“She had a heart attack?” I lost the battle and my jaw fell somewhere around my ribs. “And the coven never noticed anything was wrong?” To be fair, I wasn’t sure how I would tell if someone’s heart was defective, so maybe I couldn’t blame the coven. “Why didn’t you tell them? Magic can do that to somebody?”
“Magic,” Virissong said, rather sternly, “has its price, just as everything else does. It can become as much a burden as physical labor, with the same results.”
Having been pleased only minutes earlier about my lack of sleep deprivation, I felt a little chastised. I should’ve known that, or at least put it together on my own. Virissong gave me a brief understanding smile, then added, “I did try to warn Faye. I gathered they were close. But as much as I want to, my ability to communicate with those in the Middle World is limited. She may never have heard my warning.”
I thought of Faye’s quivering sorrow and anger over Cassie’s death, and nodded. “Guess not.”
“As to the other, though. As to my purpose.” Virissong folded himself down suddenly, with much the same grace Judy had displayed when she arrived in my garden, and gestured for me to do the same. My shoulder brushed the shield as I sat, glimmers wavering around the circle. Judy sat behind me, half-visible from the corner of my eye. The sun crept higher in the sky, and no one said anything. Just before my patience gave out, Virissong lifted his head and began to speak, more to the too-close horizon than to me.
“I was born, as men reckon it, some three thousand years ago, south of what you now call Seattle.”
I refrained from comment on his grasp of colloquial English in favor of listening, and he gave me a look like he’d heard what I was thinking.
“Things were different then. Not perfect, as some people of your age want to believe, but different.” He saw the wryness of my smile and gave me a quick grin in return. “My people were generally at peace, both with each other and with the world. But there came a time of great darkness and great coldness. We starved and grew cold and died, and nothing we did seemed to appease our gods and ancestors. We became desperate. We made offerings of everything—what little we had, and still our people died and froze and starved. I was very young then, a youth of less than twenty summers.”
He hesitated, then put out his hand toward me. “Are you sure you will not cross the power circle, Joanne Walker? If I could take your hand I could show you these things, rather than only tell them.”
I looked at Judy. Her forehead wrinkled with uncertainty and she shook her head. “The decision isn’t one I can make for you, Joanne. I can’t forbid you to take risks.”
“Do you think it would help?” I asked. “To be able to see it?”
“It might,” she said reluctantly. “It’s always easier to believe, when you’ve seen.”
I thought of the black-eyed Horse spirit, ordering me to try, and curled my fingernails against my palm. The healed skin opened again, easily. I put my hand against the barrier, bringing the shield down with a shudder. Virissong’s eyes glittered. “Thank you,” he said. “Your trust will not go unforgotten.”
“I hope it goes unregretted, too,” I said, and put my bloody hand in his.
Hunger bit through my belly like a knife, embarrassingly sharp. Part of me knew I had to have eaten recently: otherwise the need for food would have been reduced to a dull ache, ignorable. It was only after a feast that the famine struck so hard. Another part of me knew my twenty-first century self had never known the real meaning of the word “starving,” and that was where the embarrassment came from. I knew, back home and safe in my own time and body, that I’d still claim to be starving from time to time.
The cold cut in then, daggers slicing through the tough, warm leathers I wore, ignoring the flesh and setting up shop in my bones. I looked to my left, chill stiffening my neck. Virissong sat beside me, young and handsome and with his jaw thrust out like a petulant child’s.
“They are wrong, Nakaytah,” he said. The body I was in reached its hand out and put it on his arm. Apparently I was Nakaytah. Good to know.
“They’re the elders, beloved,” I replied. “You must trust them.”
“No! It isn’t right that we starve and freeze and do nothing. I’ve found a way,” he said, suddenly eager, and turned to me. He wasn’t, I realized, all that handsome after all. His features were lighted by a fierce zealotry, and that gave the wide bones of his face and the darkness of his eyes a compulsion that was easily mistaken for good looks. “I can make the spirits come to me.”
Horror drained down my throat in an icy sluice, colder than the wind, and pooled in my belly. “But you’re not a shaman. Not called, not trained—”
“But I am called,” he protested. “How else could I make the spirits come? Iam called, Nakaytah. It is only that my family is not a favorite, not born to the shaman line—”
Reluctant agreement thawed the horror inside me. Virissong’s father and grandfather had both pleaded to study with the shamans, convinced that they, too, carried within them the power to visit the spirit world. Their pleas had been denied; no true shaman, the elders said, would have to struggle so hard to prove his position. A spirit journey would show their true paths, and the journeys hadn’t led Virissong’s family to the powerful shaman spirits. Now they were shunned and a little ridiculed, for their delusions of grandeur. My hand crept out and wrapped itself around Virissong’s. “What do the spirits tell you?”
Virissong sat back, relief sagging his shoulders. He tightened his fingers around mine, then withdrew them. I tucked mine back inside my leathers; it was too cold to hold hands in the frozen wind. “They say there is a great and terrible battle raging in the spirit world. They say that the monsters the spirits fight are so strong the battle spills into the Middle World, and this is why it’s so cold, and why game is so scarce. Only we are stubborn—” Virissong broke off with a crooked little grin, adding, “—or foolish enough to stay.”
Disbelief bubbled up in my stomach. “You can’t mean the spirits want us to leave here!”
Comic dismay popped Virissong’s eyes wide. He shook his head, reaching to catch my hand again. “No, no. The spirits admire our stubbornness a little, I think. No. They say that to end the cold and bring the game back, we must end the battle that’s being fought in the spirit world.”
My chin dropped to my chest, cold leather tucking against the warmth of my neck as I stared at Virissong. “We have to bring the monsters to this world,” he said enthusiastically. “Here, men can hunt and slay their bodies, weakening them so that in the spirit world they can be defeated.”
Slow admiration began to course through my veins, warming me despite the freezing air. “Like in the stories of the First People,” I said wonderingly. Virissong did his best to look modest, but excitement burned in his eyes. “You’ll be remembered forever as a great hero!”
Virissong ducked his head, smiling. “That isn’t why I do this,” he said. Not even my host entirely believed him, so when he lifted his head, expression bright and hopeful, to say, “Perhaps a little of why,” it made us both laugh. “I want to prove myself,” he went on in a low voice, when the laughter had faded. “I want to show them that even if the family is not a long line of shamans, our power should not be denied. But I also want to help our people, Nakaytah. We freeze and starve and die, and I do not want this to be the end of us.”
“Then we will.” I put my hand in his again, still warmed from laughter and admiration. “Even the elders will see that they were wrong, and warmth and food will come back to us. I’ll help you, if I can.”
In the Lower World, Virissong took his hand from mine. I startled awake, blood sticky in my palm, to find him looking away, tightness around his mouth. “If you must see the rest I will show you,” he said in a low voice. He’d lost the familiar colloquial speech patterns and was more cautious now, formality masking distress. “It is…painful. Nakaytah died, helping me.”