Aneas was looking at his tree. It was the same tree, and yet it was not; there were scars in the bark, and a shadow hung in the tops. But worst of all, there were things that should have been hanging on the tree that were gone, and other things were hanging in their stead.

“How can I be a different person?” Aneas asked.

“How can you be the same?” Gas-a-ho asked. “You were dead. I lost you, brother. You weren’t alive anymore. Irene fetched back a corpse.”

“Irene,” Aneas said softly.

“Listen to me,” Gas-a-ho said. He was looking carefully at Aneas’s tree, at the field of raspberry bramble beyond, at signs of use and signs of casting and remnants of memory, sniffing like a hunting dog. “Do you feel anything . . . strange . . . from Looks-at-Clouds?”

Aneas thought, and wisps of cloud trailed across the sun of his mind.

He was afraid.

Gas-a-ho shook his head. “I am not the gods, to play with your mind. But something here is very wrong.” He reached a human hand into the brambles and pulled out an old deerskin quiver. The thorns caught on it, but the deerskin was tough.

“That was my father’s!” Aneas said, and took the quiver. He was sure it had been hanging on the tree, and he found a broken branch close to the ground.

Gas-a-ho was poking in the brambles. “Something is very wrong with Looks-at-Clouds,” he said. “Or at least, Irene and I think so.” He found an arrow, and then another, and then a third, and Aneas, obediently, slid them into his father’s quiver.

Gas-a-ho was deep in the brambles by then.

“That should all be pine needles and rocks,” Aneas said. “There are no . . .”

“There’s a trail,” Gas-a-ho said.

Aneas followed the shaman. He was aware, at some remove, that what they were doing was very dangerous.

The trail was far longer than it should have been, winding in and out of the brambles and crossing a small rivulet that seemed as brown as old blood. Aneas knew that his whole memory forest was not this big, and he knew, too, that all around them was very dark. He wanted to find his clear spring and his casting stone, and they were hidden.

“I am afraid,” Aneas said. “I cannot cast.”

The shaman turned. “Yes,” he said. “That is natural. But this is the thing for which I trained: to take people on spirit journeys. You were dead. Things have changed in here. You need to find whatever the trail wants you to find.”

They walked on, and the darkness pressed in, so that Aneas feared to raise his eyes above the muddy brown trail.

The brambles kept catching on his hands, until both of them were bleeding. The blood fell on the trail. The trail was soaked in blood.