Dark Queen (Jane Yellowrock #12)

Aggie said gently, “You wanted to wait until your jealousy passed.”

Answering Aggie, but still speaking to me, Ayatas said, “I saw the YouTube video of you walking out of a mine entrance with a massive scar across your throat and a dead police officer slung over your shoulder, one you had tried to save. Your eyes were glowing gold. I knew you were that sister. That war woman sister.” He glanced to Aggie and back to me. “Yours were big shoes to follow, when I was young, until I found my way and my place in the world. And so I waited. I let things get in the way; I put that visit on the back burner. I ignored my heart’s urging to come see you. I’m sorry. Really, very sorry.”

I blinked against the sweat that dripped down my face, again stinging my eyes. The room had lightened with the nearness of dawn, pale gray light creeping through the small cracks of the building and along the roof system overhead. We had been here twenty-four hours. “How can you be my brother?” I asked, hearing the desperation in my voice, remembering standing with my father above a roaring river. Remembering my promise to care for the expected child. “After all this time. After all these years.”

He had said the words before, but ceremony required complete candor and understanding. “Our mother was pregnant with me when our father died. I was born on the Trail of Tears. The Great One has timing that doesn’t always make sense to us.”

Aggie asked, “Jane. Are you satisfied with Ayatas’s words?”

“Yes.”

“Ayatas, are you satisfied with Jane’s words?”

Ayatas considered me. “Where were you all those years, sister?”

“I’m sure it’s a long story, but I don’t remember much of it.” I pointed to my head. “Amnesia. The stories the newspapers told about me were real. I spent a lot of time in mountain lion form.” I didn’t mention Beast’s soul inside with me. That was black magic and I needed to know him better before I shared that. Since Aggie didn’t volunteer that information I figured she was okay with a delay. “Stick around. I’ll tell you my stories.”

“I can’t stay long enough to hear the tales of that many years,” he said, his expression oddly kind, an expression I might have seen in the eyes of the Keepers of the Secrets, the most elder of the Tsalagi. Which he was. “But when I leave I’ll be going to Asheville. Hayalasti Sixmankiller has requested my presence. Maybe you should come with me.”

Shock zinged through me like a pinball, an electric bruising. Hayalasti Sixmankiller was our grandmother. “Maybe I will.” If I live that long.

Aggie said, “It is dawn. We will close with a blessing.” She reached for the bundle at her side. I had forgotten it was there and was surprised when she lifted a rock out of its folds. Or not a rock, but a huge, clear quartz crystal. There was a central spire with a multifaceted pointed top. Two smaller spikes were on one side. The three rose together from a base of smaller crystals and a curved bottom of stone. I tensed, eyes darting, searching for trapped arcenciels. There was nothing. Just the clear crystal.

With both hands Aggie pushed aside the fire-warmed river rock that was closest to her knees and placed the crystal in the depression. She held her cupped hands over the crystal and said, “Like the quartz, we are clear of strife, clear in mind, body, spirit, and natural space. Like this small piece of Grandfather Rock, we are part of Earth, safe in Earth, protecting Earth and her plants and creatures. Great One, we offer thanks for what gifts we have, thanks to the Four Directions and the power of the universe.”

Her voice took on a chant cadence as the sweat house brightened still more. “I give thanks in a traditional prayer, altered for Jane’s spiritual path:

“To the Spirit of the Fire who is the East,

“To the Spirit of the Earth who is the South,

“To the Spirit of the Water who is the West,

“To the Spirit of the Wind who is the North.

“To the Redeemer who forgives, whose path Jane follows, who Jane worships.

“We pray and we give thanks to you, Great One.

“We pray. We give thanks for Mother Earth.

“We pray. We give thanks for Father Sky, Grandfather Sun, and Grandmother Moon. For Jane’s Redeemer. For all life, all gifts, all joy, all wisdom. And we pray that we may exist together in peace, with harmony, with balance in all our relations. Wah doh.”

As she spoke the last two words, the dawn sun passed through the small door in the eaves, the door Aggie had opened when she entered. The dawn light illuminated a path through the air, lighting the dust and residual smoke with its muted ray. Alighting on the crystal on the earth near Aggie’s knees. Brightening it, sending the dawn light out in a prism of color and a rainbow of hues. This was Aggie’s version of the traditional Blessing Way. Not exactly something I remembered from the scant years of my childhood, but it was close enough.



* * *



? ? ?

    Ayatas waited at the fire while Aggie and I showered in the frigid water, dressed, and walked to stand beside his car. Aggie stared at her house, looking as wilted as the herbs from the mediation ceremony. “Will you ride with him or do you need to call your brothers to pick you up?”

“I’ll drive her home,” Ayatas called from behind the sweat house. Skinwalker ears.

Aggie smiled, nodded to me, and walked up the steps to her front door. She moved like an old, worn-out woman, exhausted by life. I had done that to her. I should go back and pour water on her fire pit and wood. Use enough water and she would have to let the pit dry out before she could work again.

Ayatas strode from behind the building, his eyes taking in the way I lounged against his car. “Get in. I’ll take you home,” he said. I opened the door and eased into his cop car, a gray four-door SUV. It smelled like Christmas trees and commercial cleansers and old cigarette smoke. The back was filled with cop gear, including one of the new psy-meters, the kind that measured all sorts of magical energy.

“It meet with your approval?” he asked as he executed a three-point turn in the street. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or curious so I just shrugged. He said, “I poured the bucket of water on the fire. It’ll be at least a day before it dries up enough to take anyone to sweat.”

“She was tired,” I agreed, finding it odd that we had been thinking along the same lines, but that Ayatas had actually done something about it while I had only thought about it. “That stuff about our clan talking about me. You know it wasn’t like that at all, right?” He didn’t respond. “I mean, yes, I made a blood vow. But I didn’t know what I was doing. I was five.”

“Our stories tell of you running through the cornfields and through the woods to the clan longhouse and waking everyone. Then climbing on the back of a horse, riding with Uni Lisi as she tracked the men, then waiting as she shifted to tlvdatsi and trapped them and caught them. Brought them to a cave on clan lands.”

I blinked, remembering the power and speed of the racing horse beneath me, the smell of Uni Lisi’s body, the smoke trapped in her clothes, the acrid smell of herbs, the sickly sweetness of old blood. The memory vanished, as if I had popped a balloon with a pin. Later memories flashed in front of my mind, like flipping the pages of a gruesome picture book.

“I watched our mother and grandmother torture and kill one of the men. And I killed the other one. Uni Lisi put the blade in my hand and pushed me at him. I wanted to do it. I wanted the white man to die. But it wasn’t glory or honor. It was kidnapping and torture and murder.”

Aya nodded and made a turn, his blinker bright yellow. “Things were different back then. Society was different. More blindly, casually cruel. Despite what people call the conservative, fascist, racist, sexist world of today, people were worse in the past.”