He tipped his aching head back to look up at the cloud-strewn sky. The sound of the wind in the branches soothed him. “Did you know about the tunnel?”
“Not until this afternoon.”
Browser closed his eyes for a moment and let the sun warm his face. He’d drifted through the day like a man without souls, feeling empty. So many things had happened, he could not take them all in. His dreams had been tortured. He kept reliving the fight in the cavern, analyzing each minute detail. Everywhere he looked now, he saw First People; it was the triangular shape of their faces, the way they held their heads and moved their hands. Even the lilt of their voices. He did not know why he hadn’t seen these things before. Perhaps he had, but had thought nothing of it.
Obsidian threw back her hood; it was an elegant gesture, filled with superiority. His own mother had moved like that. And his grandmother. Without realizing it, they had radiated an authority that had ceased long ago.
He squinted down at the trembling heart-shaped golden leaf he held.
“I’m sorry for the way I treated you,” he said.
“It’s my fault. There are just so few of us now, I was too eager.”
“No. It’s my fault. Somewhere deep inside I knew I’d seen you before, but I couldn’t place where we’d met.”
She looked at him from the corner of her eye. “We met nine moons ago when your people came here, Browser.”
“Yes,” he said, and nodded, “but you look so much like my dead wife that sometimes in my dreams I find myself replacing your face with hers.”
She stared at him, then shrugged, as if dismissing it. “I am much older than she was.”
“Yes, that’s what fooled me.”
“Fooled you?”
He nodded. “I always thought she looked like her mother, until I met you.” Tiny lights flashed in his left eye, and he had to close it to ease the sudden stunning pain. “I don’t know what was w-wrong with me. I should have seen your resemblance, and her resemblance, to Springbank before.”
“You think he’s my father?”
Browser looked down at the pool. Sunlight sprinkled the water like goldfinch feathers.
“Was
your father. Isn’t that why you’re crying? You’re grieving for him?”
“No, that’s not why I’m crying, you fool.”
“Then why—”
She whirled around. “My husband died yesterday!”
The wind pulled the leaf from his fingers. It fluttered into the river and bobbed away on the current. “He was the man—”
“Yes, Ten Hawks!
The gods know I’ve heard the story often enough today. The girl killed him! Do you understand now why I could not attend her burial?”
Browser frowned and looked away. “It wasn’t just her burial, Obsidian. We were burying over forty children, one old woman, and one girl.” He looked back and pinned her with hard eyes. “Besides, I thought you divorced him?”
She smoothed her hands over the fine blue fabric of her cape. “That’s
why
I divorced him. When he joined the White Moccasins, I knew he would end up dead. I told him so, but he said Two Hearts was more powerful than I could possibly imagine. He told me Two Hearts would lead all of our people back to glory.”
Browser chanced removing his hand from his left eye, and opened it. The pain nauseated him. He closed it again. “You didn’t believe him?”
“Two Hearts was insane. Everyone knew it.” She flexed her jeweled fingers and frowned down at the wealth of jet and shell rings. “Everyone except Ten Hawks.”
Browser’s thoughts flitted, trying to coalesce into a sentence. “That’s why there was no scandal when you divorced. No one knew what he’d done, but you.”
“I couldn’t tell anyone, Browser, not without risking my own life.”
Browser bowed his head. “Yes, I understand now.”
“No, you don’t. Not really. The White Moccasins operated silently, in secret—until four summers ago, when your Matron formed the Katsinas’ People; it gave them a reason to become more bold. Their numbers have been growing steadily ever since. This is not the end, Browser, it is the beginning.”
The ties on his bandage flipped in the wind. He put a hand up to keep them out of his eyes. “Two Hearts is dead. A leader’s death often—”
“He wasn’t their only leader!” Obsidian looked at him as though he’d turned into a rabbit. “There are many more! And he was never the scary one, Browser. It’s his daughter, Shadow Woman, that you should be afraid of. Without Two Hearts to restrain her—”
“But I thought you—”
“Me?
” she blurted. “Shadow is the one who helped him to kill your Matron, not me!”
When she raised her voice, his head throbbed sickeningly. He didn’t speak for a time, then, in a hushed voice, he asked, “How do you know she helped to kill our Matron?”
“Because Ten Hawks told me at the Matron’s burial!”
Browser thought back to that day. She’d walked the trail with a tall man, and a woman.
“Was she there, too?” he asked.
Obsidian’s full lips pressed into a white line. “Yes. She passes where she will.”
