His blood knew that of Phillip.

And THEY had killed Phillip. These others who lived around him, scattered thinly through the forests of the colony. The English, the lightskins, they had killed Phillip. Those who looked as he, Thomas Two did.

His brain had long since learned to stretch around impossibilities. After seeing the unthinkable, it had become so very flexible. He was like a fiber net woven so loosely anything and everything slid through unless he chose to draw it tighter for a moment, releasing what he caught when he slackened.

That he looked as those others did - was. He did not concern himself with it.

That, back in the clearing, SHE worried about him - was. He was aware of that differently, as something affecting him more closely, but that too was not his concern.

THEY had killed Phillip. Killed him something over one hundred and twenty-four years ago. He knew that in the way one knows what one has been told.

They had sold Phillip's wife and son in Barbados for molasses and revenge. That he knew in a different way. He SAW that. Saw the privateer and the tiny space the king's wife and son had been given. Saw the hot, jangling wilderness. The pain. The fear. The loss.

SHE had died, Phillip's queen, Metom's mother. He knew the emptiness of her going. And then the others came. Barely balanced against all the grief and change, he saw those others. The boy had been passed like a chattel to them.

Another ship. Other places. Other people.

The way the boy's life had turned.

And those who had come after the boy, following the blood. He remembered them. He KNEW them.

That boy's wife and sons and daughter. Metom, Woonetka and Simeon. And the dates. Metom, born 1692. Woonetka born 1694. Simeon born 1695. Dates and names that carried something like a color or scent. Something that thinned in Woonetka and Simeon and grew hot and sharp in Metom.

In Metom was his blood. Metom who came to a place nearer the beginning. Who had a son, Thomas Metom, in 1725 and a daughter Woonetka in 1726. In her again was the thinning of the scent.

Born in 1725, Thomas Metom who was Thomas One. Who was a name and date and other things he let fade. Who had seen other places and ships and lands.

Who sired Simeon in 1775. Hot, clear, fine blood. Moving at an easy lope through green shadows, Thomas Two's nostrils flared as though the scent of it hung still in the air. And who sired Thomas Two in 1778. His own scent. His own blood.

He saw it all. He saw HER fears, saw so much. He remembered...

With a dislocating wrench, the smoke dissolved beneath her, snapping Sara up and out into night and a strange room and empty air, where the wraiths of a dream had already vanished.

Always, it was like that. Waking, remembering... Only to have WHAT she remembered already torn from her hands as though she'd thought to grasp the wind.

Leaving her knowing only that whatever she'd been, seen, dreamed - again, it was gone.

Gone like the man's sense of humor.

Silently, the big man and the black stallion fought their war, the man refusing to turn the stallion loose into the pasture, the stallion refusing to stand and yield to the rope.

Henry winced as he saw the stallion's left front hoof rake the big man's arm, shoulder to forearm, but staggering under the impact, he instantly straightened up and moved back in silently, grabbing another foot of the leadline and using his weight to keep the beast earthbound.

So. Nothing was broken then. Henry left them to it while he checked out the damage and calmed the mare down. Due to foal in a few week's time, the mare's delicate frame was dwarfed by her enormous belly and marred by a messy gash the stallion had opened across her shoulder.

The stallion, Nemo, was a nasty piece of work. That was why he'd been up for sale, why the man had bought him. And why Henry paid so little attention to the stubborn battle of wills occurring on the other side of the paddock. He didn't expect much would happen that hadn't happened already over the last two years. They both needed to fight with someone. To his mind, it might as well be each other.

Glancing around, Henry admired the lathered up stallion. Other than being crazy, he was a splendid beast even with his ears flattened back while the elegant head snaked around trying for a good bite. If nothing else, it kept both of them from picking on someone less deserving. At least the stallion hadn't connected with the shoulder he'd dislocated last fall.

The vet's car emerging from the woods changed the picture. Henry might understand the game, but company might not take the same sporting view. Taking three quick turns of the mare's lead rope around the fence, he headed across the paddock.

