Shaman's Curse

by Audrey Faye

  I heard Seraphina gasp with delight as I let go of the ground and leaped into the open space near the fire. The ragged rings of Wanderers closest to me scooted back, laughing, clearly used to exuberance landing in their midst. I grinned and spun my skirt at them in thanks. The skirt tugged at me, created swirls, teased me into the flow.

  I laughed and shook my head and spun some more. The grandmothers had always teased me that I danced like a jungle cat—all crazy leaping and assuming the world would rise up to meet my feet. But that wasn’t the dance rising in me tonight.

  I was water.

  Flowing, turbulent, trickling, excited, impeded, delighted water.

  I felt the drumbeat shifting. Duncan, too, hearing the water, matching his hands to my feet. My toes kicked in delight, tossing the skirt up in light, flicking cascades, my fingers catching the droplets and raining them back down, up into the sky, out onto my waiting, giggling, clapping audience.

  There were littles up dancing now, but nobody made them sit. Tribes didn’t shush exuberance—they cherished it.

  I reached my hands to the sky, to the earth, to my heart, out to theirs. Calling in the energies. Offering myself back out to them. Wrapping us all in the ether that was our first breath and our last, our compass and our calling, our heartbeat and mother and tribe.

  The watchers murmured, those who felt the stirrings and those who only knew enough to respect that they were happening.

  I swooped and swirled, astonished at what was reaching for me. This was a spaceport, far from rocks and earth and trees and mother, and yet I could feel the great mother here, deeply. Wrapping me in a way I hadn’t been wrapped in a very long time.

  I never should have stopped dancing.

  I let my feet lift off the ground, the jungle cat playing with the burbling stream. The great water moved in me, deep tides and furious storms and implacable, carving rivers. Duncan’s drum thundered, demanding that all of who I was, all that I channeled, all that I touched, show up for this dance. My leaps became serious, the kind that hurled themselves off waterfalls and didn’t yet know if the landing was safe. My legs strained, caught off guard by the fury of all I needed to speak.

  I spun, lost in the power and the fire, clan and drumbeat holding the container for this fierce exhibition of what lived in my soul.

  It took my feet a very long time to hear the drumbeat ebbing. Quieting. Helping me find my way back to stillness. To endings. To peace.

  I let myself flow into the fetal position, cheek to the ground, that ended every Quixali dance. Cradled myself in the closest thing to the arms of the great mother that a spaceport could provide and let the heat inside me begin to cool.

  When I finally opened my eyes, Seraphina sat silently in front of me, holding a mug in her hands. She held it out to me, a child well used to ceremony and proud of her part in this ritual.

  I pushed myself up to sitting and took the mug. The clay was cool, the water tasting of springs and meadows and possibly a small pinch of dirt. I swallowed every last drop and held it out wordlessly. She laughed, a tiny girl clearly well pleased with me, and took off at a speed that suggested clay mugs didn’t have a terribly long life span in this clan.

  I smiled and nodded at the watching, quiet audience and hobbled over to the edge of the circle. My legs were going to hate me in the morning, and it was someone else’s turn to dance.

  Duncan winked at me and set up a quick, twinkling rhythm.

  I laughed and feigned collapsing to the ground as young dancers flooded into the space by the fire.

  “That was well done,” said an amused voice at my side. “Drink this. You’ll find it easier to get up tomorrow.”

  I looked at Delia and grinned. “Does it taste like moldy leaves?”

  She laughed. “Of course.”

  Tee knew how to make a potion that was both effective and tasty, but every tribal healer I’d ever known scoffed at such things. Medicine was supposed to remind you it was there all the way down. I chugged the contents of the small mug and managed not to grimace. “Thank you.”

  She smiled and tucked the mug somewhere in her voluminous skirts. “Come.”

