Shaman's Curse Read online

  I knew I sat across the table from someone who believed that as deeply as I did. Bean and I liked each other in part because at the very foundations of our souls, we were both servants. The kind of servants who thought obedience was for wimps and tribe mattered above all.

  I picked the last berry out of my small glass bowl and popped it in my mouth, letting the tart-sweet juices slide around in my cheeks. My life had just gotten very interesting—and back on Quixal, that was considered one of our most potent curses. Regalis always had agendas. Yesenia had agendas, and at least one of them was driven by the drumbeat of a mother’s love—which deserved respect and admiration and skepticism in equal measures.

  I stared down at my plate, unseeing, walking the lines of my spirit web as it shaped around this new knowing. It agreed with the decision my far-more-rational brain had already made. I had one more person to pay a visit—and after what I’d heard during this one, I intended to keep that visit as far under the radar as humanly possible.

  Fortunately, I was a Shaman with really good connections.

  I looked up to find Bean watching me carefully. She set down her fork. “When you go see Tatiana, take a careful look at the bracelet she wears on her right arm.”

  I blinked at her and started laughing. “Are you always two steps ahead of everyone?”

  She grinned at me. “It’s the logical next step.”

  Gut instincts that strong had very little to do with logic. “What’s the story behind the bracelet?”

  She glanced around like someone about to rob the place. “You still got that energy stuff under wraps?”

  I shielded us again. “You know I could make you quack like a chicken and lay eggs when I do this, right?” I sure as heck didn’t want her letting anyone else take such liberties. Not that she’d ever likely meet anyone who could.

  She snorted. “Don’t tell Jissa that or she’ll have us on duty when the Lightbody chickens stop laying for the vernal cycle.”

  Yup. Totally not scared of Shamans. “We’re locked down. Tell me about the bracelet.”

  She breathed in deeply and let it out slowly. “Officially, I know nothing. But here’s what I saw. When I first applied for the job as Yesenia’s assistant, there was a rug on the floor of her office. It didn’t match anything else in there—it looked like a trinket picked up at one of the spaceport flea markets. Handwoven and really colorful, like the ones the Wanderers make.”

  That sounded like something Bean would love and Yesenia would toss into the nearest compost chute. “In her office?”

  “Right on the floor in front of her desk.”

  Where trainees and other people went to die. Curiouser and curiouser.

  Bean shrugged. “It made me feel good. When I stood on it.”

  An object of power. Possibly one made by a Wanderer. Spiritual descendants of the gypsies of Earth, and at least as staunchly mystical as my own tribe. I stayed silent, very sure I hadn’t heard the end of this story yet.

  “The first day I went to the nursery to see Tatiana, that rug was on the floor in front of her crib. The staff never moved it. She took her first steps on it and even tried to carry it around like a blanket for a while.” Bean paused, her face soft with remembering. “One of the nursery staff finally cut a small piece off so she could carry it without tripping. Eventually, I braided what was left of it into a bracelet for her. She’s never taken it off.”

  I closed my eyes. Yesenia was a Traveler, and nobody ever paid attention to anything else. But Travelers had all four Talents, and she was a prodigious Shaman. One who had maybe imbued a space-market trinket with a mother’s love.

  Or someone else had done it for her.

  4

  I let myself into the small, inviting meditation garden that Tee’s family cared for zealously. Just one of the many displays of their quiet, immovable conviction that every heart should spend time in the presence of green, growing things.

  This garden was a tiny, manicured jewel, designed to tempt trainees from inner worlds who had never met a green space capable of holding two people at the same time. This one was, but just barely. I sat down on the small, sculptured bench that lived in the exact center and smiled at its other occupant. “Hi, Tatiana. Thanks for meeting me here.”

  She looked at me with golden eyes that were somehow skeptical and innocent at the same time. “Tee said you wanted to see me.”

