Traitor's Son: The Raven Duet Book #2 (8 page)

“No, I came on my own—for all the good it did! He won’t even give me a chance to explain, much less give Dad a chance! How can he abandon his own son over a . . . a political difference?”

“Not all political differences are trivial,” his grandmother said. “The fact that it was his own son who broke the Native corporations, and then turned around and represented the resort . . . It made the whole thing much worse than if it had been some stranger. And he didn’t blame you for it. He tried . . .”

The memory of camping in bug-filled woods, being hideously seasick in a fishing boat that tossed like a cork on the Arctic Ocean, and dozens of feasts, dances, and ceremonies in the village house rose up between them. Jase had been uncomfortable and embarrassed in turn, until one day . . . He’d been, what, twelve? Thirteen? One day he’d made some gaffe in the meeting hall, which he still didn’t understand, and his grandfather had explained for what felt like the hundredth time that Jase was “one of the lost ones,” and his grandfather was going to heal his spirit and make him whole. Jase’s temper finally snapped. At least he’d had the sense to drag his grandfather outside before he told him that he wasn’t “lost” at all. That his father had been right. That it was ridiculous to live in the Stone Age when you had other choices.

Later, after his grandfather had called his mother to come pick him up, Jase had tried to point out that the resort had poured money into the area, and provided people with more paths than they’d had before.

“The only paths he can see are the ancient ones,” he told his grandmother bitterly. “And if you can’t allow new paths to be created, then Dad’s right and it’s time to abandon the whole thing for a good career and a—”

“A life in the real world,” his grandmother finished. “You shouldn’t be afraid to say it to me, love. I’ve been listening to your father and grandfather fight since your father was your age. Younger! But the problem wasn’t that your grandfather couldn’t expand the old beliefs to take in modern choices. It’s that he wanted his son to take the shaman’s path too. And your father is a trader.”

“I suppose that’s one way to think of a lawyer,” Jase admitted.

“All the paths have different aspects, different branches.” A weary note crept into his grandmother’s voice. “He was so set on his son’s becoming a shaman, he wouldn’t even teach him the proper way of the trader. If he had . . .”

“Dad would have been an even sharper lawyer than he is,” Jase said, hoping to lighten her mood. “I know what they said about Ananut traders: If you see one coming, hold on to your trade goods with both hands!”

His grandmother laughed. “I was thinking about the other one, that an Ananut trader will clean you out faster than a whole pack of squirrels. But that’s not the truth. Do you know the first rule of the trader path?”

“No.”

“It’s that a good trade must respect the craftsmen’s work, on both sides, so everyone leaves the deal proud and satisfied. It’s balanced. Equal. The best traders could walk around the entire trade circle, coming home without a single item they left with, but the value would be exactly equal. Because if you came back with goods that were more valuable, you insulted the craftsmen whose goods you’d set out with, implying the craftsmen of other tribes did better work. And if you came back with lesser value, that implied the trade goods your own people made were so shoddy you practically had to give them away!”

“So, this way, whatever he brought back, the trader claimed the value was equal? Because no craftsman would ever admit that other people did better work. So no matter what he came back with, no one bitched at the trader.”

“No one ever claimed the Ananut traders were stupid.” Laughter glinted in the old dark eyes. “And who can really say if a sharp halibut hook is more valuable than a good pair of boots? Or a satchel of dried salmon worth more or less than a bladder of seal oil? But the part about the trade being balanced . . . Your father never learned that.”

“Lawyers don’t do balance,” said Jase. “It’s the system as a whole that’s supposed to provide that, by having a lawyer on each side.”

His father had told his grandfather, over and over, that the Ananut corporation needed a better lawyer.

“But you let me in, anyway,” Jase went on. “You let Mom in.”

“I’d let your father in, if he’d overcome his own stubborn pride and come home,” said his grandmother. “They’re very alike, in that way.”

They were. Jase sighed.

“Why did you come?” his grandmother asked. “After the last time, I thought it would be at least six months before you came back. And Helen said that Nadia said you were shouting something about ‘shaman business.’ I thought you thought that kind of thing was . . . quaint.”