"Hey!" He reached past and got a hold on the thick hemp rope preventing the stallion from climbing all over all of them. The big man's falter let the stallion give it one more try, both men easily keeping him from gaining height and advantage. "There's no real harm done," he said to the man only a hair less crazy-eyed than the horse. "Unless you figure you can get him to say he's sorry, maybe you want to see to the vet."

Still fighting the rope, the stallion shook his head, splattering both men with a shower of lather. Behind them, the dainty gray mare shivered, the fine thin skin twitching around the ugly gash the spurned stallion had opened on her shoulder. The big man shook himself and blinking, backed away.

"Hell of a lot of fuss over a tax write off," Henry said mildly and got only a sour look for throwing his own words back at the man before he left it to Henry to handle, muttering something to the vet in passing and not quite looking at the gray mare whose head swung to watch as he headed up towards the house.

Henry figured as long as the man wasn't trying to fool the mare, he'd managed to look like he really didn't give a shit.

The man on the other side of the desk WANTED to look like he was uninvolved. She suspected he also wanted to look honest. People wanted so many things.

He reached for the phone. "Use the name Beldon. Sara Beldon," she heard herself say. The smooth black curtain of her hair swirled concealingly around her as she looked away to watch time ride the ripples lapping at the narrow wooden dock skirting the parking lot and listen to old voices echo through twisting streets where cobblestones edged the drains.

Because of what she'd just heard herself say, Andrew's voice curled among those voices. Andrew, who'd taught her how to find other names, only to have his death drive her back to her own name and returning to that place, drive her to hide behind his.

Always, she did things backwards.

And this thirty year old, blond beachboy of a lawyer had his nose out of joint because she wasn't paying attention to some kindergarten version of masculinity. She curled tighter around herself, drawing in, fighting an old battle.

The cobalt shimmer of the hawk's eye stone in her ring distracted Sara from both that room and the cove out beyond the window. Iridescent threads of asbestos swirled through midnight blue quartz, dark blue like the swirl of cotton skirt and shirt she hid inside - golden claws trapping a fragment of lightning in a summer night.

On her way to break a promise that morning, the hawk's eye had been the ring she'd chosen. A midnight stone echoing her questions, opening to a tunnel leading into dark windy places where unknown people sought to interfere with her life.

Like this faceless tenant refusing to play by the rules.

A stranger named Michael Reneault had set himself to save the old farm from the Indians, the future, and herself. Apparently, he'd convinced himself that buying the place from her would accomplish that and the fact that she did not want to sell, that she had systematically and categorically refused to sell for more than two years, had not shaken his certainty.

Until just a short while ago, what he did or did not want had been of little importance to her. She lived inside her head. She could fold into herself and exist, drift, wonder, remember, question - speculate for hours. She understood single mindedness. It ran in her blood, like a farmer's link to the soil, like pain itself. Along with an ability to shut out unwelcome facts.

Frowning, she looked away from that thought. Memory for her was a fickle thing, opaque one second, transparent and endless the next, but single mindedness was something she understood all too well. And he'd managed to move from persistence to threat.

He'd threatened to enlist local historical societies in somehow 'marking' the old farm with enough restrictions that selling would take on new dimensions of difficulty.

It was, for the most part, an empty threat. Or it would have been. For anyone else. She could not allow that kind of attention to be turned on the old farm. Or on her.

There were things one had been taught. Things one had been told. Things one had witnessed. And things one remembered.

Sara had remembered her promise not to return to that place during each step of her preparations and known that some promises could not be kept. She had to stop him. It was that simple. She had to stop him. Whatever it took.

Her eyes slid towards the cove beneath the lawyer's windows. She could smell the age around this place. So much time, so small a distance, and she'd never stumbled across this musty town.

It had been eighteen years since she'd been back there. Longer than she wanted to think after Andrew's death. She should have known better, should have been tougher - but some things there was no preparing for, no growing accustomed. It had taken her a long time to pick up the pieces after Andrew's death and then, the first thing she'd done had been to come back there.

To something else for which there was no preparation. Not for the pain that had waited for her, draping itself around her like an old friend.

She'd gone back. But she hadn't stayed long.

Only long enough to find a new lawyer to take responsibility for the houses there. Long enough for one visit to the two quiet houses in their pocket of woods to drive her away again.

