raped by my boyfriend when she was twelve. I killed him. He was white so I went to jail for five years. You . . . You could go back and stop him.” It was hopeful and desperate.
Pain is a river in her, Beast thought, and anger like a great fire.
“I have the gift,” I said, sighing softly, my nose flaps moving. “But it’s a curse too. I can see the timelines, the possibilities of each course of action. Changing history, even recent history, has negative results, sometimes really bad outcomes. The farther back you go, changing history, the more drastic are the shifts in the timeline. And, not to be selfish, but timewalking is killing me.”
Anger burns her, Beast thought, sounding confused. Man is dead, yet anger still burns her.
That’s called hate, I thought back. And hate is never a single cut by a single blade.
Savannah breathed in and out, the sound hard and full of the tumult Beast sensed. “Aggie said taking you to ceremony would remake me. I didn’t believe her.” She sat back, and I realized she was wearing a shift like mine, having changed while I was trying to drown and freeze my butt off. Now that my nose was warmer, I smelled the smoke of native tobacco and white sage from where she had purified the sweathouse for ceremony. “If . . .” She stopped, started again. “If you could change the past for my daughter, would you?”
I studied the woman sitting on the floor in front of me. I thought about what I would do to save Angie Baby if she had been the child Savannah described. And then, understanding opened a cold fist in my chest. “If I went back and stopped him, and I told your younger self that you had sent me back to stop him, would you believe that he had tried to hurt her? Or would you get angry and tell me I was crazy and defend him?”
She jerked and whipped back an arm as if she might hit me across the flames of the sacred fire. She stopped, her arm back, her body frozen. Her eyes went wide and then closed. Moisture gathered in her lashes, glistening in the flame light.
“You knew,” I said. “You had an intuition and you ignored it. Or your daughter had complained about him and you ignored her.”
The flames popped and cracked. Savannah’s arm slowly dropped as tears trailed down her cheeks. “Chala hated him. She’d leave the room every time he was around. She was rude to him. And I didn’t listen to her. There were warning signs. But I loved him so much that I ignored them. I was stupid. I was so . . . stupid.”
“Been there. Done some stupid,” I said.
“I’m a monster,” she whispered, quoting me. I said nothing and her face hardened. Savannah’s eyes opened. “I should get you another Elder. I’m not ready for this.”
“You could,” I said. “You probably should. Or”—I picked up the flight feather—“we could do this together. Long as you don’t try to hit me again,” I amended.
Savannah stuttered a laugh. “So this is a ceremony of healing for me too?” She reached over and pulled out her eagle feather from her pile of herb packets. “Tail feather,” she said, as if that was a bad thing. “Presumably I’m to be looking into the past while you’re meant to fly into the future. Selu, the corn mother, is laughing her ass off at me.”
Savannah sighed and her body relaxed. She met my eyes. “I can’t change the past. Like you, I can go only forward. Will you walk the Full Circle with me?”
“I will.”
She nodded tiredly. “Let us talk about the masks we wear, your cat and my . . . pride. And anger. And shame.”
* * *
* * *
Two hours later, we stopped and drank a decoction. It wasn’t awful. It was actually pretty good. “Aggie gives me tea that tastes like roots and twigs and silt from the bayou.”
“Aggie’s clans are from a different persuasion than mine. Aggie’s clans are from Eastern Cherokee and from Western Cherokee.” She sniffed as if that was a bad thing. “The Western band got mixed up with the Cree, the Choctaw, Seminole, Creek, and Chickasaw. Their Medicine Men and Elders took too much from other tribes, picking a bit of this and a bit of that. Their ways are not always the same as Eastern Cherokee, and their herbs are not the same.