Trickster's Girl: The Raven Duet Book #1

CHAPTER 5


IT WASN’T TILL AFTER LUNCH that Kelsa set out for the Sawtooth Mountains. She was getting tired of peanut butter.

She thought Raven had genuinely tried to explain the exact nature of the leys. The problem was, the leys weren’t an exact sort of thing.
“How much do you know about acupuncture?” he’d asked.
She’d blinked in surprise. “Not a lot. There are currents of energy in the human body. They’ve photographed them, you know. Just eight years ago, on a full-spectrum electromagnetic scanner.”
He looked startled. “They can see chi now?”
“If they use the right scanner they can,” Kelsa confirmed. “They still don’t know why stimulating particular points … Oh.”
“Exactly,” Raven said. “What you’re doing with the leys is planetary acupuncture.”
That almost made sense, sort of. But when she’d asked him where the next nexus was, the analogy fell apart. Acupuncture points were always in the same place, and the nexuses…
“It’s sort of like plumbing.” Raven gestured with half a peanut-butter cracker. “A clog can occur anywhere in the pipe, and the flow through the pipe is weakened. Clogs might be more likely to occur where the pipe bends or there’s a valve or something, but they can happen anywhere. And sometimes running a lot of water through the pipe is enough to ease the constriction, but sometimes, like here, you have to be right on top of the clog and break it apart.”
Kelsa had grasped that, mostly, though she didn’t like hearing that he couldn’t tell her where all the nexuses would be, or even how many there were. His best guess was a vague “certainly fewer than a dozen.” Between Craters and the end of the ley. In Alaska.
“I can call Mother and ask if I can stay with Aunt Sarabeth a few more weeks,” Kelsa told him. “I think she’ll agree. And if I call home on a regular basis, Mom probably won’t call my aunt.”
In fact, her mother would be as glad to have Kelsa out of the house as Kelsa was to be gone. A small part of her heart ached at that thought, so she pushed it aside.
“But how can I plan our route if I don’t know where the nexus points are? And what are we going to do for money?”
This was her third day on the road, and by her rough tally she’d spent over a hundred and fifty dollars.
Raven’s gaze shifted aside. “Why don’t you leave that to me?”
“Why don’t you find some brainless groupie to complete your quest? I want to know where I’m going.”
The school counselor had told Kelsa that becoming an “overcontroller” was a natural response to the chaos and disruption caused by a death in the family. She said that as long as Kelsa recognized where her need to control her life and the people around her was coming from, she probably wouldn’t become too big a pain in the ass.
Her counselor had some good moments, but Kelsa wasn’t about to let someone else take control of her life right now. Especially not someone whose handsome dark eyes weren’t meeting hers.
“I can tell you roughly where the next nexus will be,” he said. “It’s somewhere around Flathead Lake.”
Kelsa had never been that far north. “That’s in Montana, isn’t it?” She unclipped her father’s … her new com pod and brought up a road map. His screen was bigger than hers had been, but not by much, which was why people used boards for detailed work. “We’ll have to go back to I-15,” she said. “But after that it’s a straight shot—”
“I want you to take a different road,” Raven said. “Through the Sawtooth Mountains.”
Kelsa squinted at the small map. She could see that route, but…
“It would keep us from backtracking, but it would probably take more time than just getting back on the highway.”
“I’ve been in the Sawtooths,” Raven told her. “They’re beautiful.”
Kelsa laid the com pod aside. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Well, mostly, I want you to follow the Salmon River. It starts in the Sawtooths and runs right beside the road most of the way to Flathead Lake. By the time you get to its end you’d have a real affinity for the river, and you could call on water to open the next nexus.”
“Call on water? I thought the nexus here was an ‘earth nexus.’”
“It was,” said Raven. “This time. But the part I wasn’t telling you is that I’m going to send you through the mountains on your own. If I fly by the shortest route, I should reach Flathead Lake around the same time you do.”
