by Hilari Bell
I had a terrible nightmare—a little old lady slapped me. It wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to say to an attractive girl. And the old woman hadn’t found him. And the football players were convinced that he didn’t have the pouch.
And after all, they were only dreams.
He still hadn’t made up his mind when he went downstairs and found Raven talking to his parents.
“What are . . . Ah, I see you’ve all met.”
“I said first thing this morning,” Raven reminded him. “It’s almost nine. But your parents were kind enough to offer me breakfast.”
“We like meeting Jase’s friends,” his mother told her.
“Even if they’re still in the ‘haven’t made up my mind what to do with myself’ club,” his father added. “Of which Jase is a charter member.”
But the look he gave Jase had less to do with criticism and more to do with wow!
His father was in love with his mother, and Jase knew he’d never look seriously at a girl Raven’s age. But a man would have to be dead not to appreciate her.
How dare she introduce herself to his parents, without asking him first?
“Let me grab a heat-go sandwich, and we’ll get out of here,” Jase said.
“Great. Your mother was kind enough to pack lunch for us.”
Raven and his mother exchanged a look he couldn’t read, but he didn’t think it meant wow.
“Raven tells us she’s going to teach you to appreciate nature,” his mother said. “I warned her it was likely to be an uphill fight—you’re worse than your father! But I certainly wish her luck.”
Was “let’s start to change the guy right now” a female version of wow? Jase doubted it.
“I won’t give up,” Raven promised. “Not if it kills both of us.”
His parents laughed.
Jase knew better.
***
“You should have asked me, before you showed yourself to my parents.” Jase pulled the Tesla out of the driveway.
“If I’d asked, what would you have said?”
“No! I don’t want my parents involved in this.”
“That’s why I didn’t ask. It was interesting to meet your parents.”
Jase turned onto the street. He didn’t want to discuss his family.
“Where to?” he asked. “We’ve already been to the most boring part of the state. How about doing dangerous next? Spelunking in glacier crevasses, maybe?”
Raven grinned. “You’re going to learn to appreciate nature, just like I told your mother.”
Jase snorted.
“Seriously. Nature is part of everyone’s heritage. Maybe you should get closer to yours.”
“That’s what my grandfather says. I attribute every bee sting and sprained ankle I ever had to my heritage.”
She laughed. “Then let’s start with something safer. The Ananut are matrilineal, right? What’s your mother’s mother’s last name?”
“Harrigan,” Jase said dryly.
“You think the Irish don’t appreciate nature?”
“I’ll have to turn at the stop sign,” Jase pointed out. “It would be nice to know where I’m going.”
“All right.” Her expression shifted into serious. “Is there someplace, anyplace at all, where you feel at peace in nature? Someplace that makes your soul feel open and still.”
Jase started to frame a crack about nightclubs, and the wildlife therein, but something in her face stopped him. The sooner she gave up on him, the sooner he’d get his car back.
“There’s . . . I’ve been to Potter Marsh on school field trips. It’s OK.”
He actually thought it was beautiful, but surrounded by the spectacular scenery of Alaska, he feared that small, home-made marsh would seem pretty tame.
“It’s quiet,” he added. “Even with tourists around. And they’ll be there, on a Sunday.”
“That’s where we’re going,” Raven said firmly. “Potter Marsh.”
On Sunday most of the traffic was headed into the city, but Potter Marsh was so close to Anchorage that it hardly mattered. Maybe afterward they could go appreciate nature farther down the road to the south. There was plenty of nature there, but also some nice restaurants and clubs. The Kenai Peninsula was Anchorage’s wilderness playground.
Potter Marsh ran beside the road, but the turnoff to the parking lot came before you could see it. Jase pulled the Tesla out of the traffic, and within moments he had Raven on the boardwalk and through the trees, and the marsh spread out before them.
