and they would work out some way that Sun Woman and Gray Cloud could be
brought here without stirring up old hatreds.

Raoul said, "Don't bring Indians into this house, Pierre, I warn you. If
any Indian tries to claim he's a member of my family, I'll make him wish
he had never been born at all."

The pain that might one day kill him sank its teeth deep into his guts.
Raoul's words seared him like a branding iron. He felt his shoulders
sag.

Raoul turned his back on his brother and his father, and the clump of
his hard leather boot heels echoed through the great hall.

"Raoul!" Elysee cried. He held his hand outstretched, as Pierre had when
Raoul was about to smash the Limoges vase.

Looking down at those glistening white shards scattered over the
flagstones, Pierre wondered what would happen when Raoul inherited the
de Marion fortune. Would he destroy it in one of his rages as he had
this beautiful object that had been part of the family treasure? Or
would he use its power as he used his fists and pistol and knife, to
destroy others?

The de Marion fortune.... Once it had been a huge tract of land in
northeastern France dominated by the chateau of the Counts de Marion,
held by them so long that no one knew when or how they first obtained
it. Just as the origin of the de Marions themselves was something of a
mystery.

Converted into gold, the de Marion fortune had sailed, with Elysee, the
last Count de Marion, his countess and his children, across the
Atlantic. Elysee, in the early 1780s, had foreseen the bloody upheaval
that would sweep away the king and the nobility of France. He had made a
friend of the American ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson, and had
thought much about Jefferson's new nation. Their revolution was over and
done with. The de Marion fortune might thrive in those United States.

And on the American prairie the de Marion fortune had purchased a vast
new estate and built a new chateau.

Elysee sighed and took a step toward his chair. Pierre turned the chair
toward the fire so that its wings would gather in the warmth of the
small fire and hold it around his father's body.

"Would you consider not bringing this woman and this boy here?" Elysee
said as he sat down. "To keep the peace in our family?"

Pierre hesitated. For ten years Sun Woman and Gray Cloud had lived in
their world, and he in his. Why provoke so much strife now by trying to
change that?

But Gray Cloud was the only son