“I did. I do! But . . . Gima, did those old Native shamans have some sort of magic? Really?”

He felt ridiculous just asking the question, in the modern rainy reality of the shuttle dock.

His grandmother was silent for a moment. Then she said, “My grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, could whistle for wind. I saw her do it, when I was a girl, out berrying. We’d climbed the hill behind the village to that big berry patch. I took you there once, remember?”

Jase did. He’d been stung by a bee and rubbed a blister on his heel.

“She brought a blanket,” his grandmother continued, “and four big plastic buckets. All of us, me and Leah and Janny and your great-uncle Arthur, we picked and picked. When the buckets were full, she spread out the blanket and made us sit on the corners to hold it, even though there was no wind. It was one of those misty days, when the fog drifts and everything is still.”

The patter of rain on the canopy sounded very loud.

“Then she began to whistle,” his grandmother said. “Not the sharp whistle you use to call someone back from the beach, but soft and breathy. The notes went up and down, very simple. But the wind came. First it ruffled my bangs. Then it began to blow harder and we all put on our jackets, and Arthur put his hands over his ears to keep them warm. Janny’s ponytail got all tangled, and later, when Mother was combing it out, she said that Grandee did it.”

His grandmother smiled, but the wonder was there in her eyes.

“When the wind was very strong, strong enough to make my jacket whip, she lifted up the buckets we’d filled and poured out the berries, and as they fell the wind blew all the leaves and bugs and twigs away, so only the hard round berries fell to the blanket. After she’d spilled out the last bucket she stopped whistling, and the wind died away. And we poured the berries out of the blanket and back into the buckets, and went home and froze them. Later, my mother and Aunt Mishka made them into jam. She was an old woman, and I was only four, but I remember.”

If anyone else had told that story Jase wouldn’t have believed it. His grandmother . . .

“Thanks, Gima. That helps. That helps a lot.”

She smiled and let the silence return. She was better at silence than Jase, and a moment later he started talking about how his parents were doing, and asked about her knitting co-op. She asked him about school, about his driving job, and if he’d paid off “that car” yet.

But all the while, the back of Jase’s mind was assimilating the fact that if Native magic was real, if their wise women could summon the wind, if their spirits could shift from girl to bird and back again—then maybe Raven was telling the truth. And if she was . . .

He wanted no part of it.

***

It was just past noon the next day, and the sun was shining down on Anchorage, when Jase pulled into his own driveway. He’d finally stopped driving and taken a room at Tok, but he’d still had trouble sleeping. When he wasn’t carrying on an imaginary argument with his grandfather (in which the old man was forced to admit he was wrong on every point) Jase thought about Raven.

If magic really existed, could she be telling the truth about the rest of it?

Alien shapeshifters, at war with his own world over . . . What was it? Leys?

Jase had been so shocked by her transformation, he hadn’t paid enough attention to what she’d said. And even if Gima’s grandmother could whistle up the wind, that didn’t mean there really were shapeshifters. From another dimension, that shared rivers of magical power with this world. Right.

Maybe she’d hypnotized him?

After a restless night, from which he woke way earlier than he’d wanted to, Jase resolved again to let the whole thing go.

Which didn’t stop adrenaline from slamming into his bloodstream when Raven stepped around the side of his garage and waited for him to pull the car up.

He had to stop to raise the garage door, and on a day this beautiful the top was down.

“Where have you been?” Exasperation poured off her in waves. And where he went was none of her business. Jase didn’t owe her any explanations. But as she leaned over the passenger door, he couldn’t help but notice that her top was both tighter and lower cut than the others she’d worn.

“I thought I’d give you a night to think it over,” she continued with less heat. “And that maybe we should talk somewhere quieter than your school. But when I got here the next morning you’d vanished! I’ve been checking back since yesterday.”

“My parents will be here,” Jase said. His heart was pounding. Fear? Or something else, mixed with it.

“They left about an hour ago,” she said. “With a couple of tall bags of shiny metal rods, with thick blades on the ends.”

“Golf clubs.” The fact that she didn’t seem to know what they were added weight on the alien side of the scale, and despite his wariness, Jase’s curiosity roused. He put the garage door up and saw that his mom’s car and both parents’ golf bags were gone.

