Eighteen

The river was mesmerizing. Constantly moving, churning, alive as it swirled, curled, and twisted. Forever changing its patterns while remaining the same. It felt eternal, yet forever fresh.

Night Shadow Star could stare at it, entranced, as finger after finger of time passed. Given the overcast and the few falling flakes, the surface looked opaque, leaden, with a galena-like metallic sheen. At least until she craned her neck to stare straight into the depths. When she got the angle right she could see down into the murky transparency.

Red Reed, true to White Mat’s brag, slipped through the water like an arrow, steady as the Traders plied their paddles to keep them racing ahead of the main current. They proceeded past the tree-lined banks with a reassuring speed.

“Too bad the Father Water doesn’t run all the way to Cofitachequi,” Fire Cat noted from the seat beside her.

To her surprise, he’d picked up a paddle first thing and hadn’t let up. Working just as hard as the others. As if he were one of them and not a passenger like she was.

She shot a glance over her shoulder, looking back upriver.

Piasa whispered, “Say farewell to everything you ever knew.”

“Farewell,” she whispered, glancing over the side again to see if there was a blue glow in the water beneath them. The river was Piasa’s world. Down in those depths she’d come face-to-face with him the day she’d tried to kill Walking Smoke.

Right down there, in this same murky and streaming water.

For all she knew the Spirit Beast was keeping pace, racing along the bottom, his clawed feet disturbing the mud, moss, fish, and clams as he lurked under their keel.

“Yes, you understand.”

She took a deep breath of the cold air, watched her exhalation fog and vanish into the chill breeze.

“Kill me, Lord, and who brings down Walking Smoke? You need me to make it to Cofitachequi alive.”

The rest of the Traders were shooting uneasy glances her way. She closed her eyes, willed herself to be calm. To the others she said, “You’ve heard that Piasa possesses my souls?”

“Something,” White Mat said tersely.

“The beast devoured them when I sent them to the Underworld in search of my dead husband.” And then she lied. “You need to know that on this trip, you are doing Piasa’s bidding. You have his protection. Sometimes I lose this world. My souls drift. It is unsettling, I know, but after the first few times, you’ll become accustomed to it.”

“Whatever you say,” Half Root muttered uneasily from her seat behind Night Shadow Star.

Though she’d tried to say it nonchalantly, the woman might just as well have screamed her fear out loud.

“How will you win their trust?” Piasa wondered, his voice seeming to float in the air beside her.

She glanced again over her shoulder, looking upriver toward Cahokia. Everything she knew was back there. She had never traveled beyond The Chains, a day’s travel to the south. Hardly traveled more than a couple of days’ journey in any direction from the city, for that matter.

And here she was, headed at a rapid clip into the unknown. Into a world about which she had no clue. For the first time in her life, she was no longer Lady Night Shadow Star of the Morning Star House, of the Four Winds Clan, of the Sky Moiety. She had no House, no servants, no prestige or authority. On the river she was just a woman, nameless, helpless. Vulnerable.

That reality sent a sliver of fear into her. Yes, she had a couple of packs and a box of Trade, a couple of changes of clothes, one dress outfit, and a sack of her jewelry and paints. But beyond that?

“Who am I?” she asked plaintively, her half-panicked gaze on the roiling water they rode into the unknown.

“You have to ask that?” Fire Cat shot her a curious look.

“I mean, out here, on the river. Away from Cahokia.” To the Traders, she asked, “Who am I to you?”

“Lady?” White Mat shot a wary glance over his shoulder. “You’re, um … well, a Cahokian lady. Rich. High born. Makes us a little nervous. When Fire Cat came to us, we didn’t really know who you were. I mean, we’d heard of you, but never figured a lady like you would be offering Trade to travel with us.”

“Figured you were some Earth Clans noble, maybe a lesser family, you know?” Half Root added from behind.

“And then Crazy Frog tells us who you really are.” Shedding Bird almost shivered. “It’s like a sort of dream, huh? Kind of as if you’re not a real woman, just a magical legend. But here you are, and you’re real, and you keep talking to the Underwater Panther.”

