Trickster's Girl (The Raven Duet)

by Hilari Bell

  She scattered a pinch of sand over the cave floor as she spoke. The moment of stillness that followed was just long enough for her to feel monumentally silly—then all thought was wiped away by a shattering blow that set every bone in her body vibrating like a mallet-struck gong. The vibration went on and on, receding into darkness, pulling her with it.

  Kelsa was lying on the tunnel floor when thought returned, lumps of stone pressing into ribs, hip, temple, and one sore knee. Her head ached fiercely.

  "Ow! What the hell was that? Did you hit me?"

  "No." Raven sat cross-legged beside her, looking far too comfortable on the hard stone. "You had a good connection to the ley, and some of the power lashed back through you. You were right. We were deep enough."

  The smug smile was back.

  "Frack you." She picked up the light, pulled herself to her feet, and started unsteadily out of the cave. Her headache lessened with each step, which it wouldn't if he'd hit her hard enough to knock her out. She was done with him, anyway.

  Kelsa felt almost normal by the time she climbed back to the surface of the lava field, more shaken and angry than hurt. It took her several moments to notice that no one was on the trail anymore. The tourists were milling around the parking lot, waving their arms as they talked.

  "What's going on?"

  "I told you that nexus power frequently has physical manifestations." Raven was retying the cord around the medicine bag's neck.

  She glared at him, then started back to the parking lot.

  "Did you feel it! Biggest I ever—"

  "Thought it would knock me right off my feet," an elderly woman was saying. "Would have, if I hadn't had my walking stick."

  "I wonder if it did any damage."

  "I wonder how big it was, on the Richter scale. Must have been at least a two."

  Kelsa stared at the chattering crowd. Then she turned and waited for Raven. He was only a moment behind her.

  "There was an earthquake? While we were in the cave? Why didn't I feel it?"

  "You more than felt it." He took her arm and led her over to a picnic table. "Sit down. You're still pale."

  "Did I ... Did we ... You're kidding!"

  "I doubt it did much damage," Raven said. "Healing magic almost never does."

  "But that's crazy!"

  "You know, one of the main symptoms of crazy is denying or ignoring what your senses perceive. You can hardly deny you perceived that."

  She couldn't deny it. Any more than she could deny she'd seen him shapeshift. Which meant...

  "I could heal the tree plague? For real?"

  "Not heal it," Raven admitted. "That will take a lot of people doing the same thing you're doing all over the planet."

  "Is that what the other shapeshifters are doing?" Kelsa asked curiously. She had a lot of questions about shapeshifters, and he'd evaded most of them.

  "No," Raven told her. "This is our first attempt. In fact, this is the first proof we've had that humans can heal the leys at all! But if you can strengthen and open this ley, all along its length, when the plague reaches the forests of the Northwest it will stop. And then, maybe, we can start pushing it back. If you succeed, your scientists will probably claim the bacterium couldn't survive outside the tropics. But if this ley isn't healed, strengthened, if the power doesn't flow along it like it does now in the nexus point you just blew open, then that plague will move out of the tropics."

  "So." He held out the medicine pouch, dangling from the cord around his fingers. "For the final time, Kelsa Phillips, will you take up Atahalne's quest and finish the healing he started?"

  She didn't have enough money to travel to Alaska. She didn't have time to get there and back before her mother missed her. She was only fifteen...

  "Yes." Kelsa took the medicine bag and hung it around her neck once more. It felt right there. "But first, you're going to answer some questions."

  CHAPTER 5

  IT WASN'T TILL AFTER LUNCH that Kelsa set out for the Sawtooth Mountains. She was getting tired of peanut butter.

  She thought Raven had genuinely tried to explain the exact nature of the leys. The problem was, the leys weren't an exact sort of thing.

  "How much do you know about acupuncture?" he'd asked.

  She'd blinked in surprise. "Not a lot. There are currents of energy in the human body. They've photographed them, you know. Just eight years ago, on a full-spectrum electromagnetic scanner."

