Dark Queen (Jane Yellowrock #12)

Ayatas’s face went cold and unyielding, the look of a hunter facing danger. If I’d been Aggie, I’d have been squirming. Aggie simply sat there and waited. And waited. Sweat became slick trails moving slow, down my spine, between my bent knees, down my chest, across my scalp, and down my face. I blinked to keep it out of my eyes, but it stung, salty-sharp.

Ayatas took a breath and blew it out, and when he spoke, it was with the same measured formality that Aggie was using. “She speaks the truth. I put off coming. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it. I heard the messages of the universe, of Grandfather Rock, and the candor of the deer, and I did not listen with my whole self. I turned away. I have been a child in my thoughts, to run away from truth and wisdom, ignoring or following the Elders’ wisdom and the Great One’s messages as I chose. Seeking my own way.” This was a Tsalagi way of speaking and The People do not lie, even to the white man, never to an Elder. This was truth.

“I combined the trip with business in the white man way. I didn’t treat the relationship with honor. My apology was not heartfelt because I justified my actions.”

His words made me feel better, though in his place, I’d have just barged ahead, driven to NOLA, and banged on his door, letting the chips fall where they might. Maybe his way was better. Or maybe his way was cowardly. Or maybe a combo of the two.

Aggie said gently, “You have both violated relationship. You have strayed from a good medicine path and dishonored one another.”

I frowned at the floor, letting her words try to make sense inside me. Among tribal peoples, medicine wasn’t drugs. It was a method of right relationships: spiritual, mental, physical, and with the natural world, in terms of nature, the Earth, tribe, clan, and family. I wasn’t sure how I had violated anything, but I sure could see how my bro had violated it all.

“Jane. Your uni lisi violated the path to harmony when she led you to kill your father’s murderers.”

Ayatas whipped his eyes to me. Yeah. I had told her. So what? I ignored him.

Aggie went on. “You were too young to understand the way of the war woman. Her teaching led you to believe that violence and death was the answer to all things.”

I opened my mouth to argue and just as quickly snapped it shut, feeling the sweat in the creases around my mouth, tasting salt and smoke. Aggie was right. I frowned harder, not wanting to agree. But. I had entered the sweat house in honor, which meant I had no choice but to be led to reconciliation.

I should have just shot Ayatas and been done with it. Dang it.

“Yes, Lisi. If Ayatas is to be believed, I continued in the way I was taught. I violated the path of harmony when I tried to kill a white man rapist on the Trail of Tears.” I frowned harder, as an image came to me of a pale face, dark with white-man beard, lined and saggy, too thin. The knife in my hand as I stabbed him with it. The vision of his fist coming at me. Then nothing. “He was yunega. He hurt a woman. I thought . . . I thought that meant he deserved to die at my hand.”

“You were a child, led down a path that was for a grown woman. You are now that woman, standing on a bridge over a roaring river, where you can see upstream to your past, down to your present, and downstream to your future.”

I nodded, but instead of seeing a river, I saw a path through a dark wood, one running with blood, and with the bloody, muddy footprints of the passage of my life. My past. I looked the other way and saw a short, rock-strewn path mostly hidden in a rainstorm, lightning jagged through the sky. Thunder boomed. Rain beat the earth like a timpani of drums. The path leading into the future quickly vanished into the mist of pounding rain and lashing trees. Rain. And lightning. And time . . .

I blinked my eyes open, surprised that they had shut. “My past is a path that runs with blood,” I said, still speaking in a formal tone.

“Yes,” Aggie said gently, “and in your present you work for Europeans, for white men, white bloodsuckers. You take their money and kill when they say to kill. Your present is a river running with blood. Your future is unknown and you may take it in any direction, the same bloody path you now tread, or something else. Something different. Something that is not dependent on the grandmother who taught you to kill.”

I wiped the stinging sweat from my eyes. I’d thought pretty much the same thing myself. After a little too long, I blew out a breath and said, “Yes, Lisi. I have taken a blood path. I am mired in it. My feet stand still, unmoving, not walking, submerged in the blood of my enemies and the enemies of the vampires.” I looked into Aggie’s dark eyes, eyes that saw too much, ignoring my brother’s yellow ones.

When I spoke the next words aloud, where my brother could hear them, I gave away much of what made me tick. But this sweat was sacred, almost holy, and it seemed the time to share my own heart. “I took this path to protect my godchildren, whom I have sworn to keep safe. To protect all the witch children in the Americas. Perhaps there was a better path, one that would have accomplished the same ends without so much death.” I dropped the formal tones and speech patterns. “But I don’t see it, Aggie. I don’t see any other way I could have gone, except through the heads and hearts and blood of my enemies.”

Aggie nodded thoughtfully and passed us pottery cups filled with cool water, smelling of mint. “Drink,” she said. “You have taken a path through blood and death. Have you done so with honor? Have you been kind and compassionate for the lives of your enemies? Have you given back to the Earth for the blood you shed? Have you treated all of Nature with honor in all of your ways? Have you taken a path with respect for the Earth?”

“Mostly. Life of the living, human life, yes, mostly. Life of the undead? Not so much.”

“Why should your brother, who knows only what he reads in his reports, trust one who deals in death? He does not know for a surety that you killed to protect the innocent. He does not know that you have not killed simply because the vampire requested a killing.”

Crap. To kill or not to kill? That is the question. And that was the crux of the whole of my life. I closed my eyes and salt stung them. A time passed, marked only by the sweat that ran off my body. I looked again at the vision of my future, as it disappeared in rabbit trails through the rain and forest—in the fall of rain/time and the life of the Earth. I said, agreeing, “The path I walk is not the only one through the forest. I may have been set on this path by the grandmother who should have taught me differently, but now I am grown. I can see clearly how the path of my future might alter.”

And there was that bear and deer story. Holy crap. I could see the future through the messages of the body and also through time . . . “I have the right to choose how I should go forward. The path is mine to make.” I looked at Ayatas. He was sitting with his eyes closed, sweat streaking his body. His nose was shaped exactly like mine. His eyebrows exactly like mine. His irises were yellow. Exactly like mine. That was the recognition sparking in Aggie when she first entered the sweat house. She had seen the resemblance. I said, softly, “I would make peace with my brother.”

If Ayatas heard me he didn’t give anything away. He might have been asleep for all the reaction he gave.

“Ayatas,” Aggie said. “You knew of Jane Yellowrock. You knew she was likely your sister. Yet you chose not to come.” Gently, her words slow and kind, Aggie said, “Your path was one of jealousy and insult.”

Ayatas’s mouth tightened.

“Your path was based upon the tales and stories you had heard as a child, the big sister who killed her enemies, who went to war when just a child. You could not live up to her. You did not believe that you could walk her path. And so you avoided her until you had need of her. Until you might use her as a weapon. Just as did the grandmother who taught her to kill. This was your insult.”

The silence stretched out, tight as a drumhead.

Aggie placed a pine bough on the fire. It caught, smoked, and blackened in the flames until its core glowed red and it fell apart.