Siege of the Heart (Southern Romance 2)

“How smart. Maybe you should have been the spy.” Knox’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

“You think you’re going to lure them into a trap.” Oh, my god. And there was no bargaining his way out of it. Jasper, by far more valuable than Cecelia, was now the least valuable of the men Knox wanted.

“We get you, and Horace. When they’re done with him, and they get Ambrose Stuart.”

“You weren’t here for them! You were here for me.”

“Plans change, Perry. You didn’t start the war thinking you’d turn traitor...did you?”

Anger boiled up at once, fury obscuring his good sense.

“I am not,” Jasper said, blood pounding in his ears, “a traitor.”

The camp fell silent. Knox stood slowly.

“I left,” Jasper said. “I saved the life of the man that saved mine. I watched hundreds die in those field camps and I took him away from that. I took him north, to go home, and while I was there, I fell in love, but I never gave aid to the Union. I never gave them information. I didn’t fight our men.”

All things that Solomon had done, but he did not say that.

“You tend their fields. You take aid from us. You haven’t set to burning their crops or poisoning their food. You left us when we needed you, Perry.”

For an unjust war. And God help them, he was too much of a coward to come out and say it.

“So sit back down.” Knox’s face was right in Jasper’s. He pressed down on Jasper’s shoulder, on one of the many bruises; not a deliberate cruelty, but he did not relax his grip when Jasper went white. “You can’t claim you didn’t know what you did. You can’t claim to be better than anything.”

He went back to the fire as Jasper sank his head into his hands.

“You were right,” he said finally. “We should have run.”

“Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it?” Cecelia’s voice was a whisper, but hysteria ran in her words.

“Cecelia, I swear to you, I meant this for the best. If I escaped, I thought they would come again, and again. I’ve been waiting for this since I left. I thought the best that could be salvaged was your safety.”

There was a pause while the sounds of the forest continued as if nature cared nothing for the death and dying and betrayal and pain humans wrought below. I give you dominion over the earth, God had said, and yet sometimes it seemed that nature was the mask of God, watching, uncaring, as humanity destroyed itself.

“I know,” Cecelia said finally. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. They’re going to come back for us, and we won’t just lose you—we’ll lose Solomon too; and whoever that spy is, I wouldn’t want to be him. Nothing you could give me to trade places.”

Chapter 13

It went wrong from the start. The woods were too quiet, even the birds strangely hushed as if they were holding their breath. Solomon lagged behind and Violet urged him onwards sharply.

“Something’s wrong,” Solomon murmured to her, and she shook her head.

“Stop being nervous,” she hissed and then shook her head. “You’re not one for this sort of thing, are you?”

He didn’t argue. It was why he had defected. Feeling the sick roiling in his gut, thinking that the revulsion he felt creeping up on men as they slept was to do with the Union, not with the act itself. How could he not feel pity? Some of the Confederate soldiers wore grey wool where he wore blue, but many had no coats at all, or the same brown they would have worn in the fields and shops they had come from. Some went barefoot, shivering in the cold air. Solomon had slain poorly trained, poorly armed men, and he had hated himself for it. In time, it had driven him away, him believing that the fervor he saw in his opponents’ eyes was truth.

Only, when he was the Confederacy, it was no better. The same dread, the same horror. Killing brought the same sickness in his gut, and he would spend evenings on his knees, asking absolution from a God he could no longer picture.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” he asked Violet, trying to get himself away from the memories of blood and life fading out of men’s eyes.

“These men,” she said softly, “want to kill your friend for defecting. They don’t mean to give him a fair trial. Whether or not they mean harm to your sister, they’ve kidnapped her and dragged her here against her will. They are not going to offer mercy, or kindness, or truth. They tried to splinter our country.”

“And it’s as simple for you as that?”

“It’s never simple,” she admitted to him. “It’s always a life. Always. I wonder whether I would be where they are if I had been born in the south.”

He stopped. “What do you think?”