  He looked startled. "They can see chi now?"

  "If they use the right scanner they can," Kelsa confirmed. "They still don't know why stimulating particular points ... Oh."

  "Exactly," Raven said. "What you're doing with the leys is planetary acupuncture."

  That almost made sense, sort of. But when she'd asked him where the next nexus was, the analogy fell apart. Acupuncture points were always in the same place, and the nexuses...

  "It's sort of like plumbing." Raven gestured with half a peanut-butter cracker. "A clog can occur anywhere in the pipe, and the flow through the pipe is weakened. Clogs might be more likely to occur where the pipe bends or there's a valve or something, but they can happen anywhere. And sometimes running a lot of water through the pipe is enough to ease the constriction, but sometimes, like here, you have to be right on top of the clog and break it apart."

  Kelsa had grasped that, mostly, though she didn't like hearing that he couldn't tell her where all the nexuses would be, or even how many there were. His best guess was a vague "certainly fewer than a dozen." Between Craters and the end of the ley. In Alaska.

  "I can call Mother and ask if I can stay with Aunt Sarabeth a few more weeks," Kelsa told him. "I think she'll agree. And if I call home on a regular basis, Mom probably won't call my aunt."

  In fact, her mother would be as glad to have Kelsa out of the house as Kelsa was to be gone. A small part of her heart ached at that thought, so she pushed it aside.

  "But how can I plan our route if I don't know where the nexus points are? And what are we going to do for money?"

  This was her third day on the road, and by her rough tally she'd spent over a hundred and fifty dollars.

  Raven's gaze shifted aside. "Why don't you leave that to me?"

  "Why don't you find some brainless groupie to complete your quest? I want to know where I'm going."

  The school counselor had told Kelsa that becoming an "overcontroller" was a natural response to the chaos and disruption caused by a death in the family. She said that as long as Kelsa recognized where her need to control her life and the people around her was coming from, she probably wouldn't become too big a pain in the ass.

  Her counselor had some good moments, but Kelsa wasn't about to let someone else take control of her life right now. Especially not someone whose handsome dark eyes weren't meeting hers.

  "I can tell you roughly where the next nexus will be," he said. "It's somewhere around Flathead Lake."

  Kelsa had never been that far north. "That's in Montana, isn't it?" She unclipped her father's ... her new com pod and brought up a road map. His screen was bigger than hers had been, but not by much, which was why people used boards for detailed work. "We'll have to go back to I-15," she said. "But after that it's a straight shot—"

  "I want you to take a different road," Raven said. "Through the Sawtooth Mountains."

  Kelsa squinted at the small map. She could see that route, but...

  "It would keep us from backtracking, but it would probably take more time than just getting back on the highway."

  "I've been in the Sawtooths," Raven told her. "They're beautiful."

  Kelsa laid the com pod aside. "What aren't you telling me?"

  "Well, mostly, I want you to follow the Salmon River. It starts in the Sawtooths and runs right beside the road most of the way to Flathead Lake. By the time you get to its end you'd have a real affinity for the river, and you could call on water to open the next nexus."

  "Call on water? I thought the nexus here was an 'earth nexus.'
"

  "It was," said Raven. "This time. But the part I wasn't telling you is that I'm going to send you through the mountains on your own. If I fly by the shortest route, I should reach Flathead Lake around the same time you do."

  "And that way," Kelsa said slowly, "you wouldn't have to worry about the Idaho-Montana border. You do realize that I have to be granted government permission, which I don't have, to exit the U.S. and enter Canada? And that in Canada, as foreign nationals, they'll be checking our PIDs—which you don't have—all the time?"

  "I'll take care of it."

  Kelsa had serious doubts about that—and he still wasn't telling her everything. But short of quitting the quest and walking away there wasn't much she could do about it. And she couldn't quit.

  She'd seen pictures of the kill zone in the Amazon, not only in her father's journals but in d-vid on the news.