Long enough to promise herself she would not return.

She didn't break promises lightly.

Pressing the button on the phone, he broke the connection and leaned back in his chair, studying her intently. Whatever concessions he made, the trick was to remember his objective.

Anything could be changed once she left.

"You have a job there if you want it," he said finally. "He didn't say what it would be."

Did he think she'd go running home if she got her hands dirty? She'd had jobs - That he could say that, knowing the only reason she'd asked him to get her into that place was to tend to something he'd failed to tend to - Blinking, she dismissed the smooth, tanned man.

Salt laden air drew her eyes to the open window again. To the ripples lapping along the shore separated from that little office building by twenty feet of tar and another six feet of wooden dock. To those narrow, echoing streets. Streets like the cul de sac where that white cape waited. If she hadn't been stalling for time, driving aimlessly around the edges of that little town, she'd never have seen the house with its FOR RENT sign. Returning even that close gnawed at her bones like an acid. But that place, the small house in its cul de sac, deep in a maze of crooked streets, that stayed in her mind.

Anchored her a hands length away from the rest of it.

 Deep in the lawyer's slippery leather chair, Sara still saw that white cape with its brick walk and white iron fence and symmetrical windows flanking the oak door.

He cleared his throat for the second time and the dark eyes in the smooth oval face with the dusky tint of some warmer blood slowly returned to him.

"Maybe if you met him, had a talk with him - " He pulled open the middle desk drawer. "I've got some photos here. You can see how much he's done with the place."

The claw feet on her chair screeched on gleaming oak flooring as she shoved her chair back, away from the proffered photos. Startled, his hand slowly dropped to the desk top.

"Would you want to take a ride out there? You can see for yourself, he's kept the property up well, restored the barn out of his own pocket..."

She'd just spent the better part of an hour questioning his failure to make her wishes clear to some faceless person and still he pushed. No wonder he hadn't relayed her message effectively.

For some reason, he wasn't hearing her himself.

Some reason... He wasn't listening to her because he'd written her off as some twenty-five year old spoiled rich bitch. An image with both good and bad points.

"I'd like to see his lease," Sara said abruptly and waited till he extracted a paper from the file before him and slid it across the desk.

"You'll find it all in order." He had not omitted the stipulation that none but maintenance work was to be done on the houses, regardless of whose pocket the money came from. What he didn't understand was how this girl was - foiling - each effort he made to reason with her. It was like reaching for what he could see so clearly and touching only a smooth glass wall. "I am aware of your instructions," he said stiffly.

He might have been aware of them, but if he'd carried them out, she wouldn't have had to come back. Somehow, she didn't think the man behind the expensive oak desk would stay awake nights worrying about a broken promise.

Sara tossed the paper back onto the glassy desktop. "You were aware of my refusal to sell, but that hasn't made any difference."

"He has - reasons - why he's so interested in securing the property," he said after a moment. "I really think that a meeting between you might clear up any misgivings you have about someone else caring for the property."

She'd dealt with the mad and the bad and the damaged, but this absent minded arrogance that didn't quite HEAR her... One more time, Sara shoved anger back.

"If I didn't know how unethical it was, I'd think he'd promised you a commission if you persuaded me to sell," she said slowly. That should tear it. "But, considering how much legal trouble that could cause you, I'm sure that if he HAD suggested such a thing, you would have explained the situation."

He straightened up in his big leather chair. "I find your remark offensive. You've been out of the area for some time. I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't advise you of the fact that his offer is a generous one. Well above current property values."

It had been a long time since she'd hesitated at saying what she thought. Or caring.

"I find your failure to relay my instructions effectively - offensive," Sara said clearly. "I find having to return here because a tenant thinks he can somehow involve local historical people with MY property - BLACKMAIL me - offensive. I do NOT choose to sell. I am the one retaining you. And I find your inability to hear what I'm saying offensive."

Sara watched him swallow his fury, watched him tell himself all kinds of things, watched the hand slowly creasing the top page in her folder deliberately relax, and knew why he was not fighting back. Somewhere in this, she didn't know where, there was something in it for him. Lord knew, she didn't expect much from people but with how dense he'd proven to be, she had to wonder just how far he had gone - or would go.

