Cinn's Arc

Chapter 2 of 12

The star-shaman came to Cinn's treehouse the next morning. He climbed the rope stairway slowly, beads clicking on his robe, and stood on her porch beneath the strings of rainbow lights. He did not smile. He set a stool on her cloth and sat down across from her bones. "They say you read strangers," he said. "Read me. Tell me my own fate." Cinn spread her cloth and cast the bones. She waited for the pressure behind her eyes, the pull she felt with every seeker. Nothing came. She looked at him and felt only wood and stone. She cast again. The bones landed. She read nothing in them. Her hands went cold. For two years she had chased this seat, and now the door stood open and she could not walk through it. "I feel nothing from you," she said. She could have lied. She looked at his flat black eyes and knew he would catch it. "Your fate is closed to me." He leaned back. "Then you are not what they said." Footsteps on the stairs. A green man climbed onto the porch, red locs shaved into a mohawk, hands in his jacket pockets. He was a stranger to Cinn, one seeker among the many who had come since her market victory. He had been waiting below to have his fate read. Now he stopped and stared at the shaman. "You," the man said. "You're the pressure. Behind my eyes. It's stronger near you." He rubbed his forehead. "I've chased a signal across three systems. Old. Not light, not radio. It's you. Or something around you." The shaman turned. His flat face changed. "You feel it too." Cinn watched them, and understood. "That's why I read nothing," she said. "You're shielded. Wrapped in something that eats the signal. He feels the shield. I feel the empty place where a person should be." She pointed at the man's forehead, then at the shaman. "His gift and mine touch the same thing from two sides." The man sat down uninvited. "Cyf," he said, plain. "I turn myself in to people who don't believe me. Habit." He almost smiled. "You're the first one who didn't call me broken." The shaman stood. He looked at Cinn a long moment. "You told me the truth when a lie was easier. And you named the shield no other reader has named." He pulled a single carved bone from his robe and set it on her cloth. "Come to the shamans' fire. This is your token in. You will still have to earn the seat." He descended the stairs. Cyf stayed on the porch, watching the empty steps. "He'll be at that fire," Cyf said. "So will the thing I'm chasing." He looked at Cinn. "I'm coming with you." Cinn closed her hand around the bone. The door was open now. But she had traded one riddle for a bigger one, and she was no longer walking through it alone.