He spoke to Musselwhite in a soft precise voice. “Do you know what happened the day I came home from Pelican Isle?”
Seeing Musselwhite’s confusion, Pondwader blurted: “Y-you mean, the Pelican Isle Massacre? Two-tens-and-six summers ago? No, I—I mean, I have heard—”
“Hush, Pondwader,” Musselwhite whispered. She examined Cottonmouth’s face as though logging his expression. Her eyes tightened.
Cottonmouth extended his hands and warmed them over the flames. “Do you?”
“Of course not. I was burying my family,” she said in a cold voice. “How could I—”
“Your family was here!” he shouted. Then, in a pitiful whisper: “ … Here! And we … we needed you.”
Musselwhite said nothing for several moments, then: “What happened when you got home, Cottonmouth?”
His lungs expanded with a deep breath. “I came home to bury our son … and found all the Soul Dancers in the village sitting around him, chattering like birds.”
“Chattering? About what?”
His fingers clenched into fists over the fire. “They told me not to bother burying Glade. That his afterlife souls had vanished. The only soul he had left was the one that stays with the body forever.”
Musselwhite sat unmoving. “But—I don’t understand. Why—”
“Don’t you?”
Their gazes held, Cottonmouth’s bitter and wary, Musselwhite’s bewildered.
In the silence, Pondwader’s blood rushed. Dogtooth had said that one of Glade’s souls had changed into lightning. He knew what had happened to that soul. He …
The Lightning Bird stirred with faint whimpers, delicate, heartrending. Immediately above the shelter, thunder rumbled and boomed and rain shished like a palm-fiber brush on a piece of hide. The baby Bird turned over inside Pondwader, and he felt suddenly as if his lungs had been crushed. Mouth open, he struggled for breath that wouldn’t come.
Something Musselwhite or Cottonmouth had said had sent the little Lightning Bird into a panic. Pondwader could feel its rapid heartbeat. The storm had grown deafening. Brilliant lightning flashes brought violent crashes of thunder.
What had happened to Glade’s other soul?
… Think about this, brainless boy—even you are smart enough to figure it out.
And from the heart of the thunder, words whispered, parts of Songs—about sleeping warmly in drifting towers of cloud, pure white light sparkling in the deepest blackness, the terrifying vertigo of plunging down through vast blue skies … living in an eternal flash. Pondwader ached with such wonder that he longed to weep. Lightning Bird memories. That’s what these were! If only he could—
Musselwhite’s question shocked Pondwader back to this world: “Why would the Soul Dancers have told you that?”
Cottonmouth, his face suddenly stripped of the mask of rage, looked incredibly vulnerable. He shook his head. The wind gusted and shoved at Cottonmouth like a hard hand. He walked around the whipping fire and knelt on the other side of Musselwhite.
“I had hoped,” Cottonmouth said, “that you could tell me.”
“But how would I know?”
Pondwader studied them curiously. As the storm raged, Cottonmouth and Musselwhite changed, their faces relaxing, voices growing softer. They now talked with intimate familiarity.
Cottonmouth spread his hands. It was a pleading gesture. “You are the only other person who might. For two-tens-and-six summers I have been worrying about what happened to Glade. Where his souls went. Terrible nightmares have tormented my sleep. Things too abominable to believe.”
Pondwader sat up straighter, bursting to tell Cottonmouth that one of Glade’s souls had been living a miracle, soaring across the face of the world in a blinding body—
Musselwhite’s voice turned stony. “Tell me what happened the night you were gone. When Glade was so sick. Did you go to see Bright Feather?”
Hair whipped about Cottonmouth’s taut face. “I did.” He nodded. “He gave me the awl as a gift. He said it could save Glade, that the awl would bring him to life again. Bright Feather—”
“How?”
“By—by acting as a siphon. To drain the souls out of a living person … .”
“And instead,” Musselwhite surmised with suave brutality, “this gift robbed our son of his souls? Is that what you’re suggesting? That somehow the awl stole Glade’s afterlife souls?”
Cottonmouth sank to the floor mats, and ran a hand through his wet hair. “I don’t know, Musselwhite. I went back—after I buried Glade—to see Bright Feather, but the old man could tell me nothing. I don’t think he understood it either.”