Spiritwalk (24 page)

Neither existed for her here. Here she didn’t need a shell to protect her from the world—the House itself provided that. Here she could vicariously experience what she’d never had the nerve or understanding to sample before. Here she could finally relax and be herself. And it wasn’t boring. Not for a moment. Not with all these books, nor the glass display cases laden with curiosities and artifacts, nor the trickle of genuinely interesting people who made their treks into what she thought of as the mind of this fascinating building.

She hummed tunelessly under her breath as she shifted the ladder to the next shelf. Beth Norton, a second-year Carleton University student, had just left to pick her daughter up from the babysitter’s and there was no one else about. The room was still, holding that special kind of quiet that only a large room can. Picking up the twelfth volume of Frazer’s original
Golden Bough
, Ginny stepped onto the ladder, then paused.

The book felt odd in her hand. The leather binding was suddenly rough with an almost barklike texture. The weight was different than she remembered it to be.

Frowning, she took it over under a light. The binding looked as though someone had taken a vegetable grater to its surface. She ran a finger across the roughness and her frown deepened. The binding hadn’t been marred. There was something stuck to it. She rubbed a fleck of it away to reveal the gleam of leather underneath. Peering closer, she realized that the book was covered with some kind of moldy growth that had hardened on the leather.

She looked worriedly at the shelves nearest to her, visions of mildew or worse ruining her precious books firing up in her imagination, but the spines facing her were unmarked.

Thank God, she thought. It was only this book.

But even one book was one too many.

She took it over to her desk, where she kept a box of tissues. Holding the book under the brass desk lamp, she started to clean its cover, but stopped when she realized that the book appeared to be getting thicker.

The only explanation she could come up with was that somehow the book had sustained massive water damage and the damp pages were swelling. How that could have happened in here, she couldn’t begin to guess. There were no leaks in the roof—it wasn’t raining, anyway. No plants that needed watering....

Idly she flipped back the cover, then dropped the book as a tree branch sprang out into her face. She stared at where the book lay on the desk, the branch, complete with leaves, growing from between the signatures in its gutter. A second, then a third, branch joined the first, bursting forth—bud, to leaf, to twig, to bough—with impossible speed.

Shaking her head, she backed her chair slowly from the desk. She stood up, and retreated further, unable to keep her gaze from the bizarre sight. A small tree grew from the book now. And...

An uncontrollable shiver started in her calves and crawled up her nerves.

Vines crept up the legs of the desk, entwining about the lamp and various knickknacks scattered on its roll top. Moss sprouted, thickened on the blotter around the book. Twigs and small knobby buds sprouted from the wood of the desk itself.

“No,” Ginny murmured, shaking her head.

It wasn’t possible.

A sharp cracking sound whipped her around to find vegetation overtaking the long rows of bookshelves all around her.

“No!” she cried.

She took a half-step to the nearest shelf and began to tear the vines and branches away. She never heard the rumbling underfoot, only felt the floor begin to sway. As she backed away, the room shook. Books tumbled from the higher shelves. The display cabinets rattled. In one, a clay flute in the shape of a bird suddenly sprouted beak and feathers and began to peck away at the glass locking it inside.

She was going insane, Ginny realized.

She tried to keep her balance as the rumbling grew into thunder, but stumbled to her knees. The House shuddered around her. Dozens of books came crashing from their high perches. She brought her arms over her head to protect herself from the sudden onslaught and crawled toward the center of the room, where the hail of falling books was the lightest. There she crouched, staring with an anguished gaze as the Library was transformed from her quiet haven into a landscape that could only have grown from the imagination of some mad surrealist, armed with vegetation in place of paint and brush.

9

“Do you remember the way?” Ha’kan’ta asked.

Sara nodded. It was the first time she’d be making the journey on her own, but she’d gone often enough with Tal taking the lead to know how to make it on her own.