“Still not real,” Made Man said from where he stroked his paddle next to Half Root. “And I’m right here behind you, seeing you in the flesh. Real. And unreal.”

Shedding Bird spread his arms. “Since we’re talking, why’d you need to pick us, Lady? We heard you were supposed to be in charge of that big flotilla of canoes and warriors. So, instead, one of the most important women in Cahokia hires us? Granted, it’s for more than we’ve ever been offered in Trade to carry anyone, but what’s the real reason you want us to take you up the Tenasee to the Shallows?”

“Anything special we need to know? Like who this Walking Smoke is who wants to kill you?” White Mat added.

“I want to go without anyone knowing who I am,” Night Shadow Star told them.

“Yes!” Piasa hissed in her ear.

“Well, sitting there like a regal matron, dressed like you are,” Half Root told her, “anyone with eyes in their head is going to know you’re not one of us. Not with a hawk-feather cloak and a garish piece of polished copper with its Spirit Bundle box pinned to your hair bun.”

“What would a normal woman do?”

Fire Cat had an amused look on his face.

“She’d be dressed in a Trader’s tunic,” White Mat said.

“Her hair would be in a braid like Half Root’s,” Made Man chimed in. “And she’d look like she had a job. Not like a passenger.”

Reaching up, Night Shadow Star pulled the long copper pins from her headpiece, removed it, and carefully laid it in her bag. Then she pulled her hair loose. With nimble fingers, she began braiding it.

“Night Shadow Star should be left back at Cahokia,” she declared. “I think it’s time I become someone else for a while.”

“Lady?” Fire Cat asked uneasily. “I mean, what’s Piasa think of that?”

“Unsettling as it might be, I think he’s purring.”

With that she removed her feather cloak, shuffled her packs, and located the spare paddle she’d seen in the canoe’s bottom. Lifting it, she inspected the long blade that ended in a pointed tip for poling. Word was that such a paddle wasn’t an unhandy tool in a fight, either.

“Uh, you ever used a paddle before, Lady?” Half Root asked.

“I spent some time in canoes as a girl,” she told them, then took a grip and joined their rhythm, letting the blade take a deep bite, water curling around the edges.

“You sure you want to do this?” Fire Cat asked.

“If we’re going to make time on the river, I can’t be Night Shadow Star. It will be a distraction at every colony we stop at. They’ll want to feast, celebrate my presence, try and use me and my position for any gain. Think it through. Fire Cat, you and I have to vanish. The best way to do that is to become Traders. And even Crazy Frog says we have some of the best people on the river to teach us how.”

On their seat up in the bow, White Mat and Shedding Bird were staring uneasily at each other. Now Shedding Bird looked back. “It’s hard work, Lady.”

“Fire Cat and I know the chances we’re taking. Maybe, doing it this way, our chances get a little better.”

“It’s your Trade,” Half Root told her. “We work for you on this trip. However you want to run it.”

“I want to make time,” Night Shadow Star told her, her arms warming to the effort of paddling. “Get us to your town on the Tenasee ahead of time, I’ll throw in a piece of copper plate.”

“Done,” White Mat agreed. “But you better know in advance, it’s going to be harder than you imagined. You just let us know what you want. One way or the other, and we’ll see to it.”

Every fiber of her being ached to order Red Reed to turn about, to paddle her back to Cahokia. Back to her safe palace and her familiar haunts. Down deep, she was afraid like she’d rarely been. Bad enough to be rushing headlong into the unknown. Now she couldn’t even do that as herself.

But being Night Shadow Star, traveling without escort, vulnerable, would make her a target for every chief on the rivers. Many hated the Morning Star House. Others would see her as the perfect hostage for ransom. Still others would want to use her as a lever for their own political advantage, not to mention that as a single woman of incredible status, every chief in the country would be pressing for a marriage.

“I need to learn to act like a Trader.” She glanced again at the banks as they rushed by. The dense gray mat of winter-bare trees gave way to sandstone bluffs on the east, their tops thickly forested with skeletal branches that almost vanished into the gray sky.

“Of course.”

But she could tell White Mat didn’t believe it.