Free Beneath Ceaseless Skies #172 by E. Catherine Tobler, Erin Cashier, Shannon Peavey Page B

made no effort to understand it. When you know the world in such a plain manner, it is not magic. It is breath and it is being.
            I reached for my matches, but Jackson dared touch me to prevent me from lighting the length of sweet grass. His fingers were rough, hooked into claws, and while the touch was tender, it was not hesitant. He did not fear me, even dressed as I was in a woman’s clothing, with beads knotted into my long dark hair and tied around my wrists. He was not repulsed even as I drew his hand beneath the table to the hard flesh between my legs. Was
this
what he had come for? Would he demand that such be given in trade to travel upon his train? It was only flesh, after all; it was not the heart of me. Jackson leaned in and took a breath of me and did not stare as if I were a thing to break apart and better understand. He looked at me with reverence, seeing my female spirit within my male skin.
            You are more than this skin, he told me, and beneath me I felt the stirrings of the thing I could not yet embrace.
Give way
, it whispered. I said the same of him, that he was more than his grasping, hooked hand, but deep down I felt that his hand
was
him—he wanted every precious thing he could scoop into claw and mouth. When he nuzzled deeper into the hollow of my throat and asked for a guide into the hills, I kept my silence. There was something in this meeting that told me Jackson already understood I was not a guide as most men expected me to be. The warmth of his once-broken fingers told me he understood what I had to offer, that he was making an offer all his own. Then, he mentioned our mothers.
            He did not know then what the thunderbirds were. The greed within his voice was plain; he either did not know or care that it came so easily across. He was a man who wanted something—just as other men here wanted gold and would obtain it by any means. Jackson’s treasure was a different sort, and he told me a story I knew too well.
            He spoke of the women at the river, their leathers soaked with the icy rush of water. They could have been sisters with their ebony hair and eyes, but they were not. They were closest of friends, knowing they had to stay close so their sons could foster the friendship that turned to the love that turned to the devastation which would free them.
            These women, Jackson said, stood in the rushing waters up to their knees and felt the cold burrow into the base of their brains, their hearts. They became of the water as they stood counting the fish their traps had collected. They came to not notice the cold, so much a part of it they were. They knew their sons were close, but something else was closer, pushing down from the sky until it opened its hooked mouth and swallowed them.
            Raven scooped them into his claws—gentle this time, because these two were not unknown to him; they were a similar creature, birds who drew the thunder down with their wings, beasts whose claws dragged the lightning from the vault of the sky. Raven scooped them into his mouth, his blue tongue startlingly warm against their chilled skins—then,
then
they felt how cold they themselves were. Raven drew them up and away and gone and my Gugán blamed himself, believed
he
had called Raven because he shared a kinship with the trickster and his ways.
            I reached again for the grass; Jackson’s hand again forestalled mine.
            Raven bore the women ever up, Jackson said. Took them so high into the winter sky they could no longer breathe or struggle. Raven bound them into the stony mountains, but they were not women as anyone knew women; each contained a spirit that could not be caged. No such thing can be caged eternally, Jackson said. You may possess a thing for a moment in time, but such things cannot be claimed for a lifetime.
            The way he spoke was a shock. He was not a white man, though looked