  The tall dead trunks were already decaying, because several other bacteria, which had burgeoned naturally in the wake of the first, were eating them away. In the heavy tropical rain it looked like the forest was melting, as if it had been sprayed with acid.

  She hadn't been able to stop the cancer that had killed her father. Faith healing wouldn't have worked. Nothing she could do would have saved him, no matter what her mother believed.

  If she could do something to stop this corrosive cancer from spreading through the world, she had to try.

  ***

  The flatlands before she reached the Sawtooths held grazing cattle, then turned to farmland. One of the farms she passed raised llamas, and the babies danced clumsily around their mothers like knitted puppets.

  Kelsa stopped at a flash station and topped up her charge before heading up into the Sawtooths—more expensive than an overnight charge, but a lot less time-consuming than stopping to spread out the solar sheets if she ran out of juice. Solar sheets that wouldn't have done any good today, anyway, since clouds were gathering over the peaks.

  The Sawtooths were beautiful: jagged volcanic crags with snowbanks on their highest slopes. It was spitting snow on Galena Pass, and Kelsa turned up the heat control in her biking jacket and pants. Those tempcontrols worked better than those in most of her coats because her father had paid for quality.

  "You may not need good tempcontrol outerwear often," he'd said. "But when you need it, you need it."

  Of course once she'd gone over the pass the sun came out, and she had to turn it all off and unzip for a while to let the fresh mountain air blow through.

  The Salmon River started as a tiny, chuckling creek. Kelsa wouldn't have noticed it if not for the sign on a bridge where the road crossed over. But as the sun sank and the road swerved gently down, more creeks and streams flowed in.

  By dusk the Salmon was a rushing cataract, huge by Utah standards, and the road ran right beside it down the valley it had carved.

  Kelsa found a fishermen's campground that didn't charge too much for a night's camping, and she pitched her tent there, falling asleep with the roar of the river in her ears.

  She was so tired of peanut butter that she splurged on breakfast in a small café near the campground—cheaper, when she wasn't feeding Raven. Whatever he really was, he ate like a teenage boy.

  She made up bits of river incantations as she rode down out of the mountains.

  Rolling water, carrying life with you. Carver of mountains.

  It was still fairly early when Kelsa reached the flatland and joined state road 93. The rocky, wooded slopes of the mountains gave way to volcanic soil, whose colors reminded her of the red-rock deserts of southern Utah, though these crumbling slopes were completely different geologically. It was still before lunchtime when the road emerged from the technicolor buttes, and the broad valley that held the town of Salmon opened up before her.

  In town, she discovered she'd come far enough north to catch up with spring. Lilacs and fruit trees that had stopped blooming weeks ago in Provo were in full blossom here.

  If she reached Alaska, when she reached Alaska, would she catch up with winter again? The prospect was both enchanting and scary.

  Kelsa stopped at a small grocery store and bought a stock of energy bars, protein sticks, and heat-in-can soup—though she knew from experience that she'd get tired of these foods even more quickly than she tired of peanut butter.

  The storage space on her bike was limited, but she added a couple of plastic-wrapped sandwiches for future meals and a premade salad for today's lunch. She was beginning to hunger for fresh food, and the lettuce in these grocery-store salads was less dubious than the ones they sold in flash centers.

  She got back onto 93 and went north toward the lake, with the Salmon River racing beside the road. Kelsa had ridden for half an hour and passed through the small town of North Fork, when she realized that the river looked much smaller.

  Were they pulling out water for the farms? But the Salmon now appeared to be running in the other direction, back toward town.

  You can follow the river all the way to Flathead Lake.

  Frowning uneasily, Kelsa turned her bike and rode back to North Fork.

  It was hard to follow a river through a town, even a river the size of the Salmon in a town that was relatively small. The streets followed their own straight grid, and the river kept swerving away from them.

  But soon she found the place where the main branch of the Salmon flowed out of town ... to the east, followed by a small county road.

  Did it curve through the hills and valleys and rejoin the main road later?