  That message had been transmitted via a couple of much younger Lightbodies. Ones with feisty spirits and the kind of regular fluxes in their energy flows that meant nobody was likely to pay attention to another wobble or two. The grandmothers would never ignore a little one, but if Bean was right and there were forces at work I didn’t know about yet, I was going to take full advantage of allies the universe didn’t tend to take seriously.

  Including Lightbody toddlers and dreadlocked admin assistants.

  I laid my hands down on my knees, palms up. Sensing the woo of the space, seeing if anything had followed me here. This wasn’t a place I tended to hang out, and even small disruptions in pattern sometimes caused ripples in the energies most people couldn’t see.

  Tatiana watched me curiously. “What are you doing?”

  I tried to think of a way to answer that didn’t sound like it came from a campy detective vid and couldn’t find one. “Making sure nothing followed me here.”

  She rolled her eyes, teenager to dopey old person. “It’s the middle of the night, and they’d just get distracted by the strawberry patch anyhow.”

  I almost got fooled, pulled in by her excellent display of thirteen-year-old nonchalance. Until I saw her fingers flutter quietly on the bench beside me, just like Iggy did when she was reading the airwaves. A smart and subtle Dancer, making sure she agreed with the dopey old person.

  I waited politely until she finished. “All clear?”

  She shot me a mildly surprised look. “Yeah. I don’t feel anything.”

  She’d been almost as fast as me, which either meant she was sloppy or very well-practiced. I raised an eyebrow. “Do that a lot, do you?”

  Her eyes studied the garden, calm to the point of bored. “Is that why you asked me to come here? To ask me questions I’m not going to answer?”

  I wondered if she had any idea just how much she sounded like her mother. “I was in Yesenia’s office this morning.”

  Golden eyes flickered with curiosity and then went back to surveying the miniature bonsai sculptures. “What does that have to do with me?”

  I knew better than to try to crack that shell head-on. “You know that I see a web of light around people.” I’d explained it to a few little Lightbodies when she was within earshot—and I was certain the golden child didn’t miss much.

  She inclined her chin. “Spirit webs. Something you learned from your grandmothers.”

  I nodded and kept watching hers. “I can see connections. How people are hooked up with each other.” Time for the big guns. “Nothing runs between you and your mother.”

  She didn’t move a muscle, but her spirit web contracted like I’d punched her. “I know.”

  I swallowed hard, because this was a brutal thing to be doing to a thirteen-year-old, even if I thought I had decent reasons. “There should be connections. Do you cut them off, or does she?”

  Her spirit web shuddered again. “It was her at first.”

  More points for Bean. “At first?”

  “Sometimes it’s me now.” Tatiana let out a breath that wavered. “Not because I’m mad, or because I want to get even with her for ignoring me, even though sometimes I do. But Mundi says that’s a bad idea.”

  I blinked. Mundi was Tee’s grandmother, in every sense that word means on my home planet. A wise, tough, interfering old woman who dispensed advice she expected people to follow, and love deep enough to drown in. I hadn’t seen her take Tatiana that far under her wing, but it was good she had. Everyone needs a grandmother.

  Including me, especially when I couldn’t keep my mind
on the job I was supposed to be doing. I glanced over at the teenager beside me again. “Why do you cut the connections off, then?”

  A long silence, one that I thought might swallow the rest of the answers I was going to get. Then Tatiana shifted on the bench. “Because my mother always finds them and cuts them off, and it hurts less if I do it. And because maybe it’s important and she knows why, even if I don’t.”

  I’d grown up in a jungle and knew how cruel the natural order of things could be, but this was shards of ice straight into my lungs. A child shouldn’t have to wonder whether her mother loved her, or why she was being ignored, or the far more awful question of whether it was being done for her own good.

  Tatiana’s pain was a visceral, breathing thing. I did the only thing I could do and helped the tiny, manicured garden around us open to receive it. She’d told me what I needed to know, but I wasn’t at all sure it was worth the price.