It was kind of lame, Jase supposed. But a cool breeze stirred the long grass, turning it from green to silver in sweeping waves. The dark water, as they stepped along the walkway above it, was full of salmon fry, from big-trout size to toothpick. Yellow butterflies perched on the deck when they weren’t in flight.
“This wasn’t here before.” Raven stared at the marsh in astonishment.
“Before what? It was created when they built the railroad,” Jase told her. “They changed the grade or something and ended up with this really big puddle, and decided to turn it into a wetland instead of draining it. So it’s almost two centuries old. But . . . the quiet’s so loud, you can hear it over the highway noise.”
He felt stupid the moment he said it, but she nodded. “You’re right. Now go on. Tell me what you see here. What makes this place what it is.”
A Canada goose with a flotilla of goslings paddled by as Jase talked. A swallow, perched on a rail, let the tourists with their flashing com pods get amazingly close before it flew.
“And those yellow lilies,” Jase finished. “They grow in ponds all over Alaska. They look like they’d smell sweet, but I got close to one once when my grandfather made . . . took me fishing. They don’t have any scent, except maybe a bit resiny. And the one I grabbed was full of ants.”
“Then there’s something sweet about them,” Raven said, “whether you can sense it or not. But you’re right about this place—you can feel the life in it. You can, can’t you?”
Jase could, though he’d never put it into words before. He nodded.
“Then it’s time to go back,” she said. “And give the taiga another try.”
***
“I was hoping we could go south today,” Jase grumbled as they drove back down Highway 1. Between the chill of the breeze and the clouds scudding across the sky, he’d decided to keep the top up. “Or maybe turn north this time, toward Denali. Denali’s got lots of nature—trees and things.” And there were good restaurants there as well, catering to the tourists. “Couldn’t we do this healing thing in Denali?”
Raven sighed. “You should be glad you’ve got me to walk you through this. Remember me talking about the ley’s terminal node? The place where all its power spirals in, and is cleaned and amplified?”
Jase frowned. “Denali’s the terminal node? Then why don’t we just do the healing thing there? If it’s that big and important, maybe we wouldn’t have to do the smaller places.”
He was looking at the road then, but he could feel Raven wince.
“If you could connect with the ley at Denali, and dropped the catalyst there, one of two things would probably happen. The first is that it would simply ignore you, and not react at all.”
“Then why don’t we—”
“The second,” said Raven grimly, “is that every volcano on the Pacific Rim would erupt. Or something equally devastating. When you clear a nexus you release a lot of power. Igniting a node . . .” She shuddered.
“OK, no nodes,” Jase said. “You’re the expert.”
“Remember that,” said Raven. “But you can’t tell me you don’t sense . . . Did you really think Denali was just a mountain? Or Niagara just a waterfall?”
“I’ve never seen Niagara Falls,” Jase said. “Though Mother says it’s spectacular. But Denali’s the tallest mountain in North America. And it starts just a few hundred feet above sea level, so that’s even more impressive. It’s so high it makes its own weather
, which is why you hardly ever see the peaks. It—”
“Those are facts,” said Raven. “What’s the truth? What does your soul know about Denali?”
Jase thought about it. Then he tried to find the words, and to his own surprise they came.
“Denali is like thunder.”
“Well,” said Raven. “At least you’re not totally deaf.”
They seemed to reach the pullout more quickly today. The top was already up, and within moments Jase was following Raven through the trees. At least the icky woods cut the wind, so he wasn’t shivering when they reached the same drab grove where he’d failed so abysmally the last time.
“Couldn’t we try this somewhere else?” he asked. “Like, a fresh start. Wouldn’t that help?”
“No,” said Raven. “I need to prove to you that you can do this, so you’ll know how to do it anywhere on the ley. The next place I want you to heal is the sea along the south coast. How will you do that if you don’t know that you can reach out to the ley through all living nature, not just the things you’re comfortable with?”
“I get seasick,” Jase said. “What’s the last ley? The inside of a live volcano?”