“So you know what she looks like. Will you help us to find her?” Obsidian laughed softly at first, then heartily. “If you value your life and the lives of those close to you, do not even try to find her! She will cut you into tiny pieces and serve you to your family for supper.”
Browser rose to his feet and concentrated on keeping his knees locked. “You won’t help us?”
“I don’t know who ‘us’ is, Browser.” Her black eyes blazed. She leaned toward him and the front of her cape fell open.
“Do you?
The one thing I can tell you for certain is that as more and more people convert to the Katsina faith, more will die.”
Browser stared at the pendant nestled between her breasts. He swallowed down a dry throat, and said, “That’s beautiful. Where did you get it?”
Obsidian reached up to clutch the black serpent coiled inside the
broken eggshell. Its one red eye glared malignantly at Browser. “My father carved it for me when I was a baby. Why?”
Her father. Shadow Woman’s father.
The same man?
Browser rose and stood gazing down at her for a long while, noting the curve of her jaw, the shape of her eyes and nose, then he walked away through the piles of autumn leaves.
When he reached the river crossing, he saw Stone Ghost standing at the edge of the water, wet up to the knees. The bottom half of his turkey feather cape hung around him in drenched folds.
Browser slowly made his way down the trail to him, and said, “Worried that I might have fainted in the trail, Uncle?”
Stone Ghost smiled. “A little.”
Browser locked his trembling knees. “Obsidian knows who the woman is who helped to kill our Matron. She even knows what she looks like, but she won’t help us to find her.”
Stone Ghost took his arm in an affectionate grip and guided Browser into the river and back toward the village. He waded the current slowly, a step at a time, to keep his balance.
“But you already know what she looks like, Nephew. You’ve seen her several times in the past nine moons. You just thought she was Obsidian.”
Browser halted and peered down at his uncle while memories flashed: Obsidian that day on the trail. Obsidian in his chamber. And many other times when she had seemed to be a different person.
He said,
“Twin pendants for twin daughters?”
Stone Ghost nodded. “I think her mother lied about her age when she came to the Longtail Clan, hoping no one would make the connection with what happened here thirty summers ago. She told people her daughter had seen seven summers, not ten, and claimed that her other daughter had died. In a very real way, of course, she was dead. Outcasts are dead to their clans.” He rubbed his forehead before continuing. “But I think it goes even deeper, Nephew. It seems that each of his daughters has one of those pendants. Ash Girl had one too, didn’t she?”
Browser started to shake his head, then straightened. The cold river swirled around his legs. “She told me she’d found it in Talon Town, and that’s what she told Hophorn when she gave it to her.”
“I think she wished to be rid of it. I can’t say why she chose to give it to Hophorn. Perhaps she thought Hophorn was more powerful than the evil creature that lives inside the pendant.”
Browser looked back at the Witches’ Water Pocket. The pool shimmered.
Obsidian was gone.
“Blessed gods, you don’t think … if there is any chance that she was Shadow Woman, I should go after her!”
“No.” Stone Ghost tugged Browser back. “This is not the day, Browser. Today, she will kill you.”
“Not if I get a war party—”
“She hasn’t survived this long by being foolish. If she thinks for one instant that you suspect, she will kill you, me, Catkin, and anyone else you might have confided in, and then she will vanish forever.”
They continued walking. Stone Ghost stepped out onto the bank and steadied Browser’s arm while he crossed the slick rocks to the sand.
Browser stood on shaking knees and forced himself to take deep slow breaths. His headache had grown almost incapacitating.
Stone Ghost said, “Let me help you back to Dry Creek camp, Nephew. You must sleep and eat.”
Browser nodded, said, “Thank you, Uncle,” and allowed Stone Ghost to lead him up the trail.
A group of small boys from the Dry Creek camp ran up the riverbank in front of them, laughing and playfully shoving each other into the water.
Stone Ghost turned to watch them, and his turkey feather cape buffeted in the wind, flattening his shirt against his bony chest. “When you are better, I would like you to help me do something, Nephew.”
Browser looked at him through one squinted eye. “Crossbill has ordered that everyone pack up their remaining belongings and be ready to leave for Dry Creek village tomorrow morning. This thing you wish to do, can it be done from Dry Creek village?”
“It does not matter where the journey begins. The task will require several days travel, maybe longer.”
“Where are we going?”
Stone Ghost tenderly clutched Browser’s arm, then gazed up at the
ash-coated cottonwoods along the river. The streaks of sunlight slanting through the branches dappled his face and fell upon the water below like flakes of gold. “A place that I am not even sure exists, Nephew. A place of legends.”