Shadows Cast by Stars

by Catherine Knutsson

  What the hell is that supposed to mean? I wonder as the man crouches low to the ground, exposing a great dorsal fin rising from his back. He’s primed to strike. And yet, something is making him wait. Why hasn’t he attacked me already? He’s said I’m weak, that I don’t know the ways of the spirit world, so why is he stalling?

  The sisiutl stares at me with its obsidian eyes. Dance, it says. Then, with a smack of its great head-tail, ripples race across the lake, right to where I stand.

  I lift one foot and set it down, and then the other, more firmly. The earth shudders. I do it again, with greater certainty, and the shudder becomes a tremor. The tremors radiate out from me, running through the earth, sending rock and plant and tree rippling as if they are borne upon waves. Again and again, I dance and jig, lifting my feet higher and higher, crowing as I jump at the sky and drop back down, the earth trembling and quaking beneath me. This is my answer. This man has my brother, and I will come for him. Oh, I will come for him and his captor will pay!

  And then sparks fly at my eyes and I’m back in my body. The hut is alive with fire. Screams fill my ears. Mine? I don’t know. Someone drags me out and a blanket is thrown over top of me. The earth shakes. Trees shudder and groan as they topple. Men run across the red earth, trying to escape.

  The hut and lean-to collapse in a burst of flames, like bones of a long-dead animal trampled underfoot.

  That’s enough, I think, and the shaking stops.

  I can smell the horrible scent of singed hair and I hope it’s not my own. I touch my face. It’s been spared, but a fierce claw of pain is coming from my right shoulder. I don’t touch it. I don’t want to know what’s there.

  Someone picks me up. Pain rips through my body, burning down veins and arteries, turning nerves to ash. I hear someone scream. Me. It’s me. I scream and scream as I am burned to dust.

  “Hold on,” a voice commands. “Hold on to me, and don’t you let go.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Sleep, Cassandra. Go back to sleep. You aren’t ready to wake yet.

  Madda?

  Yeah, it’s me. Don’t worry about that right now. You need to rest.

  Madda, it’s all gone wrong.

  Things are changing, that’s all. Everything changes.

  Am I burned?

  Yes. The spirit world needs sacrifice. They need to see what we’re willing to give up in exchange for their help. Nothing comes of nothing, you know. There’s always a price to pay. Listen to me for a second. I never told you about my last apprentice. I’m with her now. She was taken by the dzoonokwa first, and she wanted me with her. I didn’t protect her as I should have. The dzoonokwa know what it means to be mad, and they seek that insanity, flock to it like the way you and me are drawn to spirit.

  So that’s why you died?

  I’m not dead, Cassandra. I’m still alive, in a manner of speaking. Just different now. You ever see my totem?

  Only a bit.

  Well, it’s a dzoonokwa. Always knew I’d be with the wild women eventually—I suspect all of us end up with our totems sooner or later. Didn’t expect it to be quite like this, though. Now I’ll walk Dzoonokwa’s paths, work her medicine. She doesn’t have good eyesight, and she wants my eyes to see better in the world of the living.

  Madda, did I cause that earthquake?

  Yes. You did. Earth’s lent you some of her power, because she needs your help. Just like the dzoonokwa taking me. They need my help, and I’m not sure they’re done with you, yet, either. That’s why I haven’t crossed over to the land of the dead yet. But that can wait. Right now, you need to heal. So sleep. Don’t dream. Do you think you can do that for me?

  Yes.

  Good girl. You got to stay grounded, stay sane; and rest, real rest, will do that for you.

  • • •

  When I wake, the first thing I see is the monolith. Its gaze is an accusation: You should not have lived.

  And then I blink. The monolith is in my mind. Only my mind. Somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better. My chest aches. I try to move, but I can’t.

  Someone dabs my forehead with a damp cloth. Cedar. “Shh,” he murmurs. “You’re going to be okay.”

  I try to nod, but my lungs are full of smoke and sweat and fear, so full there’s no room for air. I take another breath, and another, until I’m gasping and my sides hurt.

  “Slow down,” Cedar says. “You’ll hyperventilate.”