“And that way,” Kelsa said slowly, “you wouldn’t have to worry about the Idaho-Montana border. You do realize that I have to be granted government permission, which I don’t have, to exit the U.S. and enter Canada? And that in Canada, as foreign nationals, they’ll be checking our PIDs—which you don’t have—all the time?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Kelsa had serious doubts about that—and he still wasn’t telling her everything. But short of quitting the quest and walking away there wasn’t much she could do about it. And she couldn’t quit.
She’d seen pictures of the kill zone in the Amazon, not only in her father’s journals but in d-vid on the news.
The tall dead trunks were already decaying, because several other bacteria, which had burgeoned naturally in the wake of the first, were eating them away. In the heavy tropical rain it looked like the forest was melting, as if it had been sprayed with acid.
She hadn’t been able to stop the cancer that had killed her father. Faith healing wouldn’t have worked. Nothing she could do would have saved him, no matter what her mother believed.
If she could do something to stop this corrosive cancer from spreading through the world, she had to try.
***

The flatlands before she reached the Sawtooths held grazing cattle, then turned to farmland. One of the farms she passed raised llamas, and the babies danced clumsily around their mothers like knitted puppets.

Kelsa stopped at a flash station and topped up her charge before heading up into the Sawtooths—more expensive than an overnight charge, but a lot less time-consuming than stopping to spread out the solar sheets if she ran out of juice. Solar sheets that wouldn’t have done any good today, anyway, since clouds were gathering over the peaks.
The Sawtooths were beautiful: jagged volcanic crags with snowbanks on their highest slopes. It was spitting snow on Galena Pass, and Kelsa turned up the heat control in her biking jacket and pants. Those tempcontrols worked better than those in most of her coats because her father had paid for quality.
“You may not need good tempcontrol outerwear often,” he’d said. “But when you need it, you need it.”
Of course once she’d gone over the pass the sun came out, and she had to turn it all off and unzip for a while to let the fresh mountain air blow through.
The Salmon River started as a tiny, chuckling creek. Kelsa wouldn’t have noticed it if not for the sign on a bridge where the road crossed over. But as the sun sank and the road swerved gently down, more creeks and streams flowed in.
By dusk the Salmon was a rushing cataract, huge by Utah standards, and the road ran right beside it down the valley it had carved.
Kelsa found a fishermen’s campground that didn’t charge too much for a night’s camping, and she pitched her tent there, falling asleep with the roar of the river in her ears.
She was so tired of peanut butter that she splurged on breakfast in a small café near the campground—cheaper, when she wasn’t feeding Raven. Whatever he really was, he ate like a teenage boy.
She made up bits of river incantations as she rode down out of the mountains.
Rolling water, carrying life with you. Carver of mountains.
It was still fairly early when Kelsa reached the flatland and joined state road 93. The rocky, wooded slopes of the mountains gave way to volcanic soil, whose colors reminded her of the red-rock deserts of southern Utah, though these crumbling slopes were completely different geologically. It was still before lunchtime when the road emerged from the technicolor buttes, and the broad valley that held the town of Salmon opened up before her.
In town, she discovered she’d come far enough north to catch up with spring. Lilacs and fruit trees that had stopped blooming weeks ago in Provo were in full blossom here.
If she reached Alaska, when she reached Alaska, would she catch up with winter again? The prospect was both enchanting and scary.
Kelsa stopped at a small grocery store and bought a stock of energy bars, protein sticks, and heat-in-can soup—though she knew from experience that she’d get tired of these foods even more quickly than she tired of peanut butter.
The storage space on her bike was limited, but she added a couple of plastic-wrapped sandwiches for future meals and a premade salad for today’s lunch. She was beginning to hunger for fresh food, and the lettuce in these grocery-store salads was less dubious than the ones they sold in flash centers.
She got back onto 93 and went north toward the lake, with the Salmon River racing beside the road. Kelsa had ridden for half an hour and passed through the small town of North Fork, when she realized that the river looked much smaller.
Were they pulling out water for the farms? But the Salmon now appeared to be running in the other direction, back toward town.
