Free Beneath the Tor by Nina Milton Page A

again.”
    I hadn’t expected such a generous response, and it heartened me to ask further things. “I am about to take on a new client. Laura Munroe. What should I know before I begin?”
    â€œUse your silken braid to journey. Seek out mirrors, masks, and symbols that turn things upon their own heads.”
    â€œAnd … what should I do about Babette Johnson? Ricky has asked me find his sister.”
    â€œSuch a search might help you in ways you cannot yet imagine. Examine all that comes to you. When you eliminate that which you no longer need, one possibility will remain.”
    I was going to ask, “examine what things?” but she spoke again. “Soon, you will have to face your past.”
    She caught me unawares. I didn’t want to discuss this subject. I never had seen the point in chasing after my own past.
    â€œI know it is the hardest thing for you.”
    The longer I worked with spirit, the more I understood that past was everything. It wasn’t the opposite of future. It wasn’t dead and gone. The story already told was as crucial as the story not yet known. Ancestors were as important as friends around the table. Knowing this made my past all the more difficult to come to terms with. I’d been a motherless child in the state care system, pushed from foster home to children’s home for years before I met the Davidsons. Yet for all that lonely time, I’d recently discovered, I’d had blood relations.
    When I’d been a child, I had no idea that there was anyone out there who might have rescued me, cared for, loved me. Six months ago, someone who thought they were my cousin came into my life, and with her came an unbearable thought: if this family been informed of my existence earlier on, things might have been so different.
    I hadn’t been able to hack the sudden immersion into a new family. I’d told them not to contact me again. That decision still had the smell of shame about it, like a rude word spray-painted on a concrete wall.
    At the back of my throat came the scent of honey. It made me feel positive, reinforced. It shored me up, as if the Lady knew what I needed most at this point. I’d experienced hardness from her; she often stonewalled my questions and took me to grim places. This time she was filled with honey.
    â€œTell me what you saw, when you descended the realms,” she said, out of the blue.
    I forced a shudder away. Too many images. “A plague of worms and dry ground, nothing growing …”
    â€œYes,” said the Lady. “A wasted land, stagnant, despoiled.”
    â€œI met a guardian, an ancient black man, beside a fire. He showed me a powerful totem—a red hind. What did that mean?”
    â€œIt would be better if you asked him yourself.”
    I shook my head, violently. I had no intentions of returning.
    â€œThere are roots that penetrate deep. That bind tight. You will find them at the hut of the old man.”
    â€œLady of the River, please tell me what you mean.”
    â€œSabbie Dare,” she said, and her voice was firm. “When will you call me by my true name?”
    â€œI don’t know your name, Lady.”
    â€œIndeed?” She glanced towards the river, which, as always, tumbled along, breaking white as it hit surface boulders. “I am the river, Sabbie …” Her voice was fading. She was leaving me. All that remained was a shimmering, a rippling of blues and browns and foaming whites. I heard her voice in my head, and as I did so I realized that the call-back sign from the drumming CD had come and gone and that I was lying on cushions in my therapy room.
    I am the river of cool, translucent waves and treacherous, violent tides. Only when you call me by my name can I truly be of aid …
    Recording that journey in my journal gave me pause. I hadn’t been expecting such specifics; the Lady of the River usually spoke in enigmas. I wrote down her