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“He probably was,” she says. “Or protect himself.”
I frown. “What does that mean?”
Though I can’t see the mushy lady, I feel her hesitation. “Who is your mother?”
“My mother? She’s…I don’t know. Normal. Too normal. And mortal. Human. She lives in Seattle. Left my father when I was young, brought me to the States. Remarried this guy, George. Thinks I’m a perpetual disappointment.”
“Hmmmm,” mushy lady says.
“Why?” I ask.
“What do you know about the Prophecy of Three?” Rasmus speaks up. I glare at him, even though he’s asking a more important question. “The Bone Stragglers took us because they thought Hanna was someone called Salainen. Said they look exactly alike. Is that shadow magic or…?”
“What’s shadow magic?” I ask.
“So many questions,” mushy lady notes dryly.
“Can you blame me?” I ask, defensively throwing my arms out. “This isn’t my world, and I don’t even know my own world that well.”
“Sometimes the answers to our questions come from deep within,” she says.
“Yeah, thanks, I already tried yoga,” I tell her. “The only thing I learned was that it’s boring as hell.”
“Perhaps you learned that you’re boring as hell,” she remarks.
I gasp loudly, almost laughing at her audacity. “What the fuck?”
Did this talking fungus just call me boring?
“Look,” Rasmus says quickly, giving me a tense look, “the Bone Stragglers mentioned shadows when it came to Salainen. They said she was part of the prophecy and that she would destroy Death and bring Kaaos back to the land. That’s obviously not Hanna though. She’s never met them before.”
“You know that for sure?” mushy lady says.
“Uh, I know that for sure,” I say, raising my hand. “I’m not some shadowy chaos bringer. I’m boring, remember?”
“Hmmm,” she says again. The mycelia on the walls dim a little as silence fills the cavern.
I look at Rasmus expectantly. “So this is where you spent your time? In here? With her?”
He runs his long fingers along his jaw. “She’s a bit prickly…but she knows a lot. She taught me a lot.”
“Such as?”
“She gave me Alku. She taught me magic. I couldn’t have learned it otherwise.”
“So mushy lady knows magic?”
He gives me a pointed look. “You know she can hear you right?”
I gesture to the empty cavern. “She ain’t saying anything.”
“She’s checking the network.”
“What network?”
“You know how fungi communicate, don’t you? In our world, they use electrical impulses to deliver messages along the pathways, the mycelia. Some say they have a language similar to us. Well, down here, it’s literal. She’s just one part of a larger network that stretches all across Tuonela. She knows a lot, because she’s everywhere, and she can pop up in any place.”
The mycelia threads start to glow again, signaling her presence back in the cavern.
“Rasmus,” the mushy lady’s voice booms, making my bones vibrate. “You are the son of a shaman, are you not?”
“I’m not,” he says impatiently, as if she should know this. “I’ve just been trained to be a shaman. By Torben. Remember?”
“Yes. You told me this before, I know, but there is a reason I ask again, because I don’t think you’ve been truthful with me.”
Rasmus gives me a nervous glance as he says, “What do you mean?”
“I may know all, but I don’t profess to know the truth. If you lie, I might just believe it. But perhaps you might not know it’s a lie.”
“Honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Rasmus says with exasperation.
“You are the child of a shaman, Rasmus,” she says.
I watch Rasmus closely. Death told me that Rasmus’ mother was a Lapp Witch, that he was raised by his grandmother, that his parents died when he was young. But if his parents died young, it wouldn’t surprise me if his father was a shaman and he didn’t know it.
His eyes flutter in surprise. “I’m…what? I’m not.”
“You were adopted,” she points out.
“Yes,” he says hesitantly. “By my grandmother.”
“You never knew your birth parents.”
He swallows thickly. “No. They died when I was a baby. So I was raised by my grandmother. She legally adopted me.”
“Do you know for sure that was your real grandmother? Or did you just accept it because you were young and didn’t know any better?”
He stares into the cavern with a blank expression, and I can tell his brain is sifting through the past.
“Does it seem unbelievable then to know you come from a shaman?” she adds.
He presses his lips together, frowning in thought. I’m starting to think he doesn’t know his mother is a Lapp Witch.
After a moment, mushy lady goes on. “When you look inside, you find the answers. Power and magic, it runs through the blood, just as it does through Hanna’s. It’s passed on from generation to generation. It’s a giant, unseen network, not unlike the one that I belong to. It stretches across time and, even though you can’t see it, you know it exists. This thread connecting all of us. A mortal can only learn so much. A mortal with shaman’s blood can learn so much more.”
