Cold Reign (Jane Yellowrock #11)(29)
Around me, the world was bright, sharp, each raindrop distinct and glistening and full of magic light.
I gathered all the things we had brought and wove through the trees upstream in the general direction I had taken last time, the earth sucking at my bare feet, water swirling around my ankles, muddy and thick.
The trees opened out at a slow, easy curve of the bayou, a place that had once been a tight twist of water. Smoke blew across me, black and choking, kerosene to start a fire of wet wood. In the center of the tiny clearing, Aggie and her mother were sitting beneath a canvas tent top, one coated with polyvinyl chloride so that the water ran off. The tent was just a covering with no sides, held up by a metal framework. The wind caught the top and billowed it with a hollow, flapping sound.
Aggie and Uni lisi were sitting on flat stones, situated on top of what looked like garden cloth, the kind that let water through but not plants. Like me they were naked, except for small beaded bags hanging on thongs around each neck. Their clothes must have been in the bags beside them. I could see their magic, Aggie One Feather’s a deep, dark lavender, near purple. It should have appeared soft, like a flower, but it was hard and stony, like amethyst. Uni lisi’s was much darker, a purple so deep it looked nearly black, shot through with white light, and the white was crystalline and pointed, sharp, like clear quartz arrowheads. Dangerous. Deadly.
Peyote made everything weird.
The fire smoked and stank and Uni lisi called to me. “Sabina call us and so we got one them young men to set up tent and bring us kerosene and dry wood. Not too dry now but it be okay.”
I realized that I had stopped. I pushed against the earth with the soles of my feet and floated over to them. My own magics floated behind me, silver and red and black and gray in a swirling pointed star. Violent shades of stone and blood. But my breath was clear as purest water in the midday sun.
I took the third sitting stone and settled to its flat surface. Aggie jutted her chin to the green pine boughs and I scattered them in a circle around us. Aggie had called it a protective circle. Witches called it a witch circle. No matter what it was called, circles have power and the pine boughs began to glow a pliable, deep green, the color of emeralds. Aggie put several of the green branches on the fire and wet pine smoke billowed up, black and green and choking, glowing with power. Smoke gathered in the low canopy above and writhed there. Small fingers of smoke and blackness trailed from the tent covering and out into the clearing.
Aggie said, “No evil can cross the circle or enter beneath the scented shelter of smoke. We are warded here, the three of us, against malevolent spirits.”
Uni lisi stood and faced east. The last time I had seen her naked, her skin hung in folds from her arms and thighs, and her rounded belly looked like a deflated balloon. Now she looked decades younger, her power enfolding her, magic meant for battle, for the might of war. She raised her hands to the place on the horizon where the sun would have been had the clouds not eaten it. She pushed apart the clouds and a speck of blue showed through, blue sky and a lance of sunlight on the horizon. She said something in Cherokee, words I should have understood but no longer did.
I decided in that moment that when my job here was done, I would go to North Carolina and the college or university that taught Cherokee. I would learn, and perhaps I would remember.
“This is a good thing,” Uni lisi said. I realized I had spoken aloud and clamped my mouth shut.
Aggie began to speak, a chantlike pulse to her words, the cadence formal, whispered into the mist that grew up around us. The world ducked and rolled with the smoke. Last time, I had placed my palms flat on the ground for balance. This time, I began to rock slightly with the words, back and forth, as her chant rose and fell. Rose and fell like a boat rocking on slow swells of the sea. Through my body the motes coursed, the star-working inside me doing whatever it wanted to, or whatever the Almighty had told it to. If I hadn’t been drugged out of my mind, I’d have been afraid.
Sleet began to fall, beating sporadically on the canvas tent, bouncing on the wet ground, melting in seconds. I had chill bumps all over me, and yet I felt hot, feverish. The fire before me flamed and smoked and my eyes watered as magic stung them. Tears coursed down my cheeks, hot and burning, just like the last time I was here. Everything was the same this time. Except the storm, the cold, the vision of magic, and me. I was different. I was very different. My magic was changing, flowing in a pentagram. Salty, hot tears splashed on my chest. Beast, eyes glowing, moved through the darkness that was the I/we of our two souls. She stared at the pentagram of power for many lines of chanting, then padded into the front of my mind. I knew my eyes were glowing gold when Aggie One Feather faltered in the chant.
“Do not fear,” Beast said, speaking through my mouth, her voice rough, her tone stilted. “Beast will not eat you.”
“Are you a devil? A demon?” Uni lisi asked, shaking her head. “I saw no evil spirit inside of Dalonige’i Digadoli.”
“Dalonige’i Digadoli. Yellow rock, yellow eyes,” Beast said. “I am the other inside with her.”
“Ahhh . . . Like a spirit animal,” Uni lisi said happily. Her magics danced and shimmied around her with delight.
Arms high, Aggie started speaking again and her words now had magic. Green sounds and yellow sounds and the blue of the sky sounds, the peyote showing me the power of the past and the color of power. Her words, still unknown to me, floated around us, through the glowing smoke, and when her chant ended, she dropped her arms.