Free It Sleeps in Me by Kathleen O’Neal Gear

her mother had ordered three people killed to stop the shadow-soul of an old priest who wouldn’t leave his family alone. He’d kept slipping from one unsuspecting
person to another, hiding until discovered, then moving again. Because shadow-souls resembled breath, they could slip from one mouth to another barely noticed. Whispering usually passed the soul.
    Wink rose to her feet. “I’m going to instruct our guards that Skinner is not to enter this town again.” She remained standing there, looking down at Sora as though she expected her to object.
    “Thank you. That’s a good idea,” Sora said.
    “I’m glad you agree.”
    Wink marched up the trail—a woman on a mission.
    Sora continued to stare blindly out across the forest at sprays of flowering redbud. Blossom-scented wind, blowing off Persimmon Lake, tousled her long black hair around her shoulders. As Mother Sun rose higher into the morning sky, the shadows of the mounds stretched toward her like long, pointing fingers, silently accusing her.
    Of what? What had she done?
    For three winters, I’ve been longing for him …
    Fifty heartbeats later she found herself striding down the mound steps, past the women who stirred the yucca blades. They cast fearful glances her way and whispered to each other.
    She hurried along the north side of her mound. To her left, across the broad plaza filled with commoners and racing children, War Chief Feather Dancer stood atop his mound, practicing with his war club. He swung the massive copper-studded club over his head, then slashed downward, as though cutting an opponent across the belly. When he saw her, he bowed.
    She dipped her head in acknowledgment. A very tall, muscular man, he’d seen twenty-six winters. She’d chosen him as her war chief when she’d ascended to the chieftainship—a reward for extraordinary bravery while serving her mother. Not only that, the former war chief, White Pelican, was old and always too eager for war.
    Feather Dancer had sided with her in the council, speaking against war with the Loon People. She wondered how he would feel if he knew that his matron was now considering another war,
with a people he did not know at all, over a green stone he’d never seen before.
    As she rounded the northeastern corner of her mound, her white dress flapped around her legs. Despite the thousands of times she had climbed these fifty-four steps, she still counted each as she trotted to the top. She did that: counted things unconsciously, like the angles in a painting or the leaves on a palmetto. Counting seemed to order her chaotic heart.
    From the crest, the view was stunning. She could look out across the top of Priest Teal’s mound to the lake, where ducks and cormorants paddled the green water, coming to within a few body-lengths of the people fishing onshore. The birds never got too close. They just seemed to want to watch for a time; then they veered away, leaving a wake of silver rings bobbing behind them. All around the lake, for as far as she could see, farm plots, patches where the trees and brush had been cleared, resembled irregular green squares. The corn, beans, and sunflowers that sustained the Black Falcon People had just begun to turn their faces to Mother Sun.
    Far down the lakeshore someone shouted in glee and pulled a wriggling fish from the water. His family gathered around as he used a hook to draw the intestines out through the anus without cutting the fish open, then skewered the fish, tail to jaw, with a cottonwood stick. His wife covered it with mud and put it in the embers of their breakfast fire. When the mud cracked off, it would be ready to eat. The cottonwood gave the meat a pleasantly tangy flavor.
    “He is not Flint,” she whispered to herself. “He can’t be. Skinner is tricking me, but why?”
    In the dark place deep inside her, where her own shadow-soul walked, fear rose. If all the evil had been sucked into Flint’s shadow-soul at his death …
    It would come