Introduction

Sadie Hawkmoon, the gritty and enigmatic heroine of Nancy Williams's exciting first novel, never had a simple life. Hawkmoon follows Sadie's journey as she is abducted from the circus as a young child and forced to live on the unforgiving open plains by Ice, a brutal horse thief, and his vicious band of outlaws. Dominated mentally, emotionally, and physically, Sadie is forced to kill and surrender her body as Ice's unwilling lover over the course of several years. At long last, she daringly escapes the clutches of her makeshift family and tries to start her life anew. With the help of a troubled yet charismatic horse trader, Sadie begins to discover what it means to trust and to love, although leaving her nightmarish past behind turns out to be no easy feat--Ice looms like a storm on the horizon, obsessed with getting Hawkmoon back. Richly imagined, quickly paced, and with an enrapturing narrative that encompasses everything from horse thieves to circus monkeys, Hawkmoon is a striking tale of innocence, obsession, love, and redemption.

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Carla woke to the drumming of hooves. Instinctively, she rolled onto her side and drew her boy to her. Luke squirmed, mut¬tering in his sleep, but did not wake. She pulled her blanket up to her chin and fixed her eyes to the tent wall as the ground began to shake in earnest.

In seconds the air was filled with the sounds of horses, blow¬ing and snorting as they thundered by, mere feet from where she and Luke lay. The yips and calls of the men could be heard faint¬ly above the din.

As quickly as they’d come, the herd passed by and was gone. She shut her eyes and pressed her lips to the top of Luke’s head. A dozen or more, perhaps. They’d made a good haul. Cold comfort.

She eased her arm from beneath Luke’s head and crawled to the door of the tent. A pale November moon waned low in the western sky, glinting off the surface of the Platte River just beyond camp. Peering out, she could see Eli and Caleb unsaddling their horses in the dim predawn light. They were soon joined by Jesse and Ice. They stood for some time, smoking and talking, then dis¬persed.

Carla retreated back inside the tent and lay down. Soon Jesse came in, bringing with him the smells of sweat and gunpowder. He sat down heavily beside her and put a hand on her arm. She tensed immediately.

“Do we have to go?” she whispered.

“No,” he said, his voice hoarse from yelling. “Not for a few hours. Ice says we can catch some shuteye and then leave when the sun’s full up.”

Carla relaxed somewhat. “So you ain’t being chased?”

“Ain’t nobody left to chase us,” he said. “And nothing to chase us on, even so. Besides, it was just a bunch of circus folks. They wasn’t fighters.”

“You still killed them,” she murmured.

He paused, his boots half off. “Leaving witnesses is asking for it. You’d hang, too, you know. Ride with a thief, die with a thief. You think the law cares that you’re a woman? It don’t.”

He stretched out alongside her and spent several minutes scratching. “You should’ve seen them folks,” he said. “They had everything—clowns, some fella with skin like a snake, a fat lady. They even had a elephant. Eli wanted to bring it, but Ice wouldn’t let him.”

Luke opened his eyes, as if on cue. “What elephant, pa?”

“There’s no elephant,” Carla said, shushing him. “Go back to sleep.”

“There ain’t no more,” Jesse said. “Ice shot it. Took five bul¬lets to bring that thing down. Shot the giraffe, too.”

“Did you have to kill everything?” Carla asked harshly. “The elephant wouldn’t tell no one about you.”

“Watch your mouth,” Jesse said. “And anyway we didn’t kill everything. Brought the monkey, and some runt of a girl.”

“What?” Carla asked, raising her head in surprise. “What girl?”

Jesse shrugged. “Ice found her next to the monkey cage. Said they was clutching each other like sisters. He brung her for Paige.”

“Why? Paige is pregnant.”

Jesse snorted. “That don’t mean nothing. This one will come out dead, just like all the others. I guess he figures if they’re gonna have a child, he better take matters into his own hands.”

Carla bit back a retort. She knew better. Instead, she rose and crawled out of the tent. Jesse didn’t ask where she was going. She knew he didn’t care. Ever since she’d had Luke, his interest in her had evaporated. Not that he’d taken up a vow of chastity. She knew better.

