“It is against my best instincts, but if you are certain . . .”

Molly said, “I’m good. I promise.”

“Then I offer you welcome in the sweat house of the Tsalagi.”

“What herbs will you put on the fire?” Molly asked.

The two women talked herbs and herbal concoctions and herbal reactions and herbal interactions. They talked ceremony. And all the while, Molly drank from a gallon bottle of Gatorade. The blue kind that always made me want to barf. Just looking at it made me all gaggy.

“I’m thirsty,” I said. “But none a’ that blue stuff. Just water.”

“Soon, Jane,” Aggie said soothingly. More tentatively, she asked Molly, “What do you know about Jane?”

“Everything,” I said. “More than you do.” I tried to focus on Molly, but she was blurry in the firelight. She was dressed in one of Aggie’s coarse white shifts, and so was I, my once-pretty clothes in a heap by the fire, as if to be thrown in and burned. My weapons were nowhere in sight, and I knew that Eli had taken them with him. To Molly I said, “Aggie saw me half-shifted, and we’ve talked while I was under the influence of whatever stuff she gives me to drink, so she knows what I am. How old I am. But she doesn’t know about Beast.”

“Beast?” Aggie said.

“That’s my story to tell, I suppose, since you’re not yourself,” Molly said, settling to a log seat, her baby belly less obvious beneath the sweat clothes. “When Jane was five years old, her father was murdered by two white men. They also raped her mother, all right in front of Jane. She went to live with her grandmother, who helped her track down and kill the white men. The old bat made Jane help in the killings, according to the War Woman way.”

Aggie’s mouth tightened in response. My story sounded so violent and savage, so cruel and brutal when stripped of the emotions and the pain of a proper Tsalagi telling. “I have heard this tale. Jane was not responsible for the actions of her grandmother, nor what her grandmother forced her to do. There is no judgment against her for the deeds of another.”

“Agreed. But then the political world shifted,” Molly said, “and they were sent on the Trail of Tears.”

“So she has told me,” Aggie said, agreeable, though mildly irritated. I hadn’t decided if she believed me about it all. She might just think I was a nutcase.

Molly went on, relentless. “Jane doesn’t remember much about it. But at one point, in the middle of a raging snowstorm, her grandmother forced her into the animal she knew best, a bobcat, and tossed her out into the snow to live or die.”

“Jane has told me this, and that makes her over one hundred seventy years old.”

“Give or take.”

“And yes, I know that Dalonige’i Digadoli is a skinwalker.”

“Good,” Molly said. “I didn’t know if you got that part yet. Anyway, she was out in the snow, in her bobcat form, and she found a frozen deer carcass. She was eating when a nursing female cougar came back for her kill and attacked Jane. Jane did accidental black magic and took both the form of the mountain lion and its soul inside with her. She’s two-souled.”

Aggie One Feather muttered something in the tongue of The People. It contained the word ti, which was buttocks, and the phrase sounded like a curse, which made me chuckle. “Yeah. Kinda the way I feel about it,” I said, holding up my deformed left hand. “And it’s probably the major reason why weird stuff keeps happening to me.”

Molly said, “It’s taken a long time for her accept that she isn’t a liver-eater, but the possibility of someday becoming one still worries her.”

“I understand this better now,” Aggie said. “The two-souled are . . . dangerous.”

“She knows. But she and Beast have come to an accommodation and work together to achieve common goals.”

Which made me sound like a business merger with customer relations issues.

Molly continued. “She feels guilt for killing the two men who murdered her father and it’s shaped and formed her whole personality and being. But she’s been working on guilt with you, and things are better.”

Aggie muttered the same words, and this time I got them. Tsalagi don’t have cusswords or curses like the white man, but some phrases can be used in that way, according to the intent of the speaker. “Uskanigigaluda tsi ti,” loosely translated, meant “scalping my butt.” I laughed, the movement shaking my hand, and ended on a pained breath and a curse of my own.

“You know she’s hurting if she’s cussing,” Molly said, of me. “And the little one doesn’t like the heat, so I’m moving back against the wall. I’m here if you need me.”

Through slitted eyes, I watched as Aggie stirred the wood and the new coals beneath, muttering in Cherokee too low for even me to hear. She now knew all my secrets, and she hadn’t tossed me to the curb, which had always been my private fear. She rearranged the river rocks that would take heat from the fire, pushing them closer to the flames. She rearranged the clay bowl filled with water and the dipper, and a fired red clay tile, like one off a roof, something new that she hadn’t used before, her actions and the way she was breathing indicating that she was using the motions as a formulary, a methodology, trying to settle herself, to make room inside for all the things she had heard.

She didn’t look at me, not even once, keeping her gaze on the fire, and I didn’t like the fact that she kept her gaze averted. Aggie was having a hard time dealing with this. With me. “Can you accept me, even knowing this, Aggie?” I asked.