Aggie’s mouth tightened in response. My story sounded so violent and savage, so cruel and brutal when stripped of the emotions and the pain of a properTsalagitelling. “I have heard this tale. Jane was not responsible for the actions of her grandmother, nor what her grandmother forced her to do. There is no judgment against her for the deeds of another.”
“Agreed. But then the political world shifted,” Molly said, “and they were sent on the Trail of Tears.”
“So she has told me,” Aggie said, agreeable, though mildly irritated. I hadn’t decided if she believed me about it all. She might just think I was a nutcase.
Molly went on, relentless. “Jane doesn’t remember much about it. But at one point, in the middle of a raging snowstorm, her grandmother forced her into the animal she knew best, a bobcat, and tossed her out into the snow to live or die.”
“Jane has told me this, and that makes her over one hundred seventy years old.”
“Give or take.”
“And yes, I know thatDalonige’i Digadoliis a skinwalker.”
“Good,” Molly said. “I didn’t know if you got that part yet. Anyway, she was out in the snow, in her bobcat form, and she found a frozen deer carcass. She was eating when a nursing female cougar came back for her kill and attacked Jane. Jane did accidental black magic and took both the form of the mountain lion and its soul inside with her. She’s two-souled.”
Aggie One Feather muttered something in the tongue of The People. It contained the wordti, which was buttocks, and the phrase sounded like a curse, which made me chuckle. “Yeah. Kinda the way I feel about it,” I said, holding up my deformed left hand. “And it’s probably the major reason why weird stuff keeps happening to me.”
Molly said, “It’s taken a long time for her accept that she isn’t a liver-eater, but the possibility of someday becoming one still worries her.”
“I understand this better now,” Aggie said. “The two-souled are... dangerous.”
“She knows. But she and Beast have come to an accommodation and work together to achieve common goals.”
Which made me sound like a business merger with customer relations issues.
Molly continued. “She feels guilt for killing the two men who murdered her father and it’s shaped and formed her whole personality and being. But she’s been working on guilt with you, and things are better.”
Aggie muttered the same words, and this time I got them.Tsalagidon’t have cusswords or curses like the white man, but some phrases can be used in that way, according to the intent of the speaker. “Uskanigigaluda tsi ti,” looselytranslated, meant “scalping my butt.” I laughed, the movement shaking my hand, and ended on a pained breath and a curse of my own.
“You know she’s hurting if she’s cussing,” Molly said, of me. “And the little one doesn’t like the heat, so I’m moving back against the wall. I’m here if you need me.”
Through slitted eyes, I watched as Aggie stirred the wood and the new coals beneath, muttering in Cherokee too low for even me to hear. She now knew all my secrets, and she hadn’t tossed me to the curb, which had always been my private fear. She rearranged the river rocks that would take heat from the fire, pushing them closer to the flames. She rearranged the clay bowl filled with water and the dipper, and a fired red clay tile, like one off a roof, something new that she hadn’t used before, her actions and the way she was breathing indicating that she was using the motions as a formulary, a methodology, trying to settle herself, to make room inside for all the things she had heard.
She didn’t look at me, not even once, keeping her gaze on the fire, and I didn’t like the fact that she kept her gaze averted. Aggie was having a hard time dealing with this. With me. “Can you accept me, even knowing this, Aggie?” I asked.
Aggie scowled and, from a basket at her side, pulled a sprig of dried rosemary and held it to the fire. Rosemary hadn’t been a traditional Cherokee herb, having been brought by the first European settlers, but many medicine men and wise women of the Americas had incorporated anything that worked into their ceremonies, and rosemary had strong oils that performed well with many other herbs. The scent filled the sweat house as the dried leaves curled, sparked, and caught fire. Aggie placed the burning stem in the curved arc of the red clay tile, which she had turned concave side up, perfect to hold the blazing stem as the rosemary leaves burned to ash. The stem burned as well, and the sweat house was thick with the scent. When the rosemary was ash, she slanted her gaze at me and said, “I’m your elder. Or Iwasyour elder. It was difficult for me to find out you’re older thanlisi. It is doubly difficult tohear of your souls. There is no story in the histories to tell me what to do or how to help you. But it doesn’t matter. I will try to help one of The People who comes to me for wisdom. Breathe.”
She pulled another herb from the basket and extended that branch toward the fire as well. When it caught, she placed it too in the clay tile. The herb was something even stronger than rosemary, smelling of camphor. I sneezed three times in succession, which jarred my arm horribly. When I looked at it again, the abnormal shape-change had worsened, and now my elbow was involved, the joint trying to bend backward. I groaned in misery.
“Breathe!” Aggie demanded, and I breathed in the stink. In and out. In and out. She threw another branch on the fire, and I watched it flame and turn to ash. She repeated the command to breathe and burned small branches of the stinking herb until she had done it seven times. Then she lifted the clay tile and emptied the ash over her clay bowl and tapped it until the ashes were transferred. I had a bad feeling about what she was going to do with the stuff in that bowl.
Aggie burned three more herbs, these smelling of two varieties of mint and one that stank of creosote, adding the ashes to the bowl. She had a small pile of stinking ash, like a tiny volcano cone, in the bowl. She unscrewed a Mason jar, and the stench of moonshine filled the sweat house. She added a splash of that to the bowl too. With a whisk made of plants, she stirred the contents.
“Aggie,” I said, “none of those were Cherokee herbs.”
Her scowl deepened. “No. These are herbs suggested by a crazy old Navajo man. He’s one who saw the photos I sent of your last spell-instigated injury. He said they might help you attain a higher state of energy, one strong enough to reach inside and pull your own shape back out. I thought he meant a healed version of yourself. Only later, I realized he had to know you were a skinwalker or a were and he was seeing a maltransformation, not simply an injury. A dark magic spell might have brought about this particular problem, but the treatment would still be the same, nomatter how it was acquired.” At my confused look, Aggie said, “Never mind. Maybe this will help. Maybe it won’t. So breathe and meditate and we’ll see what happens.”
I breathed, watching as she added something bluish green to the bowl’s mix; it looked like a small upside-down cup made from a wrinkled cactus, but without the spines. She took a pestle to the mix and ground it for a long time, adding more moonshine. And when she passed me the moonshine, ashes, and wrinkled green thingy, I didn’t refuse, question, or hesitate. I drank it down. The moonshine was so strong, I didn’t half notice the other tastes, though the texture was gag-worthy all on its own. I coughed and spluttered and thought my esophagus might catch fire, but it didn’t. It hit my stomach like a bomb going off, however, heat flaming back up, and I had to swallow it down again. This time, the vile concoction didn’t come back up. Instead the alcohol hit my system and I dropped down into a meditative trance, faster than I ever had. Almost as if the moonshine and other stuff pulled me down.
And down.
I fell into my soul home as if dropping though an opening in the roof and I landed beside the fire pit on all fours, Beast form. I/we shook myself, loose coat sliding across my frame.
We bent to the fire and breathed, the scent strong and warm, of cedar heartwood and hickory. Here, proper herbs had been burned on the flames, sage and sweetgrass.Tsalagiherbs, not that awful peyote.Peyote. I wasn’t certain how I knew that the greenish wrinkled cuplike thing was peyote, but it was. And I was having a drugged dream in my soul home.
I sat upright, front paws together, and studied the cave that represented my own soul, my spirit, a place of refuge and safety, which, on the surface, might seem to indicate that it should never change, but it did, and often, as a reflection of my life and what was happening to me. It was like a three-dimensional representation of my psyche.
Beast growled.Soul den. Place where Jane and Beast are one.
