Trickster's Girl (The Raven Duet)

by Hilari Bell

"Human logic," Raven muttered, not quite under his breath. "No, don't explain. From what you say, if they want to keep their cargo safe, your bikers will take longer to cross the border than we did. And don't they need government permission too?"

  Kelsa shook her head. "The people who apply for legally homeless status are travelers. They usually get permission to cross all North American borders when they apply."

  Raven stared at her. "Then what good does the border station do?"

  "Well, it makes it possible for security forces to track the movements of suspects, and ... and other things."

  Raven shrugged. "But it will take the bikers longer?"

  "If they want to keep their drugs, it will. By several days. I think it would go against a lot of their instincts to leave those drugs behind."

  "So after we heal the next nexus, we'll have some time before they could catch up with us?"

  "Some," said Kelsa cautiously. "A few days at least." Assuming, of course, that the newscasts were accurate.

  "Good," said Raven. "Because I really need a bath."

  ***

  Since a hotel would demand PID cards when they booked a room, Raven was persuaded to settle for a shower in the next campground, which would be somewhere in Banff National Park. The craggy, ice-capped peaks with glacial blue streams running below were different from the uplift mountains Kelsa was used to, and so beautiful that she kept slowing the bike to stare. Raven seemed to enjoy them too—he didn't start nagging her to speed up till clouds began to gather among the peaks.

  Kelsa didn't realize they were approaching the provincial border till she saw the sign, LEAVING ALBERTA: WILD ROSE COUNTRY. Her heart rate accelerated, but she didn't stop the bike—there were cameras posted on the approach to any border station, watching for just that kind of suspicious behavior. She did slow down enough to talk to Raven.

  "What are we going to do? You didn't warn me about a border station! In the middle of a national park? They'll run my PID card, and I'm here illegally, and you don't have one!"

  "Don't worry about it," Raven told her. "Just keep driving."

  "But there's no way they won't..."

  The next sign said WELCOME TO BRITISH COLUMBIA: THE BEST PLACE ON EARTH. Kelsa drove several hundred more yards, then pulled off at the widened patch of asphalt where drivers could check their brakes.

  She turned in the bike saddle and looked at the back of the welcome sign. It said LEAVING BRITISH COLUMBIA: THE BEST PLACE ON EARTH.

  "But ... where's the border station? Where's the scanner, the guards, the ... the security?"

  "Maybe," said Raven, "the Canadians didn't want to waste their money on something that doesn't seem to stop either terrorists or crime."

  "But ... but..."

  Kelsa half expected the border station to appear around the next curve of the road, or the next. She'd ridden five miles, or in the Canadian system about eight kilometers, before she was forced to accept that there was no border station. It seemed even more alien than seeing "100" posted on a speed-limit sign.

  The clouds were looming heavily when they reached the tourist town of Lake Louise, and Kelsa had only one set of rain gear.

  "You could shapeshift and keep warm that way." But she said it reluctantly. Now that she knew what his enemies were capable of, Kelsa wanted him behind her, in human form, able to come to her defense at a moment's notice.

  "I've got a better idea," Raven told her. "Why don't we get that shower and go shopping?"

  Kelsa hesitated. Paying their way into the park, plus the fee for a night's camping, had almost exhausted her debit account. On the other hand, if it was raining tomorrow, all the thermal knit she could loan him wouldn't keep him warm on the bike.

  "OK. But it'll have to be cheap clothes. Off the sale rack."

  "Yes, madam." A mischievous flash in the dark eyes negated the meek voice.

  Kelsa sighed.

  ***

  They had to shower one at a time because Raven had to borrow her account card to pay the dollar it cost to turn on the water. Kelsa didn't mind waiting. An amazingly tame herd of elk was grazing in the meadow next to the shower building, to the delight of all the passing campers in this large, crowded campground. There were even more tourists here than in Craters, but if Kelsa got off on one of the lonelier trails she could probably find a place to work her healing without an audience.

  If the power of the nexus manifested itself in physical beauty, the one under this park must be incredible.

