Shadow Rites

Aggie scowled and, from a basket at her side, pulled a sprig of dried rosemary and held it to the fire. Rosemary hadn’t been a traditional Cherokee herb, having been brought by the first European settlers, but many medicine men and wise women of the Americas had incorporated anything that worked into their ceremonies, and rosemary had strong oils that performed well with many other herbs. The scent filled the sweat house as the dried leaves curled, sparked, and caught fire. Aggie placed the burning stem in the curved arc of the red clay tile, which she had turned concave side up, perfect to hold the blazing stem as the rosemary leaves burned to ash. The stem burned as well, and the sweat house was thick with the scent. When the rosemary was ash, she slanted her gaze at me and said, “I’m your elder. Or I was your elder. It was difficult for me to find out you’re older than lisi. It is doubly difficult to hear of your souls. There is no story in the histories to tell me what to do or how to help you. But it doesn’t matter. I will try to help one of The People who comes to me for wisdom. Breathe.”

She pulled another herb from the basket and extended that branch toward the fire as well. When it caught, she placed it too in the clay tile. The herb was something even stronger than rosemary, smelling of camphor. I sneezed three times in succession, which jarred my arm horribly. When I looked at it again, the abnormal shape-change had worsened, and now my elbow was involved, the joint trying to bend backward. I groaned in misery.

“Breathe!” Aggie demanded, and I breathed in the stink. In and out. In and out. She threw another branch on the fire, and I watched it flame and turn to ash. She repeated the command to breathe and burned small branches of the stinking herb until she had done it seven times. Then she lifted the clay tile and emptied the ash over her clay bowl and tapped it until the ashes were transferred. I had a bad feeling about what she was going to do with the stuff in that bowl.

Aggie burned three more herbs, these smelling of two varieties of mint and one that stank of creosote, adding the ashes to the bowl. She had a small pile of stinking ash, like a tiny volcano cone, in the bowl. She unscrewed a Mason jar, and the stench of moonshine filled the sweat house. She added a splash of that to the bowl too. With a whisk made of plants, she stirred the contents.

“Aggie,” I said, “none of those were Cherokee herbs.”

Her scowl deepened. “No. These are herbs suggested by a crazy old Navajo man. He’s one who saw the photos I sent of your last spell-instigated injury. He said they might help you attain a higher state of energy, one strong enough to reach inside and pull your own shape back out. I thought he meant a healed version of yourself. Only later, I realized he had to know you were a skinwalker or a were and he was seeing a maltransformation, not simply an injury. A dark magic spell might have brought about this particular problem, but the treatment would still be the same, no matter how it was acquired.” At my confused look, Aggie said, “Never mind. Maybe this will help. Maybe it won’t. So breathe and meditate and we’ll see what happens.”

I breathed, watching as she added something bluish green to the bowl’s mix; it looked like a small upside-down cup made from a wrinkled cactus, but without the spines. She took a pestle to the mix and ground it for a long time, adding more moonshine. And when she passed me the moonshine, ashes, and wrinkled green thingy, I didn’t refuse, question, or hesitate. I drank it down. The moonshine was so strong, I didn’t half notice the other tastes, though the texture was gag-worthy all on its own. I coughed and spluttered and thought my esophagus might catch fire, but it didn’t. It hit my stomach like a bomb going off, however, heat flaming back up, and I had to swallow it down again. This time, the vile concoction didn’t come back up. Instead the alcohol hit my system and I dropped down into a meditative trance, faster than I ever had. Almost as if the moonshine and other stuff pulled me down.

And down.

I fell into my soul home as if dropping though an opening in the roof and I landed beside the fire pit on all fours, Beast form. I/we shook myself, loose coat sliding across my frame.

We bent to the fire and breathed, the scent strong and warm, of cedar heartwood and hickory. Here, proper herbs had been burned on the flames, sage and sweetgrass. Tsalagi herbs, not that awful peyote. Peyote. I wasn’t certain how I knew that the greenish wrinkled cuplike thing was peyote, but it was. And I was having a drugged dream in my soul home.

I sat upright, front paws together, and studied the cave that represented my own soul, my spirit, a place of refuge and safety, which, on the surface, might seem to indicate that it should never change, but it did, and often, as a reflection of my life and what was happening to me. It was like a three-dimensional representation of my psyche.

Beast growled. Soul den. Place where Jane and Beast are one.

Yeah. Pretty much.

It was a cave in the real world, somewhere, because I had been there when I first changed into my bobcat form, helped along by my father and my grandmother. In that long-ago past, the cave walls and ceiling had been a grayish stone, the roof melting down in drops and spirals, soft and puddling, like melted candles, the rock seeming magical. The cave roof had cried the tears of the world in soft plinks, the sound of falling water merging with the drums and flute of my first change.

Since, it had become this representation, where I saw myself as I was, moment to moment, sometimes standing on four legs, sometimes on two. The shadows on the walls merging often into one, a form with no certain shape, both cat and human, furred and skinned, four-pawed and two-footed. A shadow shimmering with black motes of light.