Chapter One

ONE



A humid July evening. Moon high in the sky and bright. A grove of trees near a waterfront, centered around one massive oak, a monster of a thing whose lower branches were as thick around as a person. In the shadows beneath this, a man caught his breath, rested, and planned. His body was mostly in shadow, but patches of moonlight fell down through the branches and stenciled highlights across his features. His face was handsome even in the partial light. Clean lines of his jaw. Thin bridged nose that flared strongly at the nostrils. Dark eyes that sat heavy on their lower lids. His complexion was hard to classify, neither pale nor truly dark, but some shade between. His face betrayed commingled cultures, bits and pieces of foreign lands set beside each other and somehow more beautiful for it.

Although he was still, his mind hummed with energy. He had already escaped the tidewater plantation on which he labored, but the night was only half over. He had crawled from his straw mattress and crept around the back of the hut, past the house in which the white man slept and out through the woods. His feet made barely a sound for the first mile, but farther on he gave up caution and splashed down the center of a thin creek. In a hollow beneath a wooden bridge he gathered the strange array of supplies he had hidden over the last week: internal organs of hogs, inflated and bound airtight; strips of leather and hemp twine; and a corn knife, stolen only the night before. He stuffed all of these things into a sack and ran. He sprinted along the edge of several tobacco fields, directly through another, and on through the forested bracken. As he felt each passing mile slip awa