The earth beneath us frosted, white magic creeping over leaves, over branches, over the wrecked helicopter and beyond. My breath turned to fog, though my skin didn’t feel cold. Magic carried silence with it, washing away the memory of battle sounds and making the valley serene. Aidan gathered his arms a little closer to his chest, embracing the walking sticks, then lifted his arms.
Soft white magic heaved upward, the ice-like frost rushing to treetops and to the distant sky beyond. I saw Raven Mocker then, a far-off shadow against the spreading brilliance. His wings cut the air, loud enough to be heard now that silence held sway everywhere else. He didn’t want to fight. He wanted to escape, so he could wreak havoc in the world beyond. He wanted to escape so I would have to hunt him, and so my attention would be split in a dozen directions. I gathered the idea of a net, knowing I didn’t have enough strength to pull him back even if I managed to catch him, but hating not to try.
Before I even tried to cast it, Aidan’s auras became blinding, lighting the whole of the valley, and an echo ran through the mountains. Power reverberated, awakening a touch I knew. Barely knew, but I recognized it. After a moment I placed it, too, and, stunned, looked to the hills.
My whole life I had wanted to be rescued by the cavalry. That scene always got me in the movies, even when I knew it was coming. Especially when I knew it was coming. The moment where the hero is desperately outnumbered, about to die, but he smiles and looks up, and that makes the bad guys look, too. The sheer cliffs are always empty in the first moment, but then they begin to appear. The ferocious chief on a painted horse. The resentful, respectful warrior whose life the hero saved at the beginning of the film. They’re the first to appear, and maybe it’s just that they’re there to stand witness to a hero’s death.
But no: then the others come. Dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands, all lining the cliffs, all surrounding the gulley where the hero isn’t about to die after all, because if he does, the bad guys will die with him. I’d stayed up until all hours of the night watching old Westerns I’d seen time and time again, just to watch that scene again. I loved it beyond reason, and I had always wanted to be part of it.
They were ghosts, this cavalry. They didn’t ride, but stood. Stepped out of the trees as light and silver, as faces and names from the past. Aidan, focused by the three walking-stick spirits, called them, guided them, and welcomed them into the present. They were so many, and so old, that the valley chilled with their presence. A power circle came to life beneath their insubstantial feet, burning more brightly and gaining speed as it passed beneath each ghost. The entire horizon came alight, every dip of the valley peopled by the serene dead, and when it reached the place it had begun, an old woman stepped forward.
I knew her. I’d had no idea we were in that same valley, my sense of the hills far too limited to notice that. But of course we were: of course, because it was a place where Cherokee had lived once, and it was sympathetic to the youth coming to find a way back toward tradition. There were no coincidences, and just this once I was glad for it. A laugh broke in my chest, bringing tears to my eyes. I whispered, “Greetings, old one,” and the ancient shaman smiled at me from the distance.
“This pain is ours,” she said. “This pain is old, and it is ours. We have waited, Walkingstick. You gave us what knowledge you could, and we have waited to repay that gift. We have stayed long past our time to rest, to take this pain back to the time it was born of. We will not let it poison our children after they have rebuilt from so little. This pain is ours, and we will die from it, but you will live. Live well, and do not forget us.”
My father didn’t know where I drew my power from, but I had nothing on the magic the old shaman threw down. She rebuilt the power circle, sending magic widdershins, redoubling its strength as the Cherokee ghosts began to sing their death songs.
Far above the valley’s hills, Raven Mocker’s wings began to shed their sooty feathers, his strength being drawn into the ghosts. Soot and ashes fell faster, breaking away. Danny careened toward the earth, trying to control his fall. He was too far to hear if he cried, or maybe he was brave enough not to, while pieces of his wings fell to the earth like melting wax, as the ghosts called home their pain.
Chapter Thirty
I looked away when Danny fell, not, in the end, as brave as he was. I still saw the impact from the corner of my eye, a flare of white where he hit. We would have to find the body later, but for now the despair and anger riding us all began to fade. There were hundreds of people in the forest now, the modern Cherokee who had come up ready to fight the military and now who stood silent and stunned in the wash of magic and in the presence of their ancestors.
The old shaman stomped one foot, unraveling the power circle she had built. The ghosts faded as the magic came undone, each retreat lightening the valley’s weight a little. She remained a few moments longer, looking over a valley full of people who were in spirit her children. I got to my feet awkwardly, feeling stiff and uncomfortable. She looked at me and I spread my hands. “I need to come back with you, if you’ll let me.”
Her iron-gray eyebrows rose. I gestured at Sara. “The magic took her husband to your end of time. I need to try to save him. I don’t know if I can, but I promised I’d try.”
Aidan spoke for the first time in what seemed like hours. “Lucas? What happened to Lucas?”
Our hesitation in answering was answer enough. His breath rushed out of him and his hands turned to knots at his sides. “I can hold it open until you get back.”
“What happenes if he does that?” Sara’s voice cracked, and she didn’t look at us when she asked the question, but at the old shaman instead. “What happens if we hold this time rift open? Can we save him?”
“Does he live, in my day?”
I shook my head, lips compressed. The shaman frowned. “Then perhaps. Maybe if his soul is still his own, or if you reach him before death takes him, perhaps he could return. But it would be dangerous. We do not die out of time, Walkingstick. We die when we are meant to. I think his soul is already lost, if he is dead in my time. I think he would return to life a sorcerer, and this battle today would be for nothing.”
“I have to try. I’ve dealt with sorcerers before. Maybe I could...” I trailed off, because really, dealing with body-snatching sorcerers in the past hadn’t gone all that well for the host bodies.
“No.” Sara slumped, hands useless in her lap. “No, you don’t, Joanne. If the risk is having to do this all over again...he wouldn’t want that. I do.” Her voice broke, harsh and miserable. “I want you to go save him, I want to make all of this unhappen, I want to go home and be happy again, but if a sorcerer stole his soul and came back in his place...Lucas wouldn’t want you to try. He wouldn’t want to risk it. He would say it was a good life and to let it go. So I have to, too, don’t I. Because what’re you going to do if you go back and save him but it’s not really him? Kill him again?”
That was possibly the worst prospect I’d ever been presented with, and I’d been given a lot of unpleasant choices over the past year. Sara glanced at me and actually laughed at my expression. Not a healthy laugh, but a laugh. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. No,” she said to the ancient shaman. “No, go home. Sing for him, too, even if he wasn’t of your People. And don’t ever cross my path again.”
The last was to me, and I couldn’t blame her for it at all. I nodded, though she wasn’t looking my way. Sara got up, brushed her knees free of debris, and left the ruin of her life along with all the rest of us.