  By the time they rode into the parking lot that served the cluster of shops, it was raining in earnest, and it had gotten cold enough to make Raven's point about both of them needing tempcontrol clothes.

  Eyeing the glass and flowstone buildings, Kelsa had some misgivings about the state of her debit account. By her loose tally, she had about a hundred dollars left.

  "The sale rack," she said, following Raven into the store. "The cheapest possible sale rack."

  "Don't worry about it," he said. "I'll take care of that. Why don't you see where we can get something warm for dinner?"

  What did he plan to do? Mesmerize the sales clerk into thinking he'd paid? That might work on the clerk, but it wouldn't work on the store's security cameras. Kelsa probably had enough money to pay for a cheap bike suit. Barely.

  She wasn't surprised to see him go straight to one of the most expensive brands and pull a jacket off the rack.

  Bike suits were designed to be worn over other clothing, so he didn't have to go to a dressing room. And the moment he approached that rack a clerk darted over to assist, so Kelsa couldn't intervene. Let him embarrass himself at the checkout counter, she thought grimly. Maybe he'd learn to listen to the person who understood how things worked in the twenty-first century.

  She had to admit, the sleek black bike gear suited him.

  She winced when he went over to the boots section and chose a pair to go with his outfit, but if he was going to blow it, he might as well blow it big. She was pretty sure he wasn't carrying enough to make it grand theft when he finally approached the counter—and pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills so thick it made the clerk blink.

  Most people paid with account cards these days, but a few used cash. The clerk took the money—four bills, Kelsa was shocked to see, with still more of them in his hand—and gave him his change without comment.

  Raven was out on the sidewalk headed for a nearby restaurant when Kelsa recovered her wits and caught up with him.

  "Where did you get that?" She kept her voice low and chose her words carefully. A lot of people had decided to spend the rainy evening shopping.

  "I made it." His dark eyes danced. "How else does one get money?"

  Kelsa looked around the crowded sidewalk and didn't dare accuse him of magical counterfeiting. Not here. Not now.

  Raven treated her to the most expensive meal she'd had on this trip. She couldn't help but enjoy the change from energy bars and peanut butter, despite her ethical qualms.

  She waited till they'd reached the privacy of her tent, where the pattering rain assured her that no one strolling past their camp would overhear, before she confronted him.

  "It's fake, isn't it? All that money you spent."

  "Of course. But the change people gave me is real. I was thinking we could start spending that, and spare your debit account for a while."

  Kelsa felt her face grow cold as the blood drained out of it. "I don't care how good it is, there are dozens of ways, technical ways, to detect counterfeit money—and track it back! When they catch you ... Counterfeiters spend years in prison!"

  Could she convince them she hadn't known the money was fake? She hadn't spent any of it herself, but...

  "Relax." Raven was spreading his blanket. "They'd have to have the money in order to prove counterfeiting, and those bills will probably turn to dust before anyone gets around to examining them."

  A wisp of memory from her research on trickster spirits sprang into Kelsa's mind. "You mean it will vanish,
like ... fairy gold?" It sounded ridiculous, but Raven nodded.

  "Exactly like that, though I'm surprised that term made it to this side of the ocean."

  "How does an Indian spirit know about leprechaun stories?"

  He stopped making his bed to look at her. "I'd have thought you'd have figured that out. Or maybe not. This is pretty new to you."

  "Figured what out?"

  "The reason I'm Raven here, along this ley, is because for thousands of years the humans who lived here thought of me as Raven. So that's the shape the ley's power wants me to take, which means it requires far less power to assume and maintain. Along other leys, I'd take other forms."

  "Wait. Are you telling me that if we were in Ireland you'd be a ... a leprechaun?"

  "I'd be Leprechaun," he corrected. "There is ever only one of me."

  Kelsa stared at him, handsome and solid, as real as she was, in the fiber-reinforced bike gear from which he'd just removed the tags. "In a little green coat, with a pipe. Top o' the mornin' to ya."