In spite of herself, her eyes returned to the cove beyond his window. God, she was tired of this. All this. Even of resisting this place. She felt like she'd spent years exiled to the room perimeters in some huge house just to keep from stubbing a sore toe on a chair leg. It was more than a sore toe she avoided whacking. But she was tired of bland perimeters.

He cleared his throat and her attention swung reluctantly back to him.

"I said, if you have no intention of selling, why did you take the time to come here?" His veneer was thinning. With his blond hair and his regularly exercised body and expensive suits, he was used to getting his own way, especially with women. He dealt with her defiance like a cat being called for a swim in the tub and attacking her motives from his failed position - that was a truly stupid move.

Sara just watched him and his out of line question.

"Because of the historical thing," he answered himself, at least putting those pieces together. "I think blackmail is a strong word - "

Andrew had told her that when she became really angry, she curled inward and a black hole opened around her. That she turned into a bronze statue. He had not been a fanciful person, or given to saying things he did not mean, so that when she felt herself withdrawing from outward contact, she was aware that her skin shrank to hug her high cheekbones and her narrow arched brows turned to charcoal streaks. That her lips stilled and smoothed and eyes of dark brown turned ebony. Only the 'statue' wasn't bronze, but something older and colder than stone.

This lawyer was already wondering about her. She'd felt it when she'd walked into his office. Because of Andrew's words, she was aware that the more she retreated, the more her differences became apparent. He had taught her that retreat carried its own price.

"Your tenant is threatening to involve a third party to force me to do something I don't chose to do," Sara said. "What would you call that?"

Probably lobbying, she told herself. He'd be good at that. As good as this tenant of his had been at finding the one thing she couldn't allow.

He shifted in his chair uneasily. It was just her mouth that was getting to him. She had a sharp mouth for someone so young. Hell, a couple of times she'd sounded just like the old man for a minute. But she was only a kid. He just had the wind up because Madelyn was getting impatient and the only way to get her what SHE wanted, so he could do what HE wanted was to somehow maneuver this woman into doing something she did NOT want to do.

She was just some yuppie type, full of words and feminism shit. That was why he was nervous. That and her being so - minklike - all sleek and dark and smooth ...

"He's not my tenant." Stupidly he saw himself respond to the most irrelevant point.

"I'm not the one who signed a lease with him," she pointed out. What she HAD done, repeatedly, was refuse to sell him the farm he currently rented through this lawyer.

 That was when she'd asked him how difficult it was to get work in that area and when he'd made his blowhard statement about his being able to pull strings, she'd told him to start tugging.

What was she getting herself into? Deep in the leather chair, Sara saw that white cape again.

Richard Casey wasn't so stupid he hadn't pulled her file when she'd called that morning. He just thought it was fucked up, that names or dates had been confused, because it said that Sara Walker had been there seventeen years ago. Sara Walker with the same social security number as the owner to whom the balance in the rental account was regularly reported. That was what the paperwork had said.

If she'd come there seventeen years ago to talk to his uncle and then turn her property over to them to administer, an old farm, two hundred acres and two houses, another house in a village twenty minutes away, if she'd owned that then... Hell, to sign papers she'd have had to be twenty-one and that would make the woman sitting across from him thirty-eight now.

 Looking at her, all narrow and sleek and smooth, with those wide apart dark eyes that didn't seem to blink for watching something noone else could see and smooth dusky skin all wrapped in a curtain of black hair... A mink for sure, long and sleek and supple, impossible to grab onto...

His dick was willing to bet the farm, his or hers, that she wasn't a day over twenty-eight. If she was thirty eight, he was seventy eight with balls hanging down around his knees and liver spots dotting his hands.

Seventeen years of renting the places out and collecting the money, paying taxes, fixing roofs - they'd dug one new well, thrown a few people out and brought new in and taken their money off the top. All there'd been of her was an address and a yearly request for records from different accountants.

There was some mistake. It'd been her mother who'd come. And kids had social security numbers early on. Mother and daughter had had the same name and the mother had passed the daughter's social security card over by mistake. That would explain it all.