“It’s not the last ley,” said Raven. “It’s the last natural system on the ley, and it’s air. You could probably do that almost anywhere near the ley, since air is so fluid. But reaching it will be harder for you than connecting with something you can see and touch, so regard this as an exercise. Sit down, and look at this place with the same eyes you used in Potter Marsh. Listen with the ears that heard Denali’s thunder. And tell me about this place.”
Brown moss and icky trees.
“But this is a swamp!”
“And the difference between a swamp and a wetland is?”
“A wetland is full of life,” Jase said. “This is all . . .”
He looked at a nearby black spruce. Now that he was examining it up close, it was still scrawny and scraggly, but the fat green fingers of needles on the few branches it had didn’t look stressed or . . . unhappy.
“No salmon fry here.” Jase went to the edge of a boggy patch to check, and there were no salmon fry—but the water was clear as crystal over the muddy bottom. Glossy black dragonflies, and a few iridescent blue ones, buzzed over the pond. He heard the chirp and twitter of songbirds, and the booming toy-horn honk of a tree frog.
Jase sat on a thick clump of moss, and for the first time in his life looked at the moss around him. It was brown, but it wasn’t dead. Its feathery fronds, soft under his fingers, had a golden undertone. And it didn’t choke out the other plants. He saw dozens of different leafy things, and the whole moss bed was studded with flowers, white and yellow, and tiny, fragile pink ones.
“I thought this was a sickly place.” His voice was soft with astonishment. “I mean, stuck down in the bog and all. But it’s so . . . alive.”
“Bogs are full of life. The taiga is one of the strangest, harshest ecosystems in the world. The reason it’s so wet is because it rests on solid ice—water can’t seep away. And it has to burn before it can grow. Black spruce seeds won’t germinate without fire. That damp moss you’re sitting on is incredibly flammable.”
The tree frog honked again, and Jase let that subtle, fragile sense of life seep into him, just like dampness from the bog beside him seeped into the moss.
“It hums,” he said. “Like the motor in my car.”
Raven rolled her eyes. “What is it with guys and cars? No, don’t answer that. Focus on that hum, how alive, how right it feels. Now, take a pinch of dust, cast it over the taiga, and say the words that will spark its healing.”
“But it’s not sick.” He knew that now, bone deep.
“Not here,” said Raven. “But in other places it is. And if you can do this, all those damaged places can be made well, like this one.”
That sounded good to Jase. He held on to the awareness of life around him as he untied the knot and opened the pouch. His car was in this dust, somehow. An unknown man, someone that Kelsa girl had cared about, was here. And so was the magic of a shaman, who had died two hundred years ago so that Jase could do this.
“What are the words?” he asked. “What do I say?”
“It’s your magic,” said Raven. “Say what’s in your heart.”
Jase looked over the taiga. It wasn’t ugly anymore.
“Carp, I hope this works.”
He scattered a generous pinch of the dust over the bog, the moss, and the nearest tree.
For a moment it felt like everything around him held its breath. Then the tree branches thrashed and the leafy things rustled as if a great wind had swept over them, though there was no wind.
The surge of power that slammed through Jase a second later was so strong it knocked him off the tussock and into the bog.
The top few inches of water were warm from the intermittent sun; the rest felt as cold as the ice beneath it.
“Carp!” Jase floundered back onto dry land and looked down at the mud on his soaked clothing and boots. Then he looked at Raven, who was lying on her side screaming with laughter.
He was too happy to care. “Hey! That worked, didn’t it? I did magic!”
“So you did.” Her voice was still unsteady, but she pulled herself together and sat up, hands clasped around her knees. “Your incantation was a bit . . . original, but it worked! Which is all that matters. Come on, let’s get you back to the car before you freeze.”
***
It would be late evening by the time they got back to Anchorage, but after he’d exchanged his wet clothes for dry rain gear, and the car’s heater had kicked in, Jase didn’t care.
“I did it! I did magic! Myself!”