You can follow the river all the way to Flathead Lake.
Frowning uneasily, Kelsa turned her bike and rode back to North Fork.
It was hard to follow a river through a town, even a river the size of the Salmon in a town that was relatively small. The streets followed their own straight grid, and the river kept swerving away from them.
But soon she found the place where the main branch of the Salmon flowed out of town … to the east, followed by a small county road.
Did it curve through the hills and valleys and rejoin the main road later?
Kelsa pulled off the road into a shaded glade, took out her com pod, and pulled up a map. The long straight rift that held the road leading to Flathead Lake certainly looked as if the Salmon flowed along it. There was even a note in very fine print that said the river she’d followed to the north was the Salmon. What was going on here?
She closed the road map and went into the net. It took some wading through the data pools, but she finally came up with a river runner’s map of Idaho and Montana. The river that ran along 93 north of town was the North Fork of the Salmon River. After this it continued flowing east, and then south through an area where there were no roads at all, and eventually it emptied into the Snake River near the Oregon border. It never even came close to Flathead Lake.
Raven had lied to her. Lied about the river’s course, at the very least. But something had happened at Craters of the Moon. Something that was neither a lie nor a crazed hallucination on her part. According to the news-net, that earthquake had scored a 2.7 on the Richter scale and been felt for hundreds of miles. And when reporters asked geologists why no one had predicted it, the geologists had been very defensive about how reliable their equipment usually was.
He’d said he would meet her at Flathead Lake, so Kelsa decided to go there. And see what he had to say for himself. Then she would decide if—magic or no magic—she wanted to do something as big and crazy as biking to Alaska with a partner who lied.
Back on 93, the Salmon grew smaller and smaller and then disappeared as the road climbed into the high mountains once more.
The Montana-Idaho border station was at the top of Trail Pass, and Kelsa’s fantasy of catching up with winter stopped looking so unlikely. Snowdrifts dripped, and meltwater ran down the ditches on either side of the road. The long white streaks of ski slopes decorated nearby peaks.
Kelsa was so angry with Raven that she presented her PID and crossed the border with barely a thought for the record of her travels being created.
It was only 4 p.m. when she saw the campground beside Bitterroot Creek, but the name struck her as appropriate and she was tired. She might have reached Flathead Lake before dark, but why should she put herself out to be on time for someone who lied to her?
The next morning, still seething, she ate a leisurely breakfast of energy bars, and then she packed up and pulled out onto the road. It was midmorning by the time she came over a hill and around a bend, and Flathead Lake burst into view.
Kelsa had grown up only a few miles from the marshy shore of Utah Lake. Camping with her father, biking with him, hiking together—she’d seen dozens, maybe hundreds of mountain lakes. Flathead took her breath away.
She could see only one end of it, for it stretched around a curve in the mountains that ringed it. Bluer than the sky, dotted with tiny tree-furred islands, it was the most beautiful lake she’d ever set eyes on.
She was so busy gawking that she missed the scenic turnout, placed there to allow drivers to pull off and gawk at the lake. She turned the bike and rode back up the hill on the shoulder, parked at the turnoff, and then just sat and stared.
When she’d finally looked her fill, Kelsa started downhill toward the lake. There had to be campgrounds there. In fact there were, but it took her the better part of the morning to find one that was state run, and therefore reasonably cheap.
She was sitting on a picnic table, gazing over the shimmering water and eating a slightly stale sandwich, when she heard Raven walk up behind her.
She didn’t turn around.
“You’re later than I expected.” The cretinous bastard had the gall to sound miffed. “Did something delay you?”
“You might say that,” Kelsa told him coldly. “You see, I was following the Salmon River. Like my partner told me to. Until it went in another direction entirely!”
Her voice rose at the end, and Raven winced. He must have gotten his clothing off her bike, for he was decently dressed. He could carry his own clothes now too!
“Sorry about that,” he said. “I wanted you off the highway, and I thought following the river from its source sounded romantic.”
