She scrambled for her pack. Sky Messenger kept watch while she hastily packed their things. His face was grim, and for the first time she saw the sweat pouring down his temples. It had glued his black hair to his cheeks.
“Why is a witch hunting us, Sky Messenger?”
With a warrior’s deadly agility, he climbed out of the hole and extended a hand to her. Gitchi slid past her leg like warm smoke and eased through the holly. She reached for Sky Messenger’s hand.
As he pulled her up, he whispered, “Evil needs no reason.”
Thirty-one
Sky Messenger
I quietly examine the dark shapes that fill the forest. The warriors are gone, but there is still something out there. I catch glimpses of it as it moves between the trees, pale and flickering. One of the gahai?
“What are we waiting for?” Taya asks.
“There’s something I need to look at more closely.”
“What do you mean?” She grips my sleeve in terror.
“Just wait here for me. If you see anything suspicious, dive back in that hole. I won’t be long.”
As I trot for the place I saw the light, she calls, “Don’t get out of my sight? Do you hear me? I want to be able to see you at all times!”
I lift a hand, showing that I’ve heard, and slow down to enter the thick trees. Gitchi moves at my side with ghostly stealth. When the wolf utters a barely audible growl, I subtly turn to look in the direction he’s pointing.
As soon as my eyes adjust, I see them. Two small balls of light wander close to the ground. Prior to two moons ago, I’d never seen such things. Since then, I’ve seen more than I wish to, most floating aimlessly around destroyed villages.
“They aren’t gahai,” I whisper to Gitchi.
Gahai move purposely, in straight lines, because they always know where they are going. These lights float in one direction, then another, clearly confused.
I tiptoe forward and lean my shoulder against the trunk of a gigantic hickory to watch them. A herd of four deer emerge from the trees and keep watch on the lights, trailing them as they head into a narrow clearing surrounded by plum trees. The bucks are young. Their forked antlers blaze whitely when they pass through the thin bars of moonlight.
Gitchi has probably always seen lost souls roaming the forests, but it is relatively new to me. I am fascinated, still learning about them.
I shift against the hickory trunk, and the scent of wet bark rises. These lights are tiny, barely larger than my thumb. Are they the lost souls of children?
The two lights bob into the meadow with the deer trotting behind them. When the bucks can see the sky clearly, they playfully kick up their hooves and charge headlong for the glowing balls. The souls seem to understand. I sense a happiness in the air, or perhaps it is relief that someone has found them. They hover perfectly still, allowing the bucks to scoop them into their antlers and toss them into the air, high over the treetops.
In awe, I watch them climb into the night sky until they disappear among the glittering campfires of the dead that crowd the Path of Souls.
“They’re on their way now.”
Yes, as you should be.
The words are so soft I’m not sure whether I actually heard them, or if they exist only in my souls. When moccasins crunch the dry leaves to my right, I turn slowly.
He stands four paces away, with his gaze focused on the bucks in the meadow. There is an eerie quality to the man, a stillness so complete it is as though he has been standing beside me unnoticed all my life, just waiting for me to see him. His pale hands are folded in front of him. Against his black cape they appear pure white. He wears sandals, apparently immune to the cold, or perhaps it is warm where he stands. He seems to be looking around the forest, and sadness pervades the air.
“Why are you here?” I ask.
“The cold.”
“I don’t understand.”
His cape waffles as though touched by wind, though I do not feel a breeze.
“The cold has worked its way into the hearts of all living creatures and twined around the roots of the sycamores and oaks. It’s killing us all. Especially him.”
“Who?”
The Voice is unsettlingly soft: “He has no afterlife soul. She locked it in her soul pot.”
Deep inside me, memories flash. The tormented faces of children. Terror congeals like the impact of an arrow. “Are you talking about Hehaka?”
Twelve summers ago, the old woman who held us captive used an eagle-bone sucking tube to suck out the boy’s afterlife soul. Hehaka. Zateri’s brother. He’d seen eleven summers. She blew Hehaka’s soul into a pot where she imprisoned the souls of anyone who crossed her. The old woman used the pot to threaten Hehaka, telling him to do as she ordered, or when he died she’d take his soul far away and release it to wander among enemy ghosts for eternity.