When she had first met Jesse, six years ago now, she had no idea he was a horse thief. Even when she found out it had seemed exciting. But she had been whoring then, at the Black Hat Saloon in Independence, Missouri, a slow drip of a town if there ever was one. Anything sounded exciting, and she was looking for a way out.

When Jesse and the rest of them had come into the saloon, they were unlike anyone else she had ever seen; heavily armed, they carried themselves with confidence and ease. She’d been impressed by the way they seemed to fill the room, and the way men deferred to them, giving up prime seats at the bar and laugh¬ing too loud at their big talk. She and the other girls immediately began to vie for their attention. One man stood out—their leader, she soon learned—and that man was Ice.

Tall and broad through the shoulder, Ice left an indelible impression. His body was tremendous—his head barely cleared the door frame when he came in and his shoulders filled it com¬pletely. He was strikingly handsome, except for one strange anom¬aly: his eyes didn’t match. One was a perfectly normal brown, but the other was a vivid shade of blue, the color of a mountain lake on a clear day. And just as cold. Those strange eyes were like blank stone walls, the worst emptiness she’d ever seen. She could not describe the feeling she got when he looked at her. Chilled did not even come close.

Jesse was different. Not remotely good-looking, he was nev¬ertheless easier to be with than Ice—downright jolly, in compari¬son. He was thin and sinewy, his eyes flinty above his beak of a nose, which had obviously been broken at some point. Compared to Ice he looked weak and ineffectual, but she soon learned that looks were deceiving. He was a crack shot and sharp-eyed, whether judging horses or targets. And, unlike the others, he was not married.

He took a shine to her right away, plying her with compli¬ments, and whiskey, too, until she was so drunk she could barely get up the stairs. He never stopped talking, even when he was inside her, bragging about their wild and exciting way of life. Drunk and easily impressed, it had taken nothing to get her in front of the preacher the very next afternoon. That day still burned in her memory.

It didn’t take long for the novelty of life on the run to wear off. Ice kept them on the move constantly; they seldom remained in one place for more than a day. Carla was sure this was much of the reason why Paige was unable to carry a child to term. It was unusual for outlaws to travel with their families, but somehow Ice made it work. He was indifferent to the law, refusing to abide by any rules, no matter how dangerous. He was no fool—flagrant, yet calculated, if that was possible. He had stolen horses up and down the plains in the ten years since the war and had never once been caught. Carla had come to trust him in a strange sort of way, almost as much as she hated him.

Ice had not always been a horse thief. As a younger man, before the war, he had been a farmer in Missouri, subsisting on a small piece of land with a mule, two cows, and Paige. He had never cared much for farming, so when a bunch of guerilla fight¬ers came raging through his dooryard from the south and burned everything from his house to his field, Ice—then Carl Blake—took it as a sign and joined up with the Union army.

There had been two years left in the war and Ice saw it through to the end. In the course of those bloody years he learned to live on the back of a horse, how to survive, how to kill, and how to hate. He met Eli, Caleb and Jesse there. They all came from similar cir¬cumstances, having lost farms and family to a fight they hadn’t considered theirs, or even understood. Watching their barns burn made it theirs, though, and as killing became a way of life their sense of what they used to be was lost, replaced by something cold and empty. A hole where humanity used to live.

The end of the war came like a blow. Once again their sense of purpose was jerked out from under them by men they had never seen. They had no place to go, nothing to do. The war gave them a niche and Ice wasn’t ready to give it up. Just because the army had stopped fighting didn’t mean he had to. So he became a thief.

Their first raid was small—two horses from a traveling sales-man—but that was unimportant. The success proved they could work together, and profitably. Ice retrieved Paige from her parents, not telling her about his change in occupation until they were well out of Missouri. Caleb and Eli had wives, and they were also col¬lected. The passage of time swept them together until they were as tight as a family—tighter even, for though the ties of common blood did not exist between them, a thin line of distrust and suspi¬cion bonded them into a brotherhood far stronger than blood ever could. They viewed the rest of the world through a haze of doubt; hence, no other man could join them, and it was implicit that none could leave. Women were not considered a threat and were accept¬ed. A man could take any woman from anywhere he chose, but like the men in this one respect, she could never leave.