  He broke into laughter, a deep sincere laugh she'd never heard from him before. "Of course not. That's an image your advertisers created. Would you like to see the original?"

  He started to change before she could find her voice to answer, and she watched as he shrank, his clothes falling away. The change from one human form to another wasn't nearly as horrifying, and she kept her eyes on him as his nose grew long and sharp, his brows thick and bushy.

  When the transformation was finished he stood about three feet high, clad in something that looked like a coarse sack, snugged around his skinny body by a wide leather belt. His feet were bare and muddy, and though he was no larger than a child, his face was that of a man in middle age, lined and forbidding.

  "How weird." Goose bumps were popping out on Kelsa's arms.

  Raven, Leprechaun, cast her a sardonic glance and said something in a language both liquid and harsh, which she didn't recognize.

  "Is that Gaelic? What does it mean?"

  This other version of Raven looked ... old. Ancient and alien. How many versions of him were there? Almost every mythos in the world had a trickster spirit in it.

  "I said, 'Don't go spending fairy gold, girl, or they'll be looking for you when it vanishes.'"

  Even his accent was different. Not the over-the-top brogue of the cartoon leprechaun, but something like a real Irish accent, only rougher, thicker.

  He picked up his jacket and pants and pulled them on, holding them up as he changed again, expanding back into them, becoming the boy she knew.

  "Hey! Why did you have clothes when you shifted just then? Leprechaun clothes."

  He waited till the change finished before he answered.

  "I can create clothes if I have to, but it takes a lot more power than changing my living shape, and power to maintain them. But a living form will maintain itself, just like your own body does."

  He rubbed his face as if suddenly tired, pulled off his boots, and rolled into his blanket.

  Kelsa was still struggling with this new information. "So you can shapeshift nonliving things, like money, but once the power that maintains it wears off, it turns back into leaves or whatever."

  "That's right. Except once you've disrupted their molecular state to that extent things don't change back, they just disintegrate. In a few days nothing will be left of those bills but dust, and some bank clerk will come up short and blame it on an accounting error. They'll have no idea where the error came from, and no one will even be scolded for it—so stop worrying about counterfeiting and go to sleep. You've got a healing to do tomorrow."

  He turned onto his side, away from her, and Kelsa slowly lay down beside him. "Disrupting molecular structures. You said what you did was magic."

  "You say potayto, I say potahto. Get some sleep."

  Easy for him to say. The leprechaun's wrinkled face had brought home to her that he really wasn't a boy—or even human—in a way that shifting into animal form hadn't. And magic might be a convenient label for what he did, but if it really was some form of alien physics ... Aliens, enemy aliens, in her world, helping humanity destroy itself. It seemed more real to her now.

  But human or not, he was her only chance to heal the leys. Humanity's only chance for survival? Remembering his flashing, untrustworthy smile, that thought made her blood run cold. But he had rescued her. He was trying to help, whatever he might be. Eventually, the sound of his even breathing lulled her into sleep.

  ***

  It was still drizzling the next morning. They had to put the tent away wet, which might make it moldy eventually, but Raven didn't want to dry it, wasting energy he might need later. With tempcontrol bike gear to keep them warm and dry, the rain wasn't much of a hardship, though Kelsa was sorry when the low clouds obscured her view of the towering peaks.

  The road that ran through Banff and into Jasper National Park was beautiful, even in the rain. For the most part it followed the chalky glacial rivers, and any break in the clouds revealed jagged mountains that took Kelsa's breath away.

  Despite the distraction of a herd of bighorn sheep grazing right beside the road, they soon found themselves climbing up, mile after mile, into the peaks that held the ranger station that celebrated the Columbia Icefield.

  "This is getting old," said Kelsa, looking at the crowded parking lot. "Are there any nexuses that aren't packed with tourists?"

  "Don't worry," Raven told her. "There won't be nearly that many out on the ice. According to the park brochure, they only allow people to go onto the glacier from the buses the rangers run, but once we get up there we can wander off by ourselves. As long as they can't hear what you say, there's nothing for anyone to see except you dropping a pinch of dust. They won't even see that if you're careful."

