“What are we doing?” she demanded. “What is this?”
Brother Horse laid a hand on her shoulder. “We are only talking, as of now. Only talking, little one, away from the madness of the town.”
Despite the comforting words, Hezhi felt panic rise in her chest. They had tied her down, naked, drugged her—awakened that thing in her belly, in her blood. This seemed somehow like that, another trick, something thrust upon her. The similarity between ghun and gaan flashed once more through her mind. Priest, shaman, what was the difference to her?
“Wh-what will you do?” she stuttered.
“Nothing. Nothing without your leave. Indeed, Hezhi, there is nothing I can do. You must do it, though I can guide you, help you along the way.”
“There must be something else,” she insisted. “Some way to be rid of him forever.”
They stepped beneath the slight natural roof, the enormous sky halved by the red stone. It was oddly comforting to Hezhi, making the world seem smaller, more manageable. Brother Horse motioned her toward a flat stone and lowered himself by degrees onto another, as if his joints were rusted metal. He placed his elbows on his knees, clasped his hands with thumbs together, and pointed skyward. He looked first at the cold stone and charcoal between them, but then raised his gaze frankly to meet hers.
“No way that I know of, child. My hope for you was that the ember in you would die away without the River nearby to strengthen it. But it has caught, you see? Even without him, it will burn inside of you. Not as the Changeling planned for it to; it will not transform you as you have told me it did your kin. Still, unless you bank it, bring it under your control, that little flame will yet consume you.”
Hezhi considered that she did know one way; she could fling herself from a cliff, break her body, and release her curse with her spirit. But even that might not work; more likely she would become a monstrous ghost, the sort that had once attacked her in Nhol. The Mang spoke often of ghosts, as well. However different the lands beyond the River were, they were not so different that death was a certain escape.
“What then?” she asked. “What must I do?”
Brother Horse reached over to stroke her hair. “It may not be so bad as you think,” he said. “But I won't promise you that it will be easy.”
“Nothing is, for me, it seems,” she replied dully.
“It may even make you happier,” he went on. “I've watched you, these past months. You took to camp work pretty well. In time, I think you could even be good at it. But you would never love it, would you? The only things that I know you love—that I can see you love—are your paper and your ink, your book. The thought of books.”
“What does this have to do with that?” she muttered.
“Mystery,” he answered simply. And in that small word, Hezhi caught a glimmer of something. Hope, possibilities—something to fill the growing emptiness in her heart.
“Mystery,” she repeated, a question really. Brother Horse nodded affirmation.
“That is what you find in your books, am I right? Questions that you had not thought of yourself? Visions you could not imagine unaided? I can offer you the same.”
“It frightens me,” she admitted. “What lives in me frightens me.
“It always will, unless you master it,” he said. “And probably even then, if you have sense, which I believe you do. But did your books bring you only comfort?”
She quirked an insincere smile at that. “No, not comfort,” she answered.
“Well, then,” the old man said. “Why do you hesitate?”
“Because I'm tired” she snapped. “Weary of new things, of being frightened, of being sick, of losing what I know! Tired of these things happening to me …”
He waited until she was done, until she chewed down on her lip, panting, fury replacing fear.
“What then?” she asked again, this time sharply, insistently. “How do we start this?”
The old man hesitated, then reached into a pouch at his waist. He withdrew a small dagger, its blade keen and silver in the shadowed shelter.
“As always,” Brother Horse replied. “With blood.”
HEZHI turned the knife over and over in her hand, as if inspecting it would allay her fears. Instead, she only grew more nervous as Brother Horse kindled a small fire in the stone hearth.
She was distracted by the process of fire-making itself, which relied not upon matches—the only way she had ever seen fire “made”—but upon a dubiously simple device. He placed a flat piece of wood on the shelter floor; the wood had grooves cut along one side, and these shallow cuts terminated in blackened depressions. In one of these depressions he placed a stick, about the length of her forearm, and began to twirl it briskly with his palms, starting at the top of the stick and working quickly to its base, returning his palms to the top again, and so on. In moments a coil of smoke sought up from the juncture of the two pieces of wood. The smoke grew thicker and thicker until Brother Horse removed the stick and blew upon the hole he had been twirling it in. Astonished, Hezhi saw a small red coal there.
“Hello, Fire Goddess,” Brother Horse said. “Welcome to my hearth. I will treat you well.” He shook the coal onto a small wad of shredded dry material of some sort, held it delicately in his fingers, and breathed upon it. In an instant, he held flame between his fingers. With that small blossom, he ignited a pile of twigs leaning together like a little tent and, as they caught, added larger pieces of wood on top. Heen, sleeping with his head between his paws, opened a single eye halfway at the scent of smoke, then closed it once more, singularly unimpressed by the birth of a goddess.
“Can you teach me that?” she breathed.
“To waken the Fire Goddess? Of course. It is simply done. I'm surprised you haven't seen it happen.”
“The women would never let me near, at the hunting camp; not when they made fire.”
“Women have some odd taboos about the goddess,” Brother Horse informed her, then added, “and about foreigners, as well.”
“That I know.” The wood crackled gleefully. Hezhi cocked her head and even smiled, despite the threatening edge of the knife in her hand, the nervous twitching in her belly. “I never thought of fire as a miracle before,” she breathed.
“See her in there?” Brother Horse asked. “Look closely.” He gestured with his lips, his gnarled brown fingers feeding bits of juniper twigs to the flame.
“No,” Hezhi said, suddenly understanding what she was being asked to do. She averted her eyes from the little tongues of light.
“The Fire Goddess is different,” Brother Horse reassured her gently. “She has lived with Human Beings for a long time—at least this aspect of her. Look, child. I will help you.”
He reached over and took hold of her hand; trembling a bit, she turned her gaze back to the fire. The evergreen tang of juniper smoke wrapped her as the wind shifted, and her eyes squinted over the sting and tears. Brother Horse tightened his grip on her, and in that instant the fire seemed to rush up, open like the shutters of a window. As through a window, she could suddenly see through it, to another place.
Once again, alien thoughts crowded her mind, and the scale upon her arm pulsed madly. She gasped and jerked to release herself from Brother Horse, but he kept his grip, and when she turned her head it was to no avail; the goddess was still there.
But after the first instant, her beating heart began to slow. Seeing the god at the cairn had been terrible, like suddenly understanding that she had pushed her hands into a nest of stinging worms, the shock before the pain. There was nothing of her in that experience, only the promise of dread and power.