Raven stood away from the car as he drove in and parked. He kept an eye on her in the rear-vision projector, and saw that although she took a step toward the garage, she didn’t follow him in. He could put the door down. Escape into the locked house.

She was giving him the choice.

That made up his mind, and he turned the motor off and came back out into the sunlight where she waited.

“Follow me.” He led her around the house and up the steps to the deck. Even an alien-shapeshifter-hypnotist had to stop a moment to take in the view.

“It’s gorgeous at night too,” Jase told her, as she gazed out over the basin that held the city. “The lights spread out like a . . . a glowing carpet.”

That hadn’t come out as beautiful as it was, but he couldn’t think of a better way to say it. He sat down on one of the shaded benches and waited for her.

“I saw it last night,” she said. “It looks even bigger then. And for its size, it’s astonishingly clean. For most of your history, a city half that size would have been a cesspool. Or a toxic furnace.”

She sounded as if she’d seen those cities herself, and Jase’s skin prickled.

“You’re not, like, immortal or something. Are you?”

“No.” She smiled at that and came to sit beside him. “I can die. Beyond that, it gets complicated. But I wanted to explain, now that you’ve had some time to adjust to the idea, why healing the leys matters so much. To both your world and mine.”

She didn’t look like an alien, smiling at him from the other side of the bench.

“Do you really come from another world?” Jase held her gaze steadily as he spoke. Though if she was an alien, would he be able to tell if she was lying?

“Yes.”

“What’s it like?”

She sighed. “In some ways much like this one, in others utterly different. But what I said about the leys being vital to its survival, that was true. And they’re vital to your survival too! If they’re not healed, that tree plague your terrorists started won’t stop spreading. And you know what will happen then.”

“They’re not my terrorists,” said Jase. “And no one knows for certain what the tree plague will do. We’ve survived ecological disasters before.”

Raven’s brows snapped together. “Those disasters are a large part of what damaged the leys so badly in the first place! How can you be so . . .”

She took a deep breath and brought the smile back. “I’m sorry. You modern humans were trying to mend the damage, before this plague got loose. That’s the exact point I keep trying to make to the others.”

“Others?” Jase asked. “Those enemies you were talking about?”

For an alien, she had a really nice smile.

“Some of them. One of the ways our world is like yours is that we have politics too,” Raven said ruefully. “Not elections or that kind of thing, but . . .”

“People politics,” Jase helped her out.

“Exactly. And that’s why it’s so important for you to heal the leys.”

“So heal them,” said Jase. “I won’t stop you. If you have enough magic, or whatever, to change shape, you’ve got to be able to heal stuff better than I can.”

There, that got him out of it. It was true, too.

“Unfortunately,” said Raven, with another of those warm smiles, “that’s where the problems come in. You need to understand, the others’ point of view is that humans have been poisoning these leys, on which our world depends, for centuries. In the last few centuries it was acute, and we were forced to expend our own power like crazy just to make up for some of what you were doing. And our power isn’t infinite, any more than yours is. The power we spent cleaning up after you could have gone to serve other needs, and the higher the price of the cleanup went, the angrier everyone got about humans and your world. Then it got better, for a short time, but this tree plague was the last straw. A lot of my people really want to see humans destroy themselves, even if it means weakening the leys still further. They say it’s so you can’t keep doing it, over and over forever. But really, it’s anger over the past as well. Some of them feel very strongly on the subject.”

Jase shivered. A bunch of powerful aliens, hating all humanity, had never turned out well in any d-vid he’d seen.

Raven moved to sit closer, sharing her warmth as she looked at the bustling city. Ships moved smoothly in and out of the harbor, and Jase could see traffic on the highway.

“But you said you were here to heal the leys,” he protested.

“No, I’ve been given permission to help
humans
heal them. Using your own power, for my people have refused to spend even a spark of ley power for this. Or to let me use it, either! If I so much as touch the leys, they’ll shut me down. The only good news is that the others aren’t allowed to use ley power to stop us. If we started draining the leys to fight each other, that might cause the very collapse I’m here to prevent.”