  "Unless the healing triggers an avalanche or something and kills us all."

  But when they went into the building to sign up for the glacier bus, the clerk told them no buses were running that day. "The rain makes the ice too slippery," she said, with the firm smile of someone who'd been disappointing tourists all day. "Liability issues. You understand."

  Kelsa did, but Raven was scowling. "Isn't there any way we could see the glacier up close? From a trail, or something?"

  "Certainly," the clerk said. "There's a trail to the base of the glacier from this road here." She pulled out a map and showed them. "You can't go out on the ice, but you can go right up to it."

  "Thanks." Raven turned to go. "That'll do."

  "But it's raining," Kelsa told him. "Couldn't we do this another day? There are lots of glaciers in Alaska."

  "There are," said Raven. "But we have to heal this one."

  Kelsa frowned. "You said any lake would do. As long as it was the lake that was the essence of 'lake-liness' for me, any lake would work."

  "But if you'll remember"—Raven was steering her toward the exit—"not just any cave would do. The Columbia Icefield carved the spine of this continent, and its meltwater flows into three oceans. This is the best glacier by far for the calling of ice. You don't have to stand on it. As long as you can drop the dust on it and touch it, reach out to it, you'll be fine."

  "Three oceans? The Atlantic, the Pacific...?"

  "And the Arctic," said Raven. "Where we're going."

  ***

  By the time they reached the parking lot below the glacier, arctic was beginning to feel like the right adjective.

  They were high in the mountains now, and between the altitude, the rain, and the great ice floe above them, it was cold. Kelsa turned up her tempcontrols, then pulled out her therma knit and wrapped the sleeves around her head and ears.

  "That looks ridiculous," Raven told her.

  "At least I'm warm," Kelsa retorted. When he was in this form, it was almost impossible to think of him as anything but the boy he appeared to be. Surely he remained himself inside, whatever face he wore. "Maybe you could take some underwear and wrap it—"

  He pulled her out of the parking lot an
d up the trail without further ado. Having looked at the map in the ranger station, Kelsa was not surprised that the trail was all uphill, but its steepness and the altitude took her breath away.

  The fine-ground glacial silt made for slippery mud where it coated the rocks, and the patches of hard-packed snow, with melting slush over the surface, were even more treacherous. Paths across the snowbanks had been carved by the feet of dozens of chattering tourists, who wanted to see the glacier up-close despite the persistent drizzle.

  "This rain." Kelsa gestured to the ice field that filled the valley above them, its higher reaches vanishing into the mist. "Is there any chance your enemies sent it to keep us from reaching the glacier?"

  Raven's brow creased in a thoughtful frown. "It's not impossible. They know as well as I do that this is a place of far-reaching power, and tinkering with weather systems just a little doesn't take much out of the ley. Making the weather do something completely unnatural, like a blizzard in the desert in July, would be different. But this kind of rain is so normal here that it's probably normal rain, and not my enemies at all. Don't be paranoid."

  Kelsa sighed.

  Higher and higher they went. Kelsa tried to think of words to summon up the essence of a glacier, but aside from cold nothing came to her. Several panting minutes later she reached the top of the slope. The glacier loomed before her, a rolling wall of white ... with a line of orange plastic back-off tape stretched about twenty feet in front of it. A smiling female ranger was posted there to enforce order.

  "Carp," she muttered. "I can't reach it after all."

  "The clerk said we could go right up to it," Raven protested.

  "This is right up to it, in glacier terms. If we try to cross that tape, the ranger will stop us."

  It was a lower-tech barrier than Mr. Stattler's rabbit fence, but the simple presence of a human guard made it far more effective. Even if Kelsa was prepared to dart past the woman and fling the dust at the glacier, it wouldn't work. She needed to connect with the glacier before she could call it. And she wasn't in the mood for healing.

  "We can't," she said. "We'll have to find some other ice field. There are plenty of glaciers in Alas—"