  Kelsa pulled off the road into a shaded glade, took out her com pod, and pulled up a map. The long straight rift that held the road leading to Flathead Lake certainly looked as if the Salmon flowed along it. There was even a note in very fine print that said the river she'd followed to the north was the Salmon. What was going on here?

  She closed the road map and went into the net. It took some wading through the data pools, but she finally came up with a river runner's map of Idaho and Montana. The river that ran along 93 north of town was the North Fork of the Salmon River. After this it continued flowing east, and then south through an area where there were no roads at all, and eventually it emptied into the Snake River near the Oregon border. It never even came close to Flathead Lake.

  Raven had lied to her. Lied about the river's course, at the very least. But something had happened at Craters of the Moon. Something that was neither a lie nor a crazed hallucination on her part. According to the news-net, that earthquake had scored a 2.7 on the Richter scale and been felt for hundreds of miles. And when reporters asked geologists why no one had predicted it, the geologists had been very defensive about how reliable their equipment usually was.

  He'd said he would meet her at Flathead Lake, so Kelsa decided to go there. And see what he had to say for himself. Then she would decide if—magic or no magic—she wanted to do something as big and crazy as biking to Alaska with a partner who lied.

  Back on 93, the Salmon grew smaller and smaller and then disappeared as the road climbed into the high mountains once more.

  The Montana-Idaho border station was at the top of Trail Pass, and Kelsa's fantasy of catching up with winter stopped looking so unlikely. Snowdrifts dripped, and meltwater ran down the ditches on either side of the road. The long white streaks of ski slopes decorated nearby peaks.

  Kelsa was so angry with Raven that she presented her PID and crossed the border with barely a thought for the record of her travels being created.

  It was only 4 p.m. when she saw the campground beside Bitterroot Creek, but the name struck her as appropriate and she was tired. She might have reached Flathead Lake before dark, but why should she put herself out to be on time for someone who lied to her?

  The next morning, still seething, she ate a leisurely breakfast of energy bars, and then she packed up and pulled out onto the road. It was midmorning by the time she came over a hill and around a bend, and Flathead Lake burst into view.

  Kelsa had grown up only a few
miles from the marshy shore of Utah Lake. Camping with her father, biking with him, hiking together—she'd seen dozens, maybe hundreds of mountain lakes. Flathead took her breath away.

  She could see only one end of it, for it stretched around a curve in the mountains that ringed it. Bluer than the sky, dotted with tiny tree-furred islands, it was the most beautiful lake she'd ever set eyes on.

  She was so busy gawking that she missed the scenic turnout, placed there to allow drivers to pull off and gawk at the lake. She turned the bike and rode back up the hill on the shoulder, parked at the turnoff, and then just sat and stared.

  When she'd finally looked her fill, Kelsa started downhill toward the lake. There had to be campgrounds there. In fact there were, but it took her the better part of the morning to find one that was state run, and therefore reasonably cheap.

  She was sitting on a picnic table, gazing over the shimmering water and eating a slightly stale sandwich, when she heard Raven walk up behind her.

  She didn't turn around.

  "You're later than I expected." The cretinous bastard had the gall to sound miffed. "Did something delay you?"

  "You might say that," Kelsa told him coldly. "You see, I was following the Salmon River. Like my partner told me to. Until it went in another direction entirely!"

  Her voice rose at the end, and Raven winced. He must have gotten his clothing off her bike, for he was decently dressed. He could carry his own clothes now too!

  "Sorry about that," he said. "I wanted you off the highway, and I thought following the river from its source sounded romantic."

  Kelsa met his gaze and held it. "Why did you want me off the highway? And if you spin me some carpo answer, I'm walking away from this right now."

  She could happily spend the next week here and make her way home with no one the wiser. At least until her mother and Aunt Sarabeth compared notes, and with any luck that wouldn't happen for a long time.

  She might even tell her mother the truth when she got home—well, part of the truth. She probably shouldn't be too self-righteous about lying. But she wasn't about to admit that to the slippery bastard in front of her. Not when she finally had him on the hook.