  Another face peers down at me. Henry Crawford. He doesn’t speak. He just looks at me, his face creased into its angry river, and then walks away.

  “You’re on a stretcher,” Cedar explains as he gently runs the cloth over my forehead again. “Your right shoulder—it’s burned. You kept on having bad dreams where you were lashing out at something. We thought you’d hurt yourself, so we bound your arms. You’re safer this way.”

  I don’t believe him. There is something wrong in his voice, something he isn’t telling me. “I want up,” I say, struggling against my bindings even though it hurts so badly. “Let me up. Let me up right now!”

  “Okay, okay. Just hold still,” he says, but his voice trembles. He unbinds the straps that hold my arms and helps me sit up.

  My head spins. Cedar steadies me until the spinning stops, but the pain inside of me, the invisible pain of losing Madda—will that be with me forever?

  And then I remember: Plague. I pull up the sleeves of the old work shirt someone has dressed me in so I can inspect my skin for the telltale black pockmarks. Nothing. Through the pain and the dizziness, I try to remember how long it takes for the first symptoms of Plague to appear, but my mind is fuzzy, unfocused. I can’t seem to find the right piece of information. “The other men?” I force myself to say, because they’re the only things I can see clearly, lying there on the floor of the hut, the Plague marks marring their skin. “The men in the hut …”

  “What about them?” Cedar’s voice is harsh, as if he’s fighting to control it.

  “They had Plague.”

  “Did they?” He squints at me. “That’s not what Henry Crawford says. He says they were sick with starvation.”

  “But …”

  Cedar leans in. “Starvation. That’s what Henry Crawford says. That’s what I say too.”

  I close my eyes. How long? How long now, until the men begin to get sick?

  If they get sick.

  Maybe I was wrong, just like Cedar says. Maybe those men didn’t have Plague after all. Maybe they had something else, something I didn’t recognize, because I’m hardly a doctor. I don’t know everything. Starvation would be so simple, so easy to pin blame on. After all, we’re supposed to be immune to Plague. No wonder everyone believes Henry. I want to believe him too.

  And yet, when we return to town, we carry the infection to everyone there. Hasn’t Henry thought of this? Hasn’t anyone?

  “Cass.” Cedar brushes my hair back from my face. “It’s done. What’s done is done.”

  He’s right. If we’re to die from Plague, we will. I can’t do anything about that, medicine woman or not, even if I wasn’t in this condition.

  But infect everyone else? I can try to stop that.

  I must stop that.

  I dream.

  I dream I follow Bran and Paul through an ancient forest. Tendrils of silver Old-Man’s Beard reach down to brush their heads. Their hands are bound. Their backs bear the stripes of a whip’s bite. Paul is hurt; he limps. Bran holds his head high, forced back stiffly in an effort to appear unafraid, but I can smell the truth.

  Who leads them? I peer into the shadows of the forest to see men without souls, without totems. Shadowmen with teeth that gleam in the moonlight.

  And then the ravens come, swooping through the cedars in droves, beating me with their coal-black wings, driving me back.

  Away, away, they shriek. Away!

  I smell the fire before I see it. Smoke licks at my skin like a snake tasting the air. I should run. But I can’t. The ravens fly around my
head, shrieking, but I am rooted to the spot like an ancient tree. I will die here.

  But the flame doesn’t come. A shadowman comes instead, with his ragged dorsal fin, his face that is part man, part orca.

  Sea wolf, sea wolf, the ravens shriek.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” I growl.

  Oh no? the man says as he crouches down, primed to strike.

  But before he does, I wake, drenched in sweat, panting, and with a mouth full of smoke.

  The trip back is terrible. They feed me alcohol laced with willow bark so that when we stop at night, stars whirl above my head while my stomach heaves back and forth.

  Three days ago I regained consciousness. How many days since we left the boundary? I don’t know. All I know is that I won’t take the whiskey anymore. Cedar pours it into a cup. He’s decided he’s my nurse.

  “No,” I say when he eases me up and puts the cup to my lips. “It’s making me sick.”

  “It’s making you better,” he says. He doesn’t take the cup away.

  “I said, enough.” This time I use my good arm to push the cup away.

