Horseweed and Balsam hunched on the opposite side of the fire, staring unblinking at the flickers of flame that licked up around the oak log. They both had their atlatls and quivers close at hand, as though they sensed danger afoot this evening.
Oxbalm worked his jaw back and forth, feeling the threat in the air. It had reached such strength that the hair on his arms stood straight up. He hadn’t felt evil this potent since the days when old Cactus Lizard had roamed the darkness in the bodies of Lion and Bear. Oxbalm’s stomach knotted into a hard ball. Even the flames in the fire pit seemed wary.
Most of his people had already retreated into the lodges to cook their dinners and tell their children stories. The few villagers who remained outside had huddled around fires and were talking in low tones … as though they, too, felt the unseen horror growing.
A witch was loose. Even those who didn’t know it were catching the scent of evil in the air. Like a winter mist, it seeped through everything, chilling the souls of men, women and children alike.
A tripod with a bag of phlox-blossom tea stood to the left of the fire, beside Dizzy Seal. The old man kept tapping his fingers on the warm bag in a nervous gesture. His shrunken face was grave beneath the beavers king hat that covered his gray hair. To Oxbalm’s right, on the other side of Sumac, a pile of chopped oak logs was stacked, enough to last for three or four days. None of them had said anything in half a hand of time. They’d been watching the blaze of sunset ignite the translucent vestiges of clouds that limned the sky… and surreptitiously studying Catchstraw.
He had built himself a sweat lodge down the slope right next to the trail. The small hide-covered structure nestled in the shadow of the hill, where it turned dark long before’ the west-facing slopes did. The lodge sat like an ominously hunched black beast.
Dizzy Seal’s mouth pursed. “Most Dreamers would build their sweat lodge out away from people, not on a busy trail.”
“He wants to be seen,” Sumac said. Sweat beaded on her nose. She’d unbraided her gray hair and let it hang loose down the front of her heavily fringed doeskin dress. She wet her lips and lowered her voice to a whisper, afraid that Catchstraw might hear. “This newfound Power of his has made him arrogant and boastful. I’ve never known a conceited Dreamer.”
“Catchstraw is no Dreamer,” Oxbalm reminded her. “He does everything the opposite of the way a Dreamer would. As if he’s deliberately mocking the sacred ways of compassion and charity.”
“The old fool.” Dizzy Seal’s deeply incised brow creased into a hundred folds. His beaver hat slipped down to cover half of them. “He’s walking on a thin crust of ice.”
Horseweed hissed, “Shh,” when Catchstraw looked up at the hilltop.
They all fell silent. Oxbalm calmly dipped his wooden cup into the phlox tea and sipped the warm, flowery liquid.
Catchstraw’s hooked nose lifted, and he scented the wind, then bent over the glowing hearth before his sweat lodge, his stick poking at the rocks heating atop the red coals. He’d stripped down to his breech clout A beautiful tortoiseshell comb pinned his gray-streaked black hair on top of his head.
To Oxbalm’s eyes, he looked skinnier, paler, almost as though the very breath of life was being sucked from him. Evil did that. That’s how it survived; it nursed itself on the strength of the body and the soul. And if a man let it, it would drink him dry, leaving nothing but a hollow shell of flesh. The soul would rot out of the body, all black and twisted, like a slice of liver left in the hot sun for days.
Once, a very long time ago, Oxbalm’s parents had taken him to the village of the famed witch Pineburl. They’d gone to meet a Trader who brought rare shells from far to the east, pink things, huge, with spikes on them. As his mother had been arguing price with the Trader, the old woman had walked out of the forest. She looked like a half-dead white weasel, unbelievably thin, and with glinting amber eyes that bored holes in anyone who dared to meet her gaze.
At the age of five summers, Oxbalm had dared. He’d stared openly, not knowing any better. Her face had been as gaunt as a corpse’s. Pineburl had smiled at him with broken teeth, and his soul had shriveled. As though every unnameable terror that lurked in the shadows beyond the village had suddenly risen and come crowding around him, he’d gone cold inside. In those eyes, he’d seen nothing but angry wickedness. Oxbalm’s mother had told him later that evil had eaten away all the softness in Pineburl’s soul.
Catchstraw had started to look like that. His eyes darted constantly now, like a rabid wolf’s. He sought out and lambasted anything that didn’t please him. He shrieked at the children for playing games they