Until now, I’ve never realized how much I use a person’s eyes to read what they’re thinking. I can’t get anything from Odawa, obviously, not with that milky-white gaze, but I do get the sense that he’s genuinely curious and serious about what he asks me next.

“That’s really all you’ve been doing?” he says. “Helping people?”

It’s not something I like to talk about. It always strikes me that if you talk about it, you’re not doing it for the people you help anymore. You’re doing it for yourself.

“You’ve been following me long enough,” I say. “What do you think?”

There’s a long pause before he finally gives me a slow nod.

“I never really thought about it,” he says.

“So what’s it going to be?”

“You want to talk to Raven?”

“It’s more that I promised I would.”

“Fine,” Odawa says. “But I’m coming with you.”

I have to look at him for a long moment, trying to figure out if he’s actually being reasonable, but I still can’t read him. So I take the chance, and turn my back on him, heading for Raven’s house. I hear his footsteps fall in behind me.

Whiskey Jack

North, in the Kickaha Mountains, Whiskey Jack stood on a high slope where a break in the trees created by slabs of granite gave him a long view of the valley that lay below his vantage point.

Wetlands stretched from one end of the valley to the other. They’d begun as a small lake, fed by a natural spring, but beaver had damned the stream that drained from the valley, the backed-up water slowly rising to swallow all of the land except for a few small islands supported by granite outcrops. Cedars stood throughout, tall, grey and dead, returning to life and green only on those islands and the surrounding slopes where they rose up out of the waterlogged valley. Where it wasn’t choked with swamp grass and reeds, the surface of the water was still as glass, reflecting back the sky, the cedars, the immediate hills.

Jack sighed.

He wasn’t fond of this swampy land. All those dead cedars depressed him, and he didn’t like getting his feet wet. He also didn’t like all the little mosquito and deer fly cousins who made such places their home and eagerly fed on intruders. But he supposed he had to go down there.

He turned back into the woods and worked his way down through the trees until he reached the edge where solid ground grew marshy. He was just mapping out the route he’d take to reach the largest of the islands where Ayabe was supposed to make his home, when a deep voice came to him from the forest to one side of the lake.

“So, do you have that thousand dollars you owe me?”