  He sits back on his heels. “You’ll regret it later.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t want any more. It’s poison.”

  “Suit yourself,” he says, setting the cup on a stump. “I’m going to go hunt.” He grabs his rifle and stalks off.

  Men mill about. An air of brooding hangs over them as they get ready for the night. Few look my way, but I hear them. Oh, I hear them as they whisper that the earthquake was my fault. It’s almost laughable. How could a girl cause an earthquake?

  Until I hear one of them whisper, I saw her dancing. It was the dancing that did it.

  Was it?

  I don’t know. I remember becoming the sisiutl, and seeing the shadowman and the stench that accompanied him. I remember feeling sick, and then, yes, dancing— why dancing? It seems a strange thing to have done, though that’s what I did—but I was in the spirit world. How would dancing in the spirit world equate an earthquake in this one? I know that what happens in the spirit world has repercussions in ours, but an earthquake? It just doesn’t seem possible. Or plausible.

  And yet, it happened.

  What does that mean? What am I supposed to do with a power like that? Healing is one thing, but this? The ability to set the earth shaking?

  They’re wrong. They’re crazy. It wasn’t me. And just to prove it, I lift my foot and gently set it down. Nothing— no shudders, or tremors, or swaying trees. Nothing at all. I try it again, fearing what might happen, but I need to know. I need to know if it was me, if I’m capable of such destruction.

  I wish Madda were here right now. I don’t understand this. I don’t understand how I could have done such a thing. I didn’t know! If I had, I would have stopped dancing….

  And then what? The sisiutl told me to dance. It wanted me to do it, and it had to have known what would happen, even if I didn’t.

  Why would it want me to cause an earthquake?

  But it’s not just the earthquake, if “just” is even the right word at a time like this. It’s what happened after. I haven’t seen Chris Johnson. My heart hopes he’s off hunting too, but something tells me he’s not, that he’s back there at the boundary, left behind. Was it the fire or the earthquake that took him? Doesn’t matter, I guess. Both, I think, were my fault.

  The men watch me. They’ve seen what I can do, and any lingering doubts why Madda chose me as her apprentice have been erased. I walk with greater care. I’m afraid of my own feet, and I almost laugh. How ridiculous is that? And yet … what if it was me? Why would I be given the power to cause earthquakes? What’s the trigger? Anger? I remember being angry, but if it is anger, what if I can’t control my temper? What if this power uses me, rather than me using it? What if I start something and can’t make it stop?

  One by one, I look at the men, making note of the faces. Who is missing? Who was lost in the fire?

  The two men in the lean-to. The two men with Plague. Is that why the sisiutl had me dance? To destroy them before they … what? Before they destroyed me? No. Why would a supernatural need me, if that’s all it was? They were dying anyway.

  But the smell … the smell that made me gag when I entered the lean-to. I encountered it again in the spirit world, a stench so intense that it almost had form. It followed the shadowman like his very own shade. Is that it?

  I’m not sure, but I’d like it to be. Then all of this would be his fault, because if I caused that earthquake, if I caused that fire, if I set the world shaking by just dancing, what does that make me …

  I remember Madda saying I was special, but special isn’t the right word. Freak might be closer to the truth. And a danger—to everyone—if I don’t figure out what this all means.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. Madda once said that there is a duality in everything. We need water, but too much will kill us. Fire warms our bodies, but too much? My aching shoulder is proof of that. Too much food can be just as bad as too little. Too much sun? Too much wind? Too much rain? Life is about balance, she said, about walking that thin line between what is right and what is wrong. How will I know which is which? How will I know if this next footstep is the one that will set off another earthquake? If my next breath will cause a hurricane and destroy us all?

  I don’t. So for now, I keep on walking. Carefully.

  The men have set their packs at the roots of a great maple. I spot Madda’s among them and ease myself down beside it, carefully unwrapping the bandage wound around my right shoulder. I go slowly, the bandage crackling as dried blood breaks apart. It doesn’t hurt, more or less, until I get to the final layer. What was once skin has adhered to the linen of the bandage. I stare at my shoulder, wishing I didn’t have to do what I’m about to do. I can already tell that Madda’s tattoo is gone. The skin has been burned clean away. My hand creeps up my neck, slowly, testing the remaining skin. The wound from the sisiutl is gone now too, but not because of the fire— because it’s simply not there. I squeeze my eyes shut. First the earthquake and now disappearing wounds?