Carla became acutely aware of this about a month after her arrival into Ice’s band. She tried to run away one night after Jesse very matter-of-factly beat her for talking to one of the other men. She shuddered every time she recalled the stealthy way he came up behind her after she left Eli’s camp, and how he had slipped his arms around her waist, turning her towards him with a gentle smile.

“You been doing a little flirting, ain’t you?” he said, and she had giggled girlishly, seeing his jealously. Then he hit her, again and again, that smile never leaving his face; afterwards, he relieved the rest of his anger inside her. Pulling up his trousers, he gave her a sharp kick in the back and said: “Don’t do it again.”

Driven by pain and humiliation, she had stumbled off into the night, not sure where she was going, not caring. She would find a sheriff and tell him about them all, see them all hang.

She wandered the plains for two days, hunger and thirst weak¬ening her, before Jesse came and got her. He had been watching her from the time she left, but it was only now that he chose to make an appearance. He sat in his saddle, chewing a piece of jerky and swigging liberally from his canteen while she gasped and begged him for a drink of water.

“Well I don’t know Carla,” he said thoughtfully. “You ain’t been a good girl. There’s some rules you got to follow. Now you can come with me, or, if you’re so damn miserable, I can just shoot you right here. Which will it be?”

Now she was much older and her bruises had mended, but the wounds to her spirit went deep and had not faded with time. Her eyes had become slate-colored pebbles in her head, her flaxen hair already streaked with gray, her skin etched with grim lines. Most of the women looked the same, but that’s where the resemblance ended. This was their way of life, their men were their lives, and they seemed to want nothing else. She had few friends except, sur¬prisingly, Ice’s wife Paige.

When Carla first met her, she had thought Paige remarkably pretty for a woman so harnessed to the frontier. She was short and slender, her eyes a deep green, striking against the wave of dark red hair that fell to the middle of her back. There was only one flaw to Paige’s beauty, and that was a missing front tooth. Years passed before Carla knew the truth behind that, and when she found out, her fear of Ice deepened profoundly. She and Paige had been chopping kindling one day, and Carla asked her, as casually as she could, how such a young woman had come to lose a tooth in what looked like an otherwise healthy smile.

Paige was a long time answering. “It was my fault,” she said finally. “I should have known he was in a bad mood.”

“Who?” Carla asked, knowing full well.

Paige dipped her head toward Ice, who sat not far off, clean¬ing his guns. “They just come back from a job, and he wasn’t happy. The horses weren’t that good. I asked him to fetch some water—I was pregnant, and my back was paining me.”

She paused, looking down at the ax in her hands, and her lips sucked in on themselves. Carla felt her stomach tighten, suddenly wishing she hadn’t asked anything about Paige’s damn tooth.

“He didn’t say nothing at first,” Paige continued, her head bowed. “Then he come over—I thought he was getting the buck¬et. I guess he was. He set it down on the ground bottom up and put my face down by it. Told me to bite it.”

“Oh,” Carla said, feeling sick. “No Paige.”

“I thought he was going to cut my head off,” Paige said, her hands gripping the wood handle, whitening until Carla could see the blue vessels beneath the skin. “He just stomped on me, though. It just broke off the one tooth.”

Paige looked up suddenly, her smile like a fist. “I guess I’m lucky.”

As Carla made her way to Paige’s tent, she thought it remark¬able how a man who could exhibit such cruelty could find enough compassion in the black hole of his heart to bring her a child. A stolen one, albeit, but that was the only way Ice knew how to oper¬ate. It was even kind of funny—sad, but funny.

Paige was sitting in front of her tent with the child in her lap when Carla walked up. She smiled, automatically covering her mouth with her hand.

“Look what I got, Carla,” she said, bouncing the girl. “Ain’t she pretty?”

The girl was indeed pretty. She looked to be about Luke’s age, or maybe a few years older. She was thin and dirty. Her dress was made from an old piece of sacking, and her brown hair was a tan-gled mess. She studied Carla with eyes that were soft but alert.

“She sure is,” Carla said warmly. “What’s her name?”

“I don’t know. I ain’t got a word out of her yet. I expect she’s scared.” Paige smoothed the girl’s hair. “She don’t know she’s safe.”

