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Dedication

To those who were here first

Mitaque oyasin

CHAPTER ONE

SHE POURED A dipperful of water over the hot rocks in the heaterbox, and steam hissed up in sudden clouds, saturating the dimly lit sauna with moisture. The smoke of cedar and sweetgrass joined the steam, the humidity making both scents so vivid she tasted them in the back of her throat.

She sat down cross-legged on the wooden floor, boards that had been sanded as smooth as satin underneath her bare thighs. It didn’t matter to her—or more importantly, to Grandfather—that this sweatlodge was really a commercially made portable sauna; that the rocks were heated by electricity and not in a fire; that the sweetgrass and cedar smoke were from incense bought at an esoteric bookstore in Tulsa. Or even that the sweatlodge as a place for meditation was more common among the Lakotah Sioux than the Osage; Grandfather had borrowed judiciously from other nations to remake the ways of the Little Old Men into something that worked again. The destination is what matters, he had told her a thousand times, and the path you take to get there. Not whether your ritual clothing is of tradecloth or buckskin, the water you drink from a stream or a spring—or even the kitchen tap. Sometimes ancient ways are not particularly wise, just old.

So they had this contrivance of the I’n-Shta-Heh, the “Heavy Eyebrows,” installed in what had been the useless half-bath at the back of the house she and Grandfather shared. Most of the time it served as nothing more esoteric than anyone else’s sauna, useful for aching muscles and staving off colds.

Sometimes it served purposes the I’n-Shta-Heh who built it would never have dreamed of.

She closed her eyes, sweat salty on her upper lip, and stripped off the layers of her working self the way she had stripped the layers of her working clothing before she had taken her ritual bath and entered the now-sanctified wooden box. There were layers to who she was, like an onion, each layer both hiding the one beneath and keeping the one beneath from reaching outward.