Kelsa met his gaze and held it. “Why did you want me off the highway? And if you spin me some carpo answer, I’m walking away from this right now.”
She could happily spend the next week here and make her way home with no one the wiser. At least until her mother and Aunt Sarabeth compared notes, and with any luck that wouldn’t happen for a long time.
She might even tell her mother the truth when she got home—well, part of the truth. She probably shouldn’t be too self-righteous about lying. But she wasn’t about to admit that to the slippery bastard in front of her. Not when she finally had him on the hook.
He must have read the determination on her face, for his shoulders sagged.
“All right. You deserve the truth. I was trying to put it off until you were really committed, because I was afraid it might … ah, discourage you.”
“What truth?” Kelsa demanded.
Raven grimaced. “The truth is, not everyone approves of what I’m, we’re, doing. I have enemies among my … fellow spirits, I guess you’d call them. They—”
“Let me guess,” Kelsa cut in. “They’re trying to stop the quest! How terrible. How romantic. I bet that’ll suck her in. How stupid do you think I am?”
“I think you’re quite bright, for a human,” Raven said cautiously. “That’s one of the reasons I picked you. And I really haven’t lied—”
“What about—”
“I just haven’t told you the whole truth,” he went on. “Once you blew open that nexus at TuTimbaba my enemies knew I’d found someone. They’ll have assumed we’d go on to Glacier National Park and do an ice calling there, but there are plenty of glaciers down the ley, and I thought—”
“So this isn’t even the next nexus? You lied about that too?”
“I thought that if they wasted their time setting up a trap for you in Glacier, maybe we could get far enough to keep ahead of them for a while. In this world they have to use their physical forms, as I do, and only a few of them can fly.”
He sounded so serious that doubts began to rise in Kelsa. If he wasn’t lying…
“Setting a trap for me? What does that mean?”
“Nothing fatal,” he said hastily. “At least, not yet. The same rules that bind me also bind them. Just as I can only guide and coach you, they aren’t allowed to simply kill you or attack you and take the pouch away. And all of us are forbidden to work magic that violates the physical laws of this world. If nothing else it would weaken the leys too much, and they’re weak enough already.”
“Go back to the part where your enemies are setting a trap for me,” Kelsa told him. “Why would they want to stop me? And if they can’t kill or attack me, why should I worry about them?”
“I said they couldn’t attack you. Themselves. There are plenty of ways they can interfere with the quest. And with any luck they’re still lurking around the glaciers setting them up, and just beginning to wonder why we haven’t arrived there yet.”
“But if that’s where the nexus is…”
Raven made a helpless, groping gesture. “A nexus isn’t a fixed point, it’s a process. A place in the ley where power is pushed forward and amplified. Some places lend themselves to power more willingly than others—we’re on the outskirts of the ley here, not in the center. But almost any point the ley touches is, or can become, a nexus. It depends a lot on you. I was thinking we could go past Glacier and then veer back to the deeper parts of the ley, maybe ride up to Crowsnest Pass. If you can pull the power from there, drag it past any lag points by calling it to you, that will work fine. And it will catch the doubters flat-footed, because they’d never believe you could pull power that far! I wouldn’t have believed it till I felt what you did in that cave. Before that”—he offered her a tentative version of the charming smile—“we were all underestimating you. Now they’re not, and that makes them far more dangerous. Whatever else you think I’m lying about, you’d better believe that. Do you?”
“I’ll think about it.”
Kelsa picked up the remains of her lunch and walked away. For once, he had enough sense not to follow her.
***

Kelsa spent the rest of the day thinking about what Raven had said, and what she concluded was … she didn’t need him.

Oh, if she chose to go on she’d need him to tell her where the ley was. She wasn’t even sure those convenient enemies existed. When she’d asked Raven why anyone would want to keep her from healing the leys, he hadn’t answered. And even if these so-called enemies did exist, he’d admitted that they couldn’t attack her.