“Yes.” Raven sounded more serious than Jase thought the situation called for. “But the bad news is that my enemies will have felt the change in the ley as clearly as you and I did. Which means we have to do the next two healings before they can find you. Could you not go to school tomorrow?”
“If I have to,” Jase said. “But it took you a week to find me in the first place, and you knew what the pouch felt like. Don’t we have a few days? You said we’re doing the seacoast next? I’ll be driving one of Dad’s clients back to the border on Tuesday, and we could drop down to Valdez after.”
The football players were scary, but they hadn’t struck him as the best and brightest. Remembering the old woman’s furious face, they might be the lesser evil. But she was just a dream. And she’d never gotten his address. It was that burning contempt that made her so terrifying.
“Do the rest of your people really hate us so much they’d damage their own world just to destroy us?” Jase asked. “Wouldn’t letting us heal the leys make a lot more sense?”
“That’s what I keep saying,” Raven told him. “And Frog People and Goose Woman agree with me. If we can heal just this one ley, the neutrals will come over to our side. Some of them, anyway. The neutrals are the ones who set the rules for this fight. Including that we all have to use the things of this world, human tools, human magic, to accomplish our goals.
“Which is why a human has to do the healing,” she went on. “But it’s also why they can’t just waltz in and kill you themselves.”
“They can’t kill me? Nobody told the football player with the knife that!”
“He wouldn’t have killed you,” Raven said. “They bent the rules just by threatening you, directly, because they aren’t allowed to take the pouch from you by force or magic. They were trying to trick you into handing it over, and thank goodness you were too smart to fall for it!”
A warm glow started in Jase’s heart.
“Unfortunately,” Raven went on, “they’re a lot more adept at using human tools than I thought they’d be. Are you sure you can’t get out of school tomorrow?”
“How long do you think it will take them to find the pouch now?” Jase asked. “Seriously.”
She hesitated. “I honestly don’t know. They’ve already found you once. It really
depends on how you . . . smelled to them, for want of a better word, and how well that matches the scent of you now in the energy signature.”
“They weren’t sniffing me.” But he knew she meant something other than scent, and went on quickly, “I was panicking then. I probably feel pretty different now. Can’t we wait just one day? The principal OKs those things, as long as I review vids of all the classes I miss. I could meet you in Valdez Tuesday evening and make it home late Wednesday night. As long as I’m in school Thursday, my parents won’t care.”
And if they should happen to sign on to Travelnet and check the GPS log of the car’s movements, Jase would tell them he’d planned to pay a quick visit to his grandparents and then changed his mind. They wouldn’t hold that against him.
And speaking of holding grudges . . .
“I forgive you,” said Jase, “for hexing my car. And . . .”
His face was hot.
“I can’t unhex it,” Raven told him. “The only way to get your car back is to heal the ley.”
“I’m OK with that, now. So we can wait for a day?”
“Probably.” She sounded pretty reluctant.
But if the football players weren’t allowed to beat him up, and the old woman hadn’t even found him, how much could one more day hurt? If he ditched school, his father wouldn’t let him drive Mr. Hillyard back to the border. If he stopped being a reliable driver, the firm would stop hiring him—and technically, the Tesla still belonged to them.
“You can meet me in the parking lot after school,” Jase said. “And protect me from the bad guys. I still don’t get why they won’t leave us alone to heal stuff. That’s what they want in the end, anyway!”
Raven sighed. “They say that the more your technology advances, the more power you have to destroy. That even if you made some progress lately, eventually you’ll do something so terrible we won’t be able to bring the leys back. So it’s better to stop you now. That once you’re gone, we can come in and heal the leys ourselves, and this time they’ll stay clean.”
“Like”—Jase groped for an analogy—“like a grain silo infested with rats. You might bring in an exterminator, poison them all, even though the grain in the silo will have to be discarded. Sacrificing one harvest, so the grain stored there in the future will be all right.”