  I managed not to roll my eyes at the one-word order. The Fixer in me would never have obeyed it without explanation, but I’d just done a dance that had carried me far away from those shoes, and it would be a while before I slid my feet back into them again. KarmaCorp could complain, but in the end, the woman sitting in the boss lady’s chair knew exactly what I knew—Shamans weren’t a Talent you harnessed too tightly.

  The dark simply didn’t work like that.

  Delia guided me to a tent just behind the crowd gathered around the fire. The sounds of laughter and drumming still washed over us, but here, we would be able to talk. She pulled back a flap done in rich fabrics and enough fancy stitching to be very certain it had never lived under a non-climate-controlled sky, and ushered me in.

  The circle waiting for me was smaller than the one by the fire. Imani sat in what was obviously the place of honor. The twins sat to her left, their heads leaning together and their energy exchanging in an eerie dance that both called to something in my spirit web and made me wary.

  I felt a tendril of their energy reach for me as I took a seat, and I batted it away. No touching. Not without knowing what it was they sought.

  One of the twins leaned forward. Their voice was rich and sonorous, almost like they spoke from the end of a tunnel. “We apologize for the intrusion. We forget our manners with another who can sense spirit. You carry something of the clans with you.”

  I fingered my tunic and skirt, confused. “These are Elleni’s. She wanted me to arrive unremarked by outsiders.”

  The other twin shook their head. “No. Something small and very powerful, carried near your heart.”

  I reached reflexively for my amulet pouch. It held deep power, but not of this clan.

  And then I remembered.

  Silently, with hands not quite steady, I loosened the thong that held the pouch closed and drew out its most recent addition. The tiny, frayed square of fabric looked entirely unremarkable, but it still spoke deeply of Tatiana—and of bonds far older and deeper.

  The twins inhaled sharply and exchanged potent glances with Delia.

  “Ah.” She held out her hand. “May I?”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, letting all my senses weigh in. Then I opened them and gently set the small bit of rag in her outstretched palm.

  She cupped it reverently and swayed, chanting in a low, deep rhythm I could barely hear. Then she raised her cupped hands to her forehead. “Please, tell me how you came by this. It is an object of much power and it comes from my people, but it is not complete.”

  I hadn’t asked nearly enough questions before I’d left Stardust Prime. “I don’t know the whole story. I know only that it comes from a rug that once graced the office of the woman I work for.” The next part was hard to say, even drenched in tribal custom, but I was asking a great trust from them, and I needed to offer mine. “Scraps from that rug belong to a young friend of mine. She was the one who gave me this piece to carry with me.”

  Delia was searching my face now, looking for something only a Seer could find. “She is your sister.”

  There was no word in Federation Standard for sister-daughter. “By promise and by custom and by the sacred words of my people, yes.”

  She smiled, and it was a beautiful and fearsome thing. “Then both of you belong to a story that began long before you arrived.”

  They definitely knew something I didn’t. I waited. My tribe didn’t have Seers, but it did have storytellers, and trying to rush them was never smart.

  Duncan began a light drumbeat outside, of the kind that would accompany a healing or a speaking of truth. I breathed. It wasn’t the first time I’d met a psychic musician. The drummer threw in a sexy, potent riff and then went back to light, as quickly as if the riff had never happened.

  Delia nodded at me impassively, but he
r cheeks shaded a pretty, dusty rose.

  I managed not to laugh.

  Delia rolled her eyes and sighed, but when she looked at me again, she was all business. “There is another Seer in another clan that also lives on a spaceport and runs a market much like ours. She had visions for many rotations, dreams in which she saw a woman with dark hair and fierce elegance and the energies of one who can walk between the times.”

  A Traveler. My head lurched. Yesenia.

  Delia paused long enough to be sure I was keeping up. “One day, such a woman walked into the market. She spoke with an elder, and with the Seer, and she bought herself three drawings of a dancer in a flowing skirt, much like the one you wear.”