Any point the ley touches can become a nexus. If she performed the healing magic here, using this glorious lake, and it worked … If she felt the same thing she had in the cave, or a tidal wave swept over the town she’d passed through at the lake head the moment she spoke, then she’d know he was telling the truth about her working some sort of magic.
She had only his word for what it did. For all she knew, she could be summoning the tree plague instead of immunizing these forests against it.
Yet … In most of those old myths, despite his lies and trickery, Raven had been one of the sprits that helped humanity. Though not necessarily the individual human he was dealing with.
Of course, she also had only his word for his identity in the first place.
When Kelsa went to bed that night, lake incantations seeped into her dreams.
***

Kelsa was camped in the lakeshore forest, so the sun didn’t hit her tent to wake her at dawn. It was past eight when she emerged, but that worked in her favor. The fishermen had all gone out, and the campground was quiet.

The stretchie she slept in was long enough for decency without her jeans on, and she topped it with not only her therma knit, but a jacket as well. She’d splashed in enough mountain lakes to know what the temperature of the water would be.
She ran through possible incantations in her head while she dressed. None of the lines that had come to her while she was riding beside the river worked now, which made her angry with Raven all over again.
Kelsa hadn’t brought water shoes, since they weren’t part of her camping or biking gear, so she’d either have to go barefoot or get her shoes wet. It would depend on what the lake bottom looked like.
By the time she’d walked down to the shore, the chill morning air was nipping her bare legs. If her torso hadn’t been warm she’d have been shivering.
The water was clear as glass; the rippling waves distorted her view of the bottom without concealing it: jagged rocks with a coating of silt. Slippery silt, no doubt. Better to cope with wet shoes for a day than to break a toe if she slipped, or cut her foot on some sharp-edged, hidden bit of trash.
Kelsa looked around. No late-rising fishermen. No dark-haired boys watching from a distance. No giant black bird perched in the nearby trees.
She’d seen a number of real ravens, or maybe crows, on the road over the last few days, but none of them was half Raven’s size.
Unless he could make himself even smaller?
The hell with him. She had a test to run.
After a moment’s hesitation—the mind was willing, but her feet still shrank from it—Kelsa took her first step into the icy water. Because she was braced for it, she didn’t yelp, but she had to grit her teeth against the sound as freezing meltwater poured into her shoes.
What part of “glacial lake” didn’t you understand? She’d been seven or eight when her father had spoken those words, attempting to go for a swim after a long hot ride. How he’d laughed…
Kelsa stopped, the icy water momentarily forgotten. This was the first memory of her father, untainted by his illness, that had come to her in … she could barely remember back that far. Was she beginning to heal, the way everyone said she would?
But for now, she had another act of healing to perform.
As always, the first step had been the hardest. With only a few gasps for the temperature, Kelsa waded out till the rippling water almost reached the bottom of her stretchie. She looked back at the shore, thirty or forty feet away. If she wasn’t “surrounded” by the lake now, she’d have to be scuba diving to make it work.
She tried to put the cold out of her mind as she reached out to the lake with her senses, but the cold was part of it, the heart of its icy crystal depths. Sunlight danced on the surface and the small waves rocked her body. It seemed precarious on the slippery stones.
It was freezing and perfect and beautiful; she felt so alive she could hardly bear the joy of it. Kelsa untied the medicine bag. The words came to her, simpler than she’d expected. Powerful only in their truth.
“Water, mother of life, cold and clear. Run clear and strong, healing all you touch.”
She cast a pinch of sand into the waves, and a sudden gust of wind sent waves slapping against the shore.
“Forgive us, please, and heal. Heal and be strong!”
This time she was braced for it. This time she felt the power run through the lake, through her own body, in a great shimmering wave.
She was laughing in delight when the sudden swell knocked her off her feet, and shrieking from the cold when she splashed back to the surface. She’d barely managed to keep her grip on the medicine bag.
She waded back to the shore, dripping and swearing. She was soaked. The medicine bag was soaked.
She’d done it.
Raven stood on the shore, waiting for her, a disapproving frown on his face. “I didn’t know you were going to do that. You should have consulted me.”