She’d changed into a pair of patched jeans and a tatty old sweater—they were the best she could come up with for traveling clothes that wouldn’t also make her look too outlandish when she got back home. She’d decided that the beaded buckskin dresses or hunting leathers that she usually wore in the Otherworld were just a little too exotic for Ottawa’s streets.

Never draw attention to yourself, Kieran had told her once, passing along one of the basic lessons that his own mentor, Tom Hengwr, had taught him. If you appeared to be the kind of person that no one would look twice at, then no one would remember you either.

Sara was all for not standing out from the crowd—to do otherwise raised the possibility of too many awkward questions, such as, Where had she spent the last year? So she’d just have to wear this stuff for now and pick up some new clothes while she was home. All that had survived this past year in the Otherworld intact were her walking shoes—and that was because she mostly went barefoot or in moccasins while she was here.

She finished tying up her laces, caught up her pack by one strap and was ready to go.

“And you’re sure you don’t want any company?” Ha’kan’ta asked.

I’d love company, Sara thought.

But she knew how much Kieran’s part in the ceremony meant to Ha’kan’ta and wouldn’t have dreamed of asking the
rath’wen’a
to come with her.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Honestly. It’s just for a couple of days.”

Ha’kan’ta regarded her consideringly. The blue of her eyes was a startling contrast against the deep coppery hue of her skin. She was taller than Sara, almost as tall as Tal or Kiernan, and always reminded Sara of some Indian princess with her white doeskin dress and its beaded collar, the two long braids entwined with cowrie shells and feathers that hung to either side of her face, the dramatic beauty of her features.

“I was thinking of the wolves,” Ha’kan’ta said.

She had two of them—Shak’syo and May’asa, Winter-Brother and Summer-Brother, respectively; not exactly pets, but they weren’t wild animals either. They were just friends, Sara had realized a long time ago. The pair were lying at Ha’kan’ta’s knees at the moment, regarding Sara with expressions that seemed to say that they understood every word that was being said and were now just waiting on her reply.

“I don’t think so,” Sara said. “It’s kind of hard to go unnoticed when you’re flanked with a pair of wolves. And that goes for Ak’is’hyr, too,” she added before Ha’kan’ta could mention the moose that was the third of her constant companions.

She slipped the straps of her pack over her shoulder, adjusting the pack until it hung comfortably. Ha’kan’ta followed her outside the lodge.

“You know what we do?” Ha’kan’ta asked before Sara could say goodbye. “With the
rath’wen’a
?”

Sara nodded. To the Drummers-of-the-Bear fell the task of righting the wrongs, appeasing the offended and repairing the harm that the tribes brought upon themselves through unavoidable as well as disrespectful actions. They were intermediaries between the spirit world and the world of skin and bone, their charge as much the land itself as their people. They were healers, restoring harmony when discord threatened. They journeyed out of ordinary reality to bring back Beauty and nurture it in those—human hearts as well as heartlands—that had let their spirits become thin.

“You are as much a part of the journey we undertake as any drummer,” Ha’kan’ta said, “only you step your road intuitively, rather than following a path that has been set out before you.”

“We’ve talked about this before,” Sara said.

“Yes. But we haven’t talked about faith.”

That made Sara feel uncomfortable.

“Why do you look embarrassed?” Ha’kan’ta asked.

Sara shrugged. “It’s just... you know. It makes me think of people who are too... obsessed.”

“Faith is important,” Ha’kan’ta said. “It needn’t be invested in a particular deity—most who do so, do it by rote anyway. But you must believe in something or your life has no meaning.”

“What do you believe in?”

“Mother Bear.”

Sara nodded. Of course.

“And you?” Ha’kan’ta asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Then think of this: Have faith in yourself. In your path. In all you do. Believe that you make a difference. Faith can make that be real.”

“It’s that easy?”

Ha’kan’ta shook her head. “It’s the hardest kind of faith there is for you must accept it on your own. No one can do it for you.”

Sara took that thought with her when she left the camp.

There were three ways to cross the borders that separated the Otherworlds from the land of Sara’s birth.

