She fixed on that final image, staring into the serpent’s great crystalline eye, as though looking through time and worlds into another reality. As she did, a faint Song began to fill her souls with a tremolo that echoed from her very bones. The melody rose and fell, lifting her spirits like a leaf on the breeze. Two Petals could feel herself rising, spinning, carried aloft on the vibrant notes. She began to Dance across the hard-packed plaza, arms undulating to the beat, souls swaying in time to her skipping feet. The Song played within her.
“Soon,” she promised, her body spinning in time to the melody.
As quickly as it had come, the Song faded, leaving her to stand alone and motionless in Rainbow City’s great plaza—but one more of the many shadows that mingled in the night. In that instant she felt utterly destitute.
“You are never truly alone,” a familiar voice remarked. Over the years, she had grown used to the voices that spoke in her head. Sometimes they told convincingly of things she knew were untrue. Other times, they offered a startling insight into the confused reality around her.
This voice, though, she knew. Two Petals turned, seeing the eerie outline of Deer Man. He stood off to the side, watching her through large liquid-brown eyes. In the beginning, it had bothered her that only she could see him. That Deer Man could be so apparent to her, but not to Trader or Old White, had perplexed her. In the end, she simply accepted Deer Man’s presence as a manifestation of her Contrary Power. Half-man, half-deer, he had a human face; deer antlers and ears sprouted from his head, and the sleek hair that covered his body could have graced a buck’s winter hide.
Frowning, she studied him, wondering how he managed to balance on those slender deer legs that ended in delicately hoofed feet, or why he never left tracks in the soft dust or silty mud. Why the oddity of it continued to puzzle her was elusive. He was after all a Spirit Being. She often had seen him standing on water, waves washing through his feet, and other times with his nether regions passing through some object like a pestle and mortar, cane wall, or fallen log. As with so many of the voices that spoke to her, or the Spirits, ghosts, and other oddities she saw, she had wondered if Deer Man were real.
“Real?” Deer Man asked, hearing her thoughts. “Are any of them real? Old White? Trader? The Kala Hi’ki?” He paused. “Are you real, Contrary?”
She tightened her arms around her, feeling the warm beaverhide cape, aware of the soft swell of her breasts, of the skin, muscle, and ribs beneath. The rise and fall of her chest with each breath she took reassured her.
“I am. At least for this moment.” She frowned. “Can’t say for sure about tomorrow . . . or yesterday. Sometimes the world slips and shifts around me. It just up and moves, and I lose track of what’s what. Who’s whom. Things become muddled and rushed. Then, when it all stops, I’m not sure where I am, or how I got there.”
“Come. Let me show you something.” Deer Man turned, walking off toward the south.
Two Petals followed, head cocked as she watched his hoofed feet. Though Deer Man took long steps, his hooves never seemed to make actual contact with the earth; and though he moved at her speed, his feet seemed to be making faster progress than he was.
“How do you do that?”
“The same way every other creature does,” he answered. “It is no different than the way you move backward in time.”
Two Petals didn’t answer. So many things were riddles. That the world ran backward around her was just one more.
“Still bothers you, doesn’t it?”
“What?”
“That you’re Contrary. That you can never be normal like Trader, Old White, or anyone else.”
She nodded. “A part of me, way deep down inside, still wants to be like normal people. But it is growing smaller and smaller. Soon, as we get closer to the end, it will shrink away completely. All that will be left is the Contrary. Two Petals will have been like a raindrop in the sunlight.”
“The Kala Hi’ki has helped. I can see it in you: a strength that you didn’t know you possessed.”
She remembered the night when she, Trader, and Old White had first landed at Rainbow City. She had been frightened, overwhelmed by the images of a future that soon would be her past. The flood of souls around her had washed over and through her, drowning and suffocating. She wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but Trader had told her later that she’d cried out and fallen over. He said that she’d turned as stiff as wood, her muscles and joints locked and immovable. He’d carried her to the Kala Hi’ki’s temple like some sort of oddly shaped log. All she remembered was a thick blackness until she’d awakened in the Kala Hi’ki’s room. The terror of it was still too close.