CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Claire was at site fourteen on the long ridge that ran south from the convergence-point area, on her knees with her bare hand on a basalt face that had been pulsing under her palm for the better part of a quarter hour.
Her instruments were silent. Her body was loud.
She'd been keeping the private field log for eleven days, and the log was twenty-six pages now, and somewhere around page eighteen she'd stopped pretending she didn't know what the log was.
It was a geomantic survey. She was conducting two surveys at once.
The official one was for Cascade Valley. The other was for herself.
She did not, today, hear Lucy coming.
She felt her.
Lucy's body, in the woods, registered to Claire's hands the way one bell registers when another is struck.
She turned.
Lucy stood on the trail twenty feet off, with the flask, and her field jacket, and a small dry expression Claire was learning to read.
"I brought tea."
"Thank you."
Lucy walked over. Sat on the deadfall at the edge of the small clearing.
Patted the log beside her. Claire stood, brushed off her knees, and sat.
Lucy uncapped the flask, poured into the cap, handed it to Claire.
The tea was very dark. It smelled of black pepper and bitter root and something honey-edged.
"What is it."
"My grandmother's recipe. For when the body's done a lot of work."
Claire drank. The taste was grounding. She hadn't had a word for grounding before this contract. She had one now.
"Lucy," Claire said.
"What you're feeling isn't instinct," Lucy said. "It's real."
Claire set the cap down on the log between them.
"How long have you known," Claire said.
"Since the morning at the diner. When you didn't pull your hands off the table."
"That long."
"Mhm. I'd suspected longer. I felt something when you arrived. The pattern I protect shifted. Not in alarm. Like a guitar string buzzing in sympathy with another guitar nearby. Old friends recognizing each other. I didn't know what I was hearing, exactly, until the morning at the diner."
Claire sat with that.
She looked at her hands.
"Lucy," she said. "What is it."
"What you have, you mean."
"Yes."
Lucy thought about the question. She didn't answer it right away. She was a woman, Claire understood, who took her words seriously. She'd been taking them seriously since long before Pine Ridge.
"The women I've read about who could do it called it different things," Lucy said.
"Reading the bones. Knowing the ground. Land-listening.
There was a Greek word for it once. The English word that's least wrong is geomancy, but that one has a lot of baggage.
I don't know what your grandmother called it. "
"Good ears for the ground."
Lucy looked at her.
"That's the one, then."
"That's what Mae said."
"Mae would know."
Claire drank more of the tea. The cap was warm in her hand. The deadfall was solid under her. The trees around them were the trees of Pine Ridge, which had been holding her, she now understood, the better part of two weeks.
"How does yours work," Claire said.
"Differently. I keep wards. The wards are old.
I don't make them. I tend them. They were made by my grandmother and her mother, in a tradition that goes back further than I have time to explain on a deadfall in the middle of the afternoon.
They root in places. Right now they're rooted in this land.
They were rooted in another land before, and I was the keeper there too, and that's a long story for another day. "
"Is it costly."
"Yes."
"How."
"Different costs. It used to cost me my health. The wards drained me. Pine Ridge's don't, anymore. They root deeply enough that they pay for themselves. That part is new. That part is recent. That part is, I think, related to whatever's happening on the land that you're feeling."
Claire was very quiet.
"You're not alone with this," Lucy said. "There aren't many of us. But there are some. And there's a wider conversation, in the world, between the ones who do what we do, and you can join it whenever you want. Or not. The choice is yours and it's not on a schedule."
Claire didn't answer.
She was, very quietly, crying.
She had not cried at her grandmother's funeral. She'd been crying intermittently for two weeks, in small private moments, and the crying had not been on a schedule any more than Lucy had said the joining was. The crying was the body coming back to itself.
It didn't last long. Lucy didn't say anything while it happened. Lucy looked at the trees. Claire wiped her face with the back of her hand. Picked the cap back up. Drank the rest of the tea. The bitterness sat on her tongue.
"Thank you," she said.
"For what."
"For not telling me yesterday."
Lucy looked at her.
"I'd have told you yesterday if you'd asked," Lucy said. "But you weren't ready yesterday. The ones who have it always know when they're ready. Yours is going to ask you to do something soon. I can feel it shaping. I can't tell you what it'll ask. But you'll know when it does."
"Yes."
"You should get back to work."
"Yes."
Lucy stood. Capped the flask. Set it on the log beside Claire.
"Keep this for the rest of the day. Bring it back when you're done."
"Okay."
"Claire."
"Yes."
"You're not making it up."
Claire nodded.
Lucy walked back down the trail.
Claire worked another two hours. Her hands were steadier than they'd been all day.
She made readings the instruments didn't understand and notes the instruments couldn't see.
The convergence point pulled at her attention from the middle distance, the way a low note pulls at the ear under the higher melody.
She knew where she was going next.
She knew it the way her body had known the cabin had been waiting. The way her body had known the road from Jackson's. The way her body had known, kneeling on the basalt at site seven on the third day, that the land had been waiting.
The convergence point was waiting too.
She was going to walk to it.
She just needed Jackson to come with her.
She was going to ask him tomorrow.
* * *