The first was the most common; it required a great deal of preparation, entailing various rituals, purifications of spirit and body, and the like. It could also employ chanting, meditation, or music.

The second was to find a place—a crossroads, a “haunted” section of road or ancient stonework—where the veils of the borderland were thinner than usual and one could simply step through. The garden enclosed by Tamson House was one such site, but there were others, enough so that a whole body of folklore had grown up of mortals straying into Faerie, the modern equivalent being tales of UFO abductions. Coming back from the Otherworld by this manner required traveling through a number of such sites, depending on how deeply one had entered the spirit worlds.

The third, least common and most difficult, was by intent; to focus through the secret strengths of one’s taw and
will
a passage between the worlds. This was the technique of the
honochen’o’keh
, those little mysteries that Europeans called faerie. Mortals could learn it, but to the mysteries it came as naturally as breathing.

It was by way of the latter that Sara meant to return to Tamson House. She left the camp, unattended by her usual covey of children, and made her way back to the riverbank where her exercises had been so uncannily interrupted earlier that morning. She felt a little lonesome without the children following her and already missed Tal. When she reached the old stone, its mica freckles were hidden in shadow, for the sun had already traveled too far across the sky for its light to reach the stone anymore.

She took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, then immediately set about raising her taw, hurrying as much to stop herself from summoning up regrets as to get the journey begun. She was sufficiently versed in the exercise that her taw responded quickly to her call. It began as a tiny spark in her mind, then slowly grew into a warmth that spread through both spirit and body, centering in a spot just behind her solar plexus.

Calling it was easy. But focusing it... that was still hard for her. For that she used “Lorcalon”—the moonheart air that had been Tal’s first gift to her. She let its measures fill her until the tune resonated with the rhythm of her taw and her heartbeat. Now the focusing of her will came more easily.

She concentrated on the garden enclosed by Tamson House—the Mondream Wood of her childhood. Once she had names for all the trees in it. There was Merlin’s Oak. The Penny Trees, so called because of their rounded, silvery leaves. Jocky’s Home—the chestnut under which her little terrier had been buried when it died. The Scary Darks—a stand of birches that Jamie had so named to tease her, but the name stuck. And of course, there was the Apple Tree Man, the oldest apple tree in the small orchard on the west side of the garden.

The orchard had grown wild—a tangle of briar and thorn and apple trees that Fred had left alone because, as he’d told her, “It’s gone wild and wants to stay that way.” Since Fred’s death, no one else had touched it either.

It was to that orchard that Tal always took them when they returned to the House, a route that included a number of other stops through sites that were set in worlds progressively closer to it as one traveled through the Otherworld.

It was on the Apple Tree Man that Sara concentrated now, planning to go directly to the orchard rather than by the more circuitous route that Tal would choose. That was how Pukwudji would do it and since her abilities were more closely aligned to those of the
honochen’o’keh
than Tal’s, that was how she would do it.

She was eager to reach the House, do whatever needed to be done, and then return to the camp—hopefully in time for the ceremony. The less time her journey took, the sooner she could return.

So she called up the Apple Tree Man in her mind. Against the rhythm and flow of the moonheart air, she focused on him, remembering his scruffy bark and the tangle of his boughs, half his trunk embraced by a tall thorn tree, the thick grass that crouched over his roots, the sharp taste of his bounty when she bit into an apple....

When she had the whole of him firmly ensconced in her thoughts—not just the tree’s physical presence, but his personality, the inner
sense
of him—she let her taw reach across the distance to him, stretching between the worlds, and then she took a step and let herself go. There was a moment when it felt as though she were pressed up against a gauze curtain that was held tight at every corner so that its cloth stretched to her body’s contours. Her vision went gray. Silence hung in the air.

And then she was through, the border crossed, and she was stepping through grass that lay thick underfoot....

Did it, she thought, pleased with herself, until she took in her surroundings.

Sudden panic rose as she looked around herself.

This wasn’t the orchard in the Mondream Wood. This wasn’t any place she’d ever been before.