  Henry Crawford walks by and sees me trying to pull the bandage from my shoulder. “That’s gonna hurt.” He crouches beside me. “Do you want me to do it?”

  I nod. My voice has disappeared.

  “All right. It’s gonna bleed. You got something to stanch it with?”

  I show him the handful of sphagnum clenched in my fist.

  “Good enough. Take a deep breath. On the count of three, let it out and I’ll pull. Ready?”

  My forehead is damp with the cold sweat of fear, but I do as he asks. “Ready.”

  “One, two … three.”

  I scream as pain seers my body. Fire, fire, it’s eating me alive, my body, my eyes, my brain …

  Henry takes my hand and presses it to my shoulder, sending a shower of sparks through my mind, like cinders lifting on an updraft. The spirit world wants me. It wants me to cross over, and this pain is paving the path. Henry Crawford leaves, unnerved, as I try to blink the sparks away.

  Slowly the pain subsides, leaving me with a thirst in my throat, a thirst that probably would have been quenched by Cedar’s whiskey. But instead of going to get it, I remember something else. My hands find my throat. Bran’s stone, and the pouch holding the sisiutl pearls. They’re both gone.

  “Please,” I say to the next man passing by. “Who pulled me out of the fire?”

  The man tilts his head toward Henry Crawford.

  I make my way across the clearing, ignoring roots, the sparks, the humming in my ears, the insistent burning of my shoulder. “Please,” I say to Henry Crawford. “Please, in the fire … when you found me …” I can’t catch my breath. “Please,” I try to say again, but it’s nothing but air. Henry Crawford’s face puckers into a puzzled frown. I tap my throat, my chest, pull my collar back to expose the notch of my neck. Bran’s spirit stone. Please, tell me you have it. Tell me it’s safe.

  Henry retrieves something
from his pocket and presses it into my hand—the cloth pouch, stained with soot. I roll it between my fingers, feeling the sisiutl’s pearls inside, and then look at Henry. “My necklace? The one with the green stone?”

  “You were holding that in your hand,” he says. “That’s the only reason it survived. Everything else was destroyed when the cabin collapsed.”

  “Oh.” I run a finger over the hollow of my throat. My gut aches as my pulse collides with my finger. The spirit stone is gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  I dream.

  I dream I am sitting on the edge of the ocean, staring out at open water, looking for my brother, for Bran, but all I see is the sisiutl. Its head rises above the seafoam as it swims toward the shore. All at once, the ocean draws back, rushing away as if repulsed by the sisiutl, and I draw back too, for I’ve never seen it without water surrounding its body. Folded close to its back are a set of wings, glistening like mica, and as the sun beams down on it, I am forced to shade my eyes. This is no eel, no sea serpent. This is a creature of ages.

  Drop your hands, the sisiutl says in a voice that’s as deep as the ocean, as thin as air. Drop your hands and look at yourself.

  My arms fall to my sides as I force my eyes open and stare at nothing.

  We set out at daybreak. Cedar carries one end of my stretcher, a man named Joe Potter the other. I am permitted to walk for short intervals until my breath comes in shallow gasps and then they force me back onto the stretcher.

  Ravens wheel above us, but they don’t follow. They’re content to watch from a distance.

  A whistle breaks the silence and we draw to a halt. Six men, armed to the teeth, emerge from the ferns.

  Stop! I try to yell to the men, but my words don’t carry. Henry gives Cedar a quick glance. He nods, and my stretcher is picked up and moved out of earshot so I can’t do any damage. I want to laugh, but I only choke. Damage. What damage can I do, compared to what Henry is doing at this very moment? He’s shaking hands with one of the men, spreading contagion as if it’s nothing to him, as if he’s forgotten our history. Smallpox. Tuberculosis. Addiction. All brought into our communities by outsiders. I clench my hands. I will not allow this.