"Mercedes Lackey - Sacred Ground" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

blood. You know how they are. With no acrimony; no one in her family believed in refighting old battles.
Her mother had just smiled.

Private Investigator, degree in criminology. Nice little house, nice little neighborhood, nice little mortgage,
in one of the older parts of Tulsa. Nice old neighbors, who thought it charming of her to take in her aged
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and "infirm" (ha!) grandfather. That persona was the first to go, washed away in the steam.

Next, the woman who danced at the powwows, engaged in her little hobby of rescuing sacred objects
from profane hands; another mask, just one a little closer to the truth, a little deeper to the bone. A
woman who bore two names, one for the earth-people and one for the sky-people, although it was the
latter she used.Hu-lah-to-me, Good Eagle Woman, daughter ofHu-lah-shu-tsy, Red Eagle. Good Eagle
was not registered on either side of her family, Osage or Cherokee, but she and her family had more right
to call themselves Native American than plenty who were registered and could speak of no more than a
single grandparent of the full blood.

Fly away, Good Eagle.Gone; there wasn't much there anyway. Jennifer was what shedid; Good Eagle
was simply an intermediary between what she did and what she was.

Last layer; what shewas.

The third Osage name, a name that was learned and not given. Kestrel-Hunts-Alone.

Not a "normal" name for a woman.

Kestrel, pupil of a man with three names, her grandfather. His Heavy Eyebrows name, Frank Talldeer.
His second,quite out of keeping with theTzi-Sho, and a name embodying contradiction,Ka-ha-ska,
White Crow. And his third—embodying even more contradiction than the first—Ka-ha-me-o-pah,
Mooncrow; crows do not fly at night, nor are they associated with the moon, and those birds that do fly
at night are generally the enemies of crows. The power of the Osage centered on the sun, not the moon;
a man of power should have had a sun-name, like her father's. Contradiction piled on contradiction. . . .

Shamanic apprentice to her grandfather, her spirit-name was