  Bean was right. Yesenia was distancing her gorgeous girl on purpose. And that child, aching in her abandonment, was helping—and slowly falling in love anyhow.

  Snipping wasn’t going to work forever.

  Tatiana swallowed beside me, and her fingers fiddled with the raggedy bracelet on her right wrist. The one from which I could sense exactly nothing. “I cut off the other things too. The ones that try to come in with hers.”

  I blinked.

  “The dark things.” The girl shivered now, her almost inhuman composure dissolving for just a moment. “I don’t know what they are. They don’t come very often, and they go away when I cut them off, but they feel awful.”

  My heart tore. I’d felt those things too, in Yesenia’s office. Some of what came for Tatiana came in the dark. And this golden child beside me wasn’t a Shaman. She was a Dancer, a worker of the light.

  Which was why I was here.

  Yesenia hadn’t truly left her girl alone, no matter what anyone thought. Kish and Tee and Iggy were just the three newest additions to Tatiana’s very quiet phalanx of guardians. There were no better three to stand in the light with you, but my job was different. Because Shamans—we know the dark things. The ones that live in the jungles and the night and the places our souls are born. We’re the ones who know, deeply, that when the dark is not in balance, it sometimes tries to eat the light.

  Most Fixers are light workers. Shamans—we’re the workers of the dark. The ones who help find that balance. The ones who stand when the fertile, deep, endless beauty of the dark places forgets its roots.

  If Yesenia and Bean were right, whatever was coming for Tatiana was still a long way off, and I couldn’t read anything in the ether that disputed that. But someday Tatiana was going to need a Shaman in her corner, and whatever came, it would be my job to meet its shadows. I had a gut sense, morphing into a strong suspicion, that her mother was making very sure we were ready. Yesenia was one of the best Shamans ever. Travelers had to be. They Traveled through the dark, through the in betweens.

  I was not here by accident.

  The coming fight felt years distant yet—but a piece of it had come for me now because the slender young woman beside me wasn’t meant to touch the dark alone, and we didn’t need to wait for the battle to arrive to fix that. It was time to plant a small vine, one that would grow over the years into something nigh impossible to rip out. Jungles knew that time made things strong in a way that power could never copy.

  And the jungles had sent me off Quixal with a mission. To serve those who had no tribe. Or in this case, someone who’d been ripped from her rightful one.

  I thought a moment, because in the memories of my eleven-year-old self were the seeds of what I wanted to do next. I needed to sister Tatiana’s energy to mine. I knew how to do it—it was the same spirit work the grandmothers had done for me when I left. Except I wasn’t a grandmother and I didn’t have three days to sweat and fast and pray, so I was going to need to improvise. “I would like your permission to carry a piece of you with me. A piece you give me willingly, that will let me check in on you even when I’m far away.”

  She kept looking quietly at her knees. “Like what?”

  A KarmaCorp Shaman would ask for words to take. Oaths of trust, bonds of energetic agreement. A child of a wild planet knew there were better ways. More solid ways, more ancient ones. Ones that had more experience with the dark—and would require more trust. “Something special to you. Something of the earth or of yourself. A pebble, a shell, a lock of hair, some fabric from a favorite dress or t-shirt.”

  She smiled, and it was a ray of confused, fascinated sunlight. “Is that why I have this in my pocket?” She slid out a tiny scrap of fabric—one that matched the faded red in her bracelet. “I’ve never shown it to anyone. It usually lives in my treasure box. I took it out this morning, but I didn’t know why.”

  I blessed whoever or whatever had imbued that rag rug with power. And the persistent care and kindness of the Lightbody clan that had taught Tatiana to love. To trust.

  I reached around my neck for my amulet pouch. I set it in my palms and invited her hands to join mine. She dropped the tiny piece of fabric beside my pouch, and the power of it nearly knocked me off the bench. I touched its energy very gingerly. I had no idea what I was touching, but it was as ancient and strong and unyielding as anything I’d ever felt. Not Yesenia’s work, or at least not that alone. Something larger—and something so fiercely of the great mother that it nearly stopped my breath.