But then, that meant she'd never been there and she was drooling on herself to hang onto property she didn't want to see. She didn't want to look at photos, didn't want to have him drive her out to check the places out, didn't want to hear what the tenants had done - didn't want to boost the rents or examine the leases.

And she didn't want to sell.

Clearing his throat for the second time, he waited till the dark eyes slowly returned to him. "So what do you want me to do?"

Sara pushed back the image of the white cape with the FOR RENT sign at the end of a cul de sac A tiny house, probably three or four rooms down and two up, with a brick walk and white iron fence and two symmetrical windows flanking a varnished oak door.

That was the first intelligent question he had asked. What did she want him to do while she figured out what he was up to? Because he was in this mess up to his eyes. She'd watched a lot of people, a lot of lawyers, and the smell of his 'wanting' hung around him like sour body odor.

What he wanted was for her to sell the farm to this annoyingly persistent tenant. What she didn't know was why. Not that it really mattered, except as a point of curiosity. What he 'wanted' had less substance than the ghosts swirling around that antique town. But he should have been of some help discouraging these inconvenient requests. Not as it seemed now, been instrumental in egging some stranger into persisting. It was past time to change lawyers.

"I want you to do nothing. Not a single thing. I don't want you to take his calls. I don't want you to let him make an appointment. I don't want him using you to get to the historical people. I don't want your secretary to answer questions for him. And I particularly don't want him to know I'm here."

Sara rose from the deep leather chair. "Actually, since you're the ONLY one who knows I'm here, if ANYONE makes the connection between the farms and myself, you will find yourself being sued. For a multitude of bad decisions. Is that quite clear?"

His nod let her escape.

An hour later, using the lawyer as a local reference, she hoped he'd heard at least her last warning. Even with the large, step-skipping security deposit she handed over to the realtor, the agent was hinky because Sara hadn't wanted to take the time to drive four blocks and examine the interior of a small white cape for which the owner was asking an impressive rent - but for three times the normal security deposit, first and last month's rent and the first six months, all in one instant lump, she'd have made out the paperwork if Sara Beldon had had a tattooed face and hairy knuckles.

With the key in her hands, Sara finally felt some inner knot loosen slightly. She was there and by the look and smell, she'd be there for a little while. Something was going on with the lawyer. Something was going on between the town and property owners, between town and local Indian tribe, between lawyer and this tenant.

But she had a place. For all the moving she'd done, place was important to her. She'd given up the one she'd had to come there. It had been time to move on from there anyway. Her household goods waited in a truck parked in a depot half an hour away. Before she was a block from the rental agent, she parked beside a pay phone and called the moving company. Then she went to settle her account at the 'Bed and Breakfast' where she'd spent the night and give the black cat Jericho a snack before stuffing him indignantly into the car carrier.

This part was easy. There was more than enough room in the coffee colored Volvo wagon for two bags and the cat carrier. She'd done this all before, even to the car. She'd owned three other Volvos. They lasted. They were dependable and roomy enough for when she moved around. And she didn't like change.

Sliding behind the wheel, listening to Jericho protesting from the carrier, she closed the door and told herself there were enough other changes over which she had little control. A good car was a small indulgence, she told herself as she backed out and headed towards a change she could not control. Headed toward an antique white cape.

Richard Casey hung up from speaking to the rental agent. Maybe that crack in her armor would be enough. Not right away, and not without careful thought and only if it became necessary, but if he needed to leak her identity, that might just let him.

Not that he gave a rat's ass who she was. He just wanted her to sell her property. Specifically, that old farm. And not for peanuts. She owned the one of the largest single pieces of property within five miles of the Indian land. He owned over a hundred acres not far from hers.

Sale of her property would double the value of his own and that was what he had to have.

And if Michael gave up on her and went to the historical society...

Richard Casey wanted that to happen even less than Sara Walker, though for very different reasons. If Michael went that route, by the time they finished messing with the deeds of everyone who'd ever walked over the property and freed up the title, Madelyn would have lost all patience. The divorce would clean him out of everything down to his postage stamps, and he'd be ten years rebuilding to where he could have a life, if some other people to whom he owed more than she knew about - if they let him have rope enough even for that.