“Th-that’s what makes it a valid test.” Kelsa’s teeth had begun to chatter.
“I intended for you to call on water somewhere in Canada. There are plenty of lakes there.”
“Not like th-th-this one,” Kelsa told him. The morning air on her cold wet skin was warmer than the lake, though not by much. She squeezed some of the water out of her dripping hair and glared back at him.
The scowl vanished, and a searching look took its place. “For you, was this the lake that holds the spirit of all lakes? The perfect, ideal lake?”
“I guess.” But it was. She’d known that from the moment she saw it, even if she wouldn’t have put it in quite those words.
“Then that’s why you could … Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“If I don’t, it’s because you never tell me anything. I came to heal the ley. Did I heal it?”
“Heal … You did more than just heal it. You dragged the main current of the ley into a new channel! You opened a brand-new nexus where none had ever existed! Every shifter on the planet will have felt that, and my enemies—”
“Your so-called enemies,” Kelsa scoffed.
“—will be on our trail like a wolf pack. You were in danger before, but now—”
“Now they’ll know that humans can heal your precious leys, so they’ll have no reason to stop me!”
“Ahh!” Raven buried both hands in his thick black hair and pulled. Kelsa had heard of people tearing at their hair in exasperation, but she’d never seen anyone do it. Another habit from the time when people said “tarnation”?
“If you don’t believe anything I tell you,” Raven said, “then why have you come this far? Why are you doing this? And if you do believe me about the leys, then why—”
“I didn’t come because of you,” Kelsa told him. “I came because of my father. Because we didn’t try everything.”
For the first time since their argument began, Raven actually looked at her. “What do you mean, you didn’t try everything?”
Kelsa’s eyes burned. It wasn’t any of his business, but the words spilled over anyway. “My mother wanted my father to go to a retreat. To try faith healing. That’s where—”
“I know what faith healing is,” Raven said.
“Dad didn’t believe in it. He wanted to stay home. To spend whatever time he had left with us.” The tears were falling again. Kelsa didn’t care. “I sided with him. But now … All this…” She gestured to the sun-drenched lake, the magic it implied. “Would it have worked?” she whispered. “Could that kind of magic have cured him?”
She hoped Raven would deny it. Instead he frowned thoughtfully. “Where was this retreat?”
“In Minnesota. Not far from Minneapolis.”
“Then no,” said Raven. “It wouldn’t have worked.”
“How can you be sure?” Kelsa demanded. Was he lying to her again?
“Because Minnesota is too far from a major ley for any human to tap it,” Raven said. “That’s what your faith healing is. Humans, however clumsily, tapping into the power of a major ley. Even if the leys weren’t so damaged … No. Going to this faith retreat in Minnesota wouldn’t have saved him. I’m certain of that.”
The rush of relief was so great, Kelsa’s knees weakened. She’d been right. Her father had been right. She hadn’t prevented him from trying something that might have worked.
She scrubbed a hand across her cheeks, though the water dripping from her hair was enough to conceal her tears. “Anyway, that’s why I’m going on. I couldn’t save him. So I have to save what I can.”
“I suppose that’ll do.”
Raven stepped forward and laid a hand on Kelsa’s head. She was about to pull away when she felt the water retreat from his touch, as if repelled by some antiwater magnetic charge. Drops fell faster from the hem of her shirt as dryness crept down from the top of her head. At last it poured out of her shoes, leaving her with puddles around her feet and completely dry clothing, though the flesh beneath it was still chilled.
“Thanks.” It was the only word her stunned brain could produce.
“It’s nothing. Or at least, it didn’t take much. We’d better get on the road. Our enemies certainly know where we are, and the road from Glacier connects with ours up ahead. I’ll ride with you today.”
“All right.” If they rode together, maybe she could get him to answer some questions. Like why the shapeshifters hadn’t—
“Wait a minute. If humans can use the leys for healing, why didn’t you tell us about this? Centuries ago? My father could have been cured!”