  One more piece of the very knotted vine that was Tatiana Mayes.

  I tucked the fabric inside my pouch, trusting the energies that would matter to understand the very truncated ritual, and the need. “Thank you. This will help me feel you no matter where I am.” It would do more than that, as she and I came to accept it.

  She stroked a finger along the bracelet on her wrist, and then she looked over at me and smiled. She reached down and picked up a small handful of dirt. “I’ve been taking care of this garden for a while now. Mundi says it’s my special place.”

  I felt an odd shifting in my sprit web again. I hadn’t known that. It had been my head that picked this place to meet, not my heart. But it gave me the last piece of the impromptu ritual we needed. One that would close the circle between our webs. I drew a small pebble out of my amulet pouch, one that quivered with the earliest energies I had ever known. “Is there a place somewhere in here for this?”

  She took it reverently, and after a long moment, she reached out and laid it in the crook of a gorgeously sculpted bonsai tree. “Will this work?”

  It would, and better than she knew. Bonsai might be sculpted, but they carried the DNA of things old and wild. A very suitable place for a piece of a Shaman’s heart.

  I breathed in, feeling the rightness of the energies as they shifted. In the world of tangible things that could be touched and felt, nothing had changed. In the world in which I most often walked, Tatiana was now mine as thoroughly as if I’d birthed her.

  I felt the wisdom of the grandmothers quivering in reply.

  Welcoming their new daughter.

  5

  I grinned as Iggy’s face emerged over the top of the rock face we’d just scrabbled up.

  She stuck out her tongue at me and set her lightweight backpack on the ground, gently enough not to bruise the fruit she’d climbed up with. “Why do your send-offs always have to be on some barren rock in the middle of nowhere?”

  This rock was way less barren than most of them. “Look.” I pointed at the tiny spring just behind me. It was little more than an oozing crack in the rock, but the colors of the mosses that had grown up around the unexpected moisture would make Iggy’s artist heart happy.

  “Oooh.” She abandoned me, crouching down beside the small wet treasure. “It’s so beautiful, Rave.” She held out a finger to the mosses and paused just before she touched them, raising an eyebrow my way. “Safe to touch?”

  I wasn’t dumb enough to bring my friends somewhere that wasn’t. “Yes.” I didn’t tell her to do it
gently—we’d all been Lightbody trained in the fine art of making friends with new botanical life forms. I just sat and watched my best friend’s face light up with the joy of someone who hadn’t grown up on a world where nature’s miracles were an everyday occurrence.

  This was why my send-offs were always in the middle of nowhere. Because magic happened here.

  Tee’s head popped up over the top of the climb next, which meant Kish was bringing up the rear. She might not be a big fan of outdoor climbing, but she knew how to scale rock better than anyone. Tee was a decent climber too, but like Iggy, she tended to get distracted by beauty—and out here, there was a lot of it. We were out beyond the cultivated boundary, but close enough to be in the transitional zone, which meant things like random wildflowers and tiny, moss-grown springs instead of just an unending landscape of rock and dust.

  Tee already had her nose down beside Iggy’s, staring at the small green carpet of moss like I’d introduced her to a ship full of hot, naked yoga dancers. She looked up at me, face beaming. “When did you find this?”

  They were so easy to please. “A few days ago. I thought I could feel something growing, so I climbed up to take a look.” It wasn’t a standard application of Shaman Talent, but it gave me an excuse to clamber up random rock faces—and a way to offer my friends the kind of gift they so entirely deserved for being my tribe.

  Well, Kish might not agree. I stuck my head over the cliff edge and looked down for the last member of our foursome. She was holding on by a fingernail and a boot lace, hanging back in space and craning her neck to see something beyond my line of vision.

  I didn’t say a word. Kish clung to rocks like she had suction cups, but that kind of precarious stance wasn’t anything I wanted to surprise.