Carla almost laughed. Not a one of them was anything near safe. She sat down next to Paige and wrapped her arms around her knees.

“Jesse said you got yourself a pet monkey, too,” she said.

Paige made a face. “Not anymore. It already run off, thank goodness. I was scared to death of it.”

Carla patted the girl’s knobby knee. “What’s your name, honey? I’m Carla. It’s all right, nobody’s going to hurt you.”

The girl didn’t say anything for a long time, continuing to watch the two women. Finally, she straightened a little.

“Sadie,” she said in a small voice. “Sadie Hawkmoon.”

Paige laughed, delighted. “Why, that’s a pretty name. It sounds like something out of a storybook.”

“Annabelle give it to me,” Sadie said.

Paige looked uncomfortable. “Who was—is Annabelle?”

“She was the fat lady.” Sadie glanced solemnly toward the tent. “The man with the funny eyes killed her.”

Paige winced. “Was she your mother?”

The girl shook her head. “No’m. Mister and Missus took care of me for a while, but they already had too many girls. They left me with Annabelle after the show.”

“How long ago was that?” Carla asked.

Sadie shrugged. “A while.”

“So you never knew your real ma?” Paige asked. The girl shook her head again. Paige sighed, then gave her a hug. “Well, you got me now. I’ll be your mamma. Would you like that?”

Sadie shifted on Paige’s lap, eyeing her swollen belly. “What about that one?”

Paige smiled. “That’ll be your little brother or sister. You can help me take care of him. I won’t make you go away when he comes. I promise. All right?”

The girl didn’t answer right away, and Carla admired how the girl seemed to be working things out. As though she had options to consider.

“Will that man in there be my daddy?” Sadie asked.

Paige’s smile faltered. “Yes. He ain’t a bad man, deep down. He provides for all of us—we’d be lost without him, I expect. Sometimes he has to do things that seem bad, but it’s always for the best. Does that make sense?”

Sadie pondered for a moment. “Like Mister and Missus leav¬ing me with the circus? That felt bad, but they said it was for the best. Like that?”

Paige swallowed. “Yes. Just like that.”

Sadie took this in and then, as unexpected as sunlight bursting through black-bellied clouds, she smiled. She wrapped her arms around Paige’s neck.

“All right,” she said.

Paige hugged her, rocking her. Carla reached over to wipe the tears from the woman’s cheek.

“Let’s start breakfast,” she said, her own voice full of emotion. “It’ll be light soon. The men will want to eat. They never sleep as long as they say.”

Carla rose and began collecting wood for the fire. She cast a worried eye at the sky—it had grown overcast and a chill wind was stirring out of the north. Fall had nearly come to a close and snow was a threat. She hated winters on the northern plains. Fortunately, so did Ice. They would soon head south, perhaps as far as Texas, though there was more law. But it was either take that gamble or freeze to death.

Luke soon emerged, swaying sleepily on his feet, digging in his ear and staring at Sadie Hawkmoon. Carla picked him up and brought him to the fire.

“Who’s that, mamma?” he asked.

“That’s Sadie,” Carla said, combing her fingers through his hair. “She’s your new playmate. Ice and Paige have adopted her. Go say hello.”

Instead Luke reached for his mother. “She’s too big for me to play with,” he said.

Carla made a place for him to sit next to the girl. “She ain’t much bigger than you. You can still be friends. She was in the cir¬cus. Ask her about that.”

The two children sat next to each other, too shy to speak at first. Carla set about cooking bacon and making coffee, insisting that Paige do as little as possible. Her time would be coming soon and Carla didn’t want the woman to strain herself. It wouldn’t help much, Carla knew. They faced a hard day of riding over rough ground, as they did nearly every day. It was a miracle any of them were able to keep a baby. Hazel, Eli’s wife, had given birth last year to a little boy, and Sybil, Caleb’s wife, had a two year old girl. All of them had lost children. Carla herself had lost two. Loss of life was Ice’s way.

The other two women soon joined them at the fire, each car¬rying their own children, exclaiming in pleasure and surprise over the new member of the family. Sadie and Luke had started talking, much to Carla’s satisfaction, and paid no attention to the fuss.

“She’s got your eyes, Paige,” Hazel joked.