  I gaped. I’d seen those drawings once—on the day twelve-year-old Tee and I had been foolish enough to sneak into Yesenia’s personal living pod long enough to deposit a small tree frog with a really big croak. It had been Prankster’s Day, the galaxy-wide celebration of practical jokes, but that wouldn’t have been enough to save our hides if anyone had caught us.

  The frog had appeared in one of the Lightbody gardens the following day without comment, and gone on to live a long and happy life. The artwork, I’d never seen again—but I’d never forgotten it either. And since that day, I’d never been nearly as afraid of the woman who hung them on her walls as she wanted us to be.

  “She also bought a rug,” said Delia quietly. “One that had been woven by the Seer herself. A simple tent rug, not one to catch the eye of someone of such sophistication.”

  Every story had a moment where the audience had a role, and this was mine. “The Seer wove power into the rug.”

  Delia nodded. “A spell of protection, the strongest she had ever done. One that would call others to guard, as spoken to her in dream.”

  A rug chosen by Yesenia and given to her infant daughter. Something that had been set in motion long ago, and was trying to form a circle now. “I felt the power. In the bracelet that has been made from the rug’s remnants.” I took a deep breath. They needed to know. “I work for the Traveler with the dark hair. The bracelet lives on the arm of her daughter.”

  Delia sucked in a breath. “Her daughter is the one you call sister?”

  A decision that was getting more complicated by the minute. “Yes.”

  The twins merely looked at each other like they’d expected this all along.

  Delia nodded at the twins and then looked back at me. “Then we will test you no more, for you were chosen before you came to us. Tomorrow, you will arise and prepare yourself. In the evening, we will take you to see the node.”

  15

  I don’t know what I’d expected, but it definitely hadn’t been this. I looked around at the lower-decks spacer pub and shook my head at Elleni. “You hid a node in here?”

  She laughed. “We don’t hide them—we find them. This one somehow attached itself to the spaceport, which probably makes sense. Lots of stray energy to play with. I think this node is more extroverted than most.”

  I gave her a confused look. “I thought nodes were in caves and things.”

  “Some are. Travelers primarily choose to use those ones because they’re more stable and tend to be in underpopulated locations.”

  This was anything but underpopulated. The bar was stuffed full of spacers on leave, and nary a one of them was sober.

  “Besides.” She was steering me through the jostling crowd that somehow managed never to spill their drinks. “This isn’t our destination, it’s only the way to get there.”

  No one was giving our Wanderer garb the slightest notice, or our strange conversation either. I sighed and tried to keep my skirt out of the puddles of unidentified liquids on the floor. I’d spent the better part of the morning asleep, and then eaten a quiet breakfast and found myself an empty tent for the more woo side of my preparations, the quieting of my spirit so that I would be seeing as clearly as possible when I met the node. Imani’s minions had checked in on me once or twice, but I’d been left to my own devices until skydusk.

  Then Delia had come for me, and after wrapping a scarf of brilliant red around my head, she’d led a line of Wanderer ducklings out into the spaceport. We’d made it as far as the main thoroughfare together, and then the ducklings had broken off alone or in small groups, headed for the usual shops and amenities with nothing more apparent than a meal or a drink on their minds.

  Elleni had herded me down to the lower decks, dragged me into this scuffle of a bar, and was now taking us right out the back entrance. The huge guy guarding the door gave her a small nod and let us by. She handed him a take-out bowl that smelled of campfire cooking and kept us moving briskly into the dim of the service tunnel.

  I didn’t speak until I was sure we were well out of earshot of the bouncer. “I should have worn my overalls.” We were in the bowels of the spaceport and heading deeper, and judging from the dust and grime we were passing, not even the techs spent a whole lot of time in here.

  “Hush—you sound like a flatlander.”

  I stuck out my tongue at Elleni’s back. Not the most mature of responses, but given that we were sneaking through oversized rat tunnels and ducking under pipes, I wasn’t feeling much like a grown-up. Although this resembled Kish’s childhood a lot more than it did mine. I shivered and tried to pretend the pipes were tree vines.

