Shadows Cast by Stars

you think you can do that for me?

Yes.

Good girl. You got to stay grounded, stay sane; and rest, real rest, will do that for you.

• • •

When I wake, the first thing I see is the monolith. Its gaze is an accusation: You should not have lived.

And then I blink. The monolith is in my mind. Only my mind. Somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better. My chest aches. I try to move, but I can’t.

Someone dabs my forehead with a damp cloth. Cedar. “Shh,” he murmurs. “You’re going to be okay.”

I try to nod, but my lungs are full of smoke and sweat and fear, so full there’s no room for air. I take another breath, and another, until I’m gasping and my sides hurt.

“Slow down,” Cedar says. “You’ll hyperventilate.”

Another face peers down at me. Henry Crawford. He doesn’t speak. He just looks at me, his face creased into its angry river, and then walks away.

“You’re on a stretcher,” Cedar explains as he gently runs the cloth over my forehead again. “Your right shoulder-it’s burned. You kept on having bad dreams where you were lashing out at something. We thought you’d hurt yourself, so we bound your arms. You’re safer this way.”

I don’t believe him. There is something wrong in his voice, something he isn’t telling me. “I want up,” I say, struggling against my bindings even though it hurts so badly. “Let me up. Let me up right now!”

“Okay, okay. Just hold still,” he says, but his voice trembles. He unbinds the straps that hold my arms and helps me sit up.

My head spins. Cedar steadies me until the spinning stops, but the pain inside of me, the invisible pain of losing Madda-will that be with me forever?

And then I remember: Plague. I pull up the sleeves of the old work shirt someone has dressed me in so I can inspect my skin for the telltale black pockmarks. Nothing. Through the pain and the dizziness, I try to remember how long it takes for the first symptoms of Plague to appear, but my mind is fuzzy, unfocused. I can’t seem to find the right piece of information. “The other men?” I force myself to say, because they’re the only things I can see clearly, lying there on the floor of the hut, the Plague marks marring their skin. “The men in the hut…”

“What about them?” Cedar’s voice is harsh, as if he’s fighting to control it.

“They had Plague.”

“Did they?” He squints at me. “That’s not what Henry Crawford says. He says they were sick with starvation.”

“But…”

Cedar leans in. “Starvation. That’s what Henry Crawford says. That’s what I say too.”

I close my eyes. How long? How long now, until the men begin to get sick?

If they get sick.

Maybe I was wrong, just like Cedar says. Maybe those men didn’t have Plague after all. Maybe they had something else, something I didn’t recognize, because I’m hardly a doctor. I don’t know everything. Starvation would be so simple, so easy to pin blame on. After all, we’re supposed to be immune to Plague. No wonder everyone believes Henry. I want to believe him too.

And yet, when we return to town, we carry the infection to everyone there. Hasn’t Henry thought of this? Hasn’t anyone?

“Cass.” Cedar brushes my hair back from my face. “It’s done. What’s done is done.”

He’s right. If we’re to die from Plague, we will. I can’t do anything about that, medicine woman or not, even if I wasn’t in this condition.

But infect everyone else? I can try to stop that.

I must stop that.

I dream.

I dream I follow Bran and Paul through an ancient forest. Tendrils of silver Old-Man’s Beard reach down to brush their heads. Their hands are bound. Their backs bear the stripes of a whip’s bite. Paul is hurt; he limps. Bran holds his head high, forced back stiffly in an effort to appear unafraid, but I can smell the truth.

Who leads them? I peer into the shadows of the forest to see men without souls, without totems. Shadowmen with teeth that gleam in the moonlight.

And then the ravens come, swooping through the cedars in droves, beating me with their coal- black wings, driving me back.

Away, away, they shriek. Away!

I smell the fire before I see it. Smoke licks at my skin like a snake tasting the air. I should run. But I can’t. The ravens fly around my head, shrieking, but I am rooted to the spot like an ancient tree. I will die here.

But the flame doesn’t come. A shadowman comes instead, with his ragged dorsal fin, his face that is part man, part orca.

Sea wolf, sea wolf, the ravens shriek.

“I’m not afraid of you,” I growl.

Oh no? the man says as he crouches down, primed to strike.

But before he does, I wake, drenched in sweat, panting, and with a mouth full of smoke.

The trip back is terrible. They feed me alcohol laced with willow bark so that when we stop at night, stars whirl above my head while my stomach heaves back and forth.

Three days ago I regained consciousness. How many days since we left the boundary? I don’t know. All I know is that I won’t take the whiskey anymore. Cedar pours it into a cup. He’s decided he’s my nurse.

“No,” I say when he eases me up and puts the cup to my lips. “It’s making me sick.”

“It’s making you better,” he says. He doesn’t take the cup away.

“I said, enough.” This time I use my good arm to push the cup away.

He sits back on his heels. “You’ll regret it later.”

“Maybe, but I don’t want any more. It’s poison.”

“Suit yourself,” he says, setting the cup on a stump. “I’m going to go hunt.” He grabs his rifle and stalks off.

Men mill about. An air of brooding hangs over them as they get ready for the night. Few look my way, but I hear them. Oh, I hear them as they whisper that the earthquake was my fault. It’s almost laughable. How could a girl cause an earthquake?

Until I hear one of them whisper, I saw her dancing. It was the dancing that did it.

Was it?

I don’t know. I remember becoming the sisiutl, and seeing the shadowman and the stench that accompanied him. I remember feeling sick, and then, yes, dancing- why dancing? It seems a strange thing to have done, though that’s what I did-but I was in the spirit world. How would dancing in the spirit world equate an earthquake in this one? I know that what happens in the spirit world has repercussions in ours, but an earthquake? It just doesn’t seem possible. Or plausible.

And yet, it happened.

What does that mean? What am I supposed to do with a power like that? Healing is one thing, but this? The ability to set the earth shaking?

They’re wrong. They’re crazy. It wasn’t me. And just to prove it, I lift my foot and gently set it down. Nothing- no shudders, or tremors, or swaying trees. Nothing at all. I try it again, fearing what might happen, but I need to know. I need to know if it was me, if I’m capable of such destruction.

I wish Madda were here right now. I don’t understand this. I don’t understand how I could have done such a thing. I didn’t know! If I had, I would have stopped dancing…