An hour later they were on the move, headed for Ogallala. The men rode on ahead, driving the new horses, while the women fol¬lowed behind in a wagon. Carla and Sybil took turns driving. They kept at least a mile between them and the men. If trouble came, the men were to scatter, abandoning horses and women alike. In the last several years, Carla had begun to sincerely wish that the law would find them. But it never did.

Caleb and Jesse took the horses into town. Ice seldom went— he was too striking with his mismatching eyes. While they waited, he rode over to the wagon and looked at Sadie, asleep in the wagon bed.

“She talk yet?” he asked.

“Yes,” Paige said. “Her name is Sadie Hawkmoon. She’s real sweet, Ice. We been having a fine time getting to know each other.”

Ice continued to look at the girl. Something in his eyes made Carla want to turn away. She couldn’t quite peg it, but it was not the kind look of an adoptive father.

“Brush her hair,” he said. “And make sure she gets fed good. She’ll sprout quicker if she’s fed good.”

He turned his horse and trotted away. Carla watched him go and then looked at Paige with troubled eyes.

“What did he mean by that?” she asked sharply.

“Why, so she’ll grow, of course. Look how thin she is—she’ll need to eat to get stronger, so she can help out around camp. That’s all.”

Carla was silent. Maybe Paige was right. In all the years that she had known Ice she had scarcely spoken more than a handful of words to the man. It was possible she didn’t know him as well as she thought. Maybe he was more concerned for his wife than he showed.

She looked at Paige, who was smiling broadly down at the sleeping child, her lips parted unselfconsciously. Carla felt her belly clench. The woman’s ruined smile told a different story. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the publisher:

1. Nancy Williams writes of how Ice and his band are "tighter than a family" because of the experiences they have shared together. Have you ever had a certain friend or group of friends that have become as close-knit as family members? Why do you feel there is such a strong bond there?

2. Ice's wife Paige is not the only character in the book who has been in an abusive situation but hers was especially brutal. Instead of standing up against her husband, however, she defends his actions. How do you feel that abusive relationships breed this kind of submissive reaction? Why do you believe Paige defends Ice? Would you do the same in a similar situation?

3. In the aftermath of the civil war, Ice and his band begin stealing horses as a way of prolonging the combative life they thrived in for so many years once their farms were destroyed. If you had a home that was destroyed, what would you do? Do you feel that your reaction would parallel Ice's and turn against the law or do you feel you would do something different?

4. Sadie greatly differs from the other women she encounters after running away from Ice's camp. Have you ever moved to a different city or state, and felt different from the new people you encountered there? What do you feel were the biggest changes you found?

5. When Sadie was a young girl, she tried to dance with Carla's son Luke at one of Ice's many campsites before Ice pulled her away—a bad memory that lingered, and caused Sadie to no longer enjoy dancing. Have you ever had something happen that affected you in such a strong way as to change your feelings toward what was once one of your favorite belongings or activities? How so?

6. Seth presents a challenge to both his family and to Sadie when she firsts meets him. How would you handle someone who treated you as rudely as Seth treats Sadie? Would you have treated him in a different way than Sadie did?

7. Sarah, as a step-mother, is in a very delicate position with Arthur's sons, primarily Seth. How do you think it would feel to be a newcomer to a family? Do you think Sarah is handling the situation the correct way or would you handle it differently?

8. Sadie is struck when Seth uses her name for the first time while they are en route with the horses. What kind of power do you feel a name holds? Why is it important that Seth said Sadie's name? Why do you think it struck her in such a way?

9. Sadie is forced to kill Luke when Caleb and Luke attempt to take her back to Ice. How difficult do you feel the internal battle was for her when she had to take the life of someone she had grown up next to? What do you think you would have done in such a situation?

10. Ice uses violence to subdue and tame those who are in his band, including raping Sadie time after time. How do you feel that the rape has affected Sadie? Has it made her into a stronger character or a weaker one? What does it say about her mental state, and how has she been transformed after the fact?

11. Sadie encounters the monkey from the circus again at the end of the book. Why is it such a powerful moment for her?

12. What is the significance of the dress? What does the last line in the book imply?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author Nancy Williams' web site
»	Hawkmoon Video

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