  “Can you feel it?” Elleni’s voice was softer now, more reverent, even as she dodged left to avoid a dripping pipe.

  I stopped paying quite so much attention to my feet and reached out with my senses. “No. Nothing.”

  She stopped and turned to face me, frowning. “Really?”

  I closed my eyes and did a more thorough sweep. “No.” I had the strongest possible personal shields in place, but that shouldn’t affect my ability to sense other energies.

  She nodded and looked almost pleased. “Good.”

  I had to duck under two more pipes to catch up with her. “Wait. What did you do?”

  “Nothing.” She met my gaze with serene confidence. “But the other guardians are shielding the node. We don’t know why it fluxed the other day, but we’d like to have both you and the node inside some tightly set protections before we introduce the two of you to each other. If you can’t feel anything, they’ve done a very good job.”

  One they hadn’t mention to me, which was a very clear reminder that there were a whole lot of highly skilled people here acting on behalf of the highest good—and we might not all agree on what that was.

  Elleni started walking more slowly, with the kind of regal, formal steps that spoke of ritual. I mimicked her and kept my eyes wide open. The pipes had given way to tunnels with less water and muck, with low ceilings and more of a structural feel, like we’d passed through the spaceport’s organ systems and were now walking inside its bones.

  I could hear other footsteps now, in other tunnels. Converging on wherever we were headed. A drumbeat, low and somber, giving rhythm to our steps. My heart could feel it calling us in. A pull I associated with fire and jungle and composting earth under my feet, not with pipes and creaks and an orbiting entity that was entirely human-made.

  Or not. I froze as the terrain under my feet gave way to something that wasn’t human-made at all.

  “The station was built around a small asteroid,” said Elleni quietly. “One with a molten metallic core and an interesting system of naturally occurring caves.”

  I reached down and stripped the slippers off my feet, setting my toes on the rough rock. I blinked in surprise. “It’s warm.”

  “It is.” Elleni was stripping off her own footwear. “That heat powers much of the spaceport, and it keeps us cozy when we come to visit the node.”

  I still couldn’t feel anything node-like, but the vague rasping of the spaceport on my jungle-born senses had entirely fled, replaced by a single, repetitive beat.

  I froze.

  Duncan’s drum wasn’t leading our footsteps. It was echoing the heartbeat of the asteroid that lived at t
he core of an inner-planet spaceport. I could feel the living presence under my feet—welcoming me, knowing me as its daughter.

  My spirit web exploded with joy.

  The great mother. She was here.

  I stumbled toward her call, into a small, vaguely circular space. A single glow light sat at the center and dimly illuminated the walls of the small, dark cave. I didn’t question how the others had gotten here. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was my toes on warm rock and the bright stream of energy feeding into my spirit web.

  I heard Elleni’s quiet gasp. “Your aura. It’s joining with the node.”

  Delia’s chuckle was tinged with awe. “Enough layers of protection to keep out an army, and she strolled right in. Should we begin the ritual?”

  “No. It’s not necessary.” Imani sounded implacable—and utterly calm. “Let her work. The node clearly knows her.”

  My brain had just enough coherent thought left to realize what they were talking about. I was doing what any child of Quixal did instinctively. Joining with the heart of the great mother, opening my spirit web to the living presence under my feet.

  If this was a node, then so was the planet of my birth.

  I dropped to my knees and curled up on the floor of the cave, wrapping myself in the arms of the mother I had not felt for fifteen years. I could feel the tears streaming out of my eyes, down onto the rock. Grieving. Rejoicing. Utterly stunned at the warm energy surrounding me, welcoming me home.

  I leaned into the cave floor under my cheek and the absolute sense of rightness in every millimeter of my spirit web and utterly opened myself, heart and soul.

  Let myself be only a child of the great mother.