“Well, crap.”
Eli laughed. “Swimming hole is that way.” He pointed more downstream.
I walked to the creek, following a trail through the snow broken by the Elder. The bank where she had stood was twelve feet above the water; the far bank was low, sandy, and littered with driftwood and plastic water bottles sticking up above the snow, and raccoon poo that rested atop the frozen white blanket. Deer tracks showed that a herd drank from here, only yards from the house, almost as if they were taunting Beast. I found the log across the water and walked out over it, my paw-feet sure on the iced-over bark. The pool below me was deep and still and green. From upstream came the splashing of a small drop. Farther downstream the water picked up its pace again, louder with whitewater. I stripped and tossed my clothes to the bank. Took a breath. Closed my nose flaps. Stepped off the log. Plunged down. Deep. Blackness closed over me.
My entire body went into spasm at the cold. I forgot how to swim, how to breathe. How to even float. My heart raced. Panic chased through me. My throat closed up entirely. My feet hit bottom and buried to the knees in the muck. Blackness was intense. A waterlogged tree was jammed into the bottom beside me, branches broken. I hadn’t thought about that possibility. I could have impaled myself. The only light was up, toward the air, where dawn was brightening the sky. I was growing cold fast. I reached out and pushed against the dead tree, pulling my buried feet from the mud and clay and rotting vegetation, and shoved off toward the surface.
I breached like a dying whale. Gasping in a breath that spasmed through my chest. Forcing my arms to move, I swam to the bank, my limbs already stiff and clumsy. I splashed too much trying to get to the high bank and then I had to figure out how to get up it. I grabbed twisted roots that seemed to come from a sycamore, pulling my weight up the nearly vertical hill. At the top, I staggered, so cold my heart was doing funny things. My pelt was drenched and I shook to get the water off, feeling like a dog as water shot out in a fine spray.
I sat on the snow, landing hard on a hidden root, my breath ragged and coarse. By my left knee, lying on top of the snow, was a brownish feather, eighteen inches long, wide near the shaft, narrowing midway down at the notch. The flight feather of a golden eagle. I looked up, from the feather to the sky, searching for the raptor, but saw nothing, and then down, along the trail the Elder had taken to and from the creek. Twenty feet upstream, her tracks marred the snow next to mine. There was no way she could have thrown this feather unless she tied it to a rock. The feather was resting on top of the snow, leaving no indentation, only the markings of the quill and, more faintly, the barbs, as if it had fallen slowly from the sky.
Carefully, I lifted the feather. Pulled myself to my feet, my knobby hands on a low branch of a tree. I was so cold I had stopped shaking and was feeling almost warm, which was a dangerous sign of hypothermia. That told me my half-form was subject to extreme temperatures. Good to know, if I survived the cold this time. Holding the feather in my right fingers, I pulled my icy but dry clothes on over my damp pelt and trudged to the sweathouse, my bare paw-feet barely lifting from the snow.
My toes caught a root. I tumbled into a drift. Face-planted. And the snow didn’t feel cold.Great. Iwasfreezing to death.I managed to struggle upright, to my feet. Eli was laughing, a hearty chuckle on the morning air. If my hands had worked, I’d have flipped him off. As if he knew what I was thinking, he laughed harder. I held on tothe feather and, feeling like a drowned rat, made my way back to the sweathouse. Opened the door. Heat boiled out, steamy and herbal, and I closed the door behind me fast, breaking out into a shiver so violent my fangs clattered.
CHAPTER 8
Pain Is a River... and Anger Like a Great Fire
The woman wasn’t watching me, so I set down the feather, stripped at the door, hung my damp clothes on an empty hook, and pulled on a shift from the stack on the table. Woven unbleached cotton with little nubs in the weave. I hauled it over my shoulders and tugged it down my wet body, and when I wasn’t an embarrassment to myself, I picked up the feather and dropped my body at the fire pit, letting the heat soak into me. “That s-s-s-s-sucked.”
“Mmmm. It was supposed to. I am Savannah Walkingstick of Long Hair Clan, an Elder of The People.”
“Not my c-c-c-clan,” I chattered, “not a skinwalker.”
“No. There are no skinwalkers left among the Tsalagi.”
Which meant she didn’t know about my family. Interesting. “I’m here.”
“You are a self-described monster. Skinwalkers were once the men and women who led us into battle. According to my grandfather, the last one was put down like a rabid dog in 1872, in Oklahoma, for eating the liver from the still-living body of a small child.”
She was baiting me. Deliberately. Were her words partof the ceremony? Or was she just mean? Or... she was afraid of me and this was a form of defense. Yeah. That.
I let her words sink in as I shivered, remembering the vision of Eli killing me when I turned into a liver-eater. Maybe there was a reason to fear me. I reached back and pulled my messy braid around to drip on the clay floor, my movement releasing the odor of wet cat. I placed the feather on the floor between my bent knees. “Why are you here? Why did Aggie One Feather pick you to lead me through ceremony and not someone like Hayalasti Sixmankiller? We’re in the same clan.” I leaned in toward the fire, though the heat was intense and my shivering increased.
Savannah sniffed. “That old woman? She may be old enough to be an Elder, but she has no wisdom or healing in her heart or hands. My father was an Elder and his father before him was a Medicine Man. I can lead you to healing of the spirit if such is possible for your kind of monster.”
Which told me that Savannah didn’t know that Sixmankiller was my grandmother. And she truly had no idea she was a skinwalker. Or how old she was. Interesting and interestinger. “And if my kind can’t be led to healing?”
“Then I will help your people take you to the top of the mountain and throw you from the heights to the rocks below.”
Well. At least she was honest.
She added shavings of wood to the fire and flame flared. The smell of cedar smoked into the room. Her eyes settled on the feather at my knees. “Where did you get the eagle feather?” she asked, though it was more a demand than a simple question.
“It was on the snow at the creek bank. I figured you put it there.”
Savannah frowned at me, her lips and jowls pulling down hard, making vertical tracks in her face. “I would never give you a primary flight feather. Mother Eagle herself gave you that feather.” Savannah snorted softly, a familiar, tribal sound, full of emotion. She clearly thoughtMother Eagle had made a bad choice. “Yesterday, an eagle left me a feather. A golden eagle tail feather. That we both received a feather is a sign that we must work ceremony together.” But she didn’t sound too happy about it.
She went on. “Aggie One Feather and her mother have led you through many ceremonies and I am not certain that you can be healed. It is possible that you have walked a path into death for so long that you are no longer able to find a way to life, to healing, to Full Circle. But I will guide you as well as I am able.”
“Thank you,Lisi,” I said.
She frowned harder. “At least you have learned humility. We will start with masks.” She indicated my pelted body.
“I am willing,Lisi.”
She made a strange, ruminative sound. “Today we will talk about this mask and your totem and your guide.” She blew through her nose again, but not so hard, not so full of negativity. “You wear a mask, the mask that all others would see as the face of a monster. Two questions. Why do you not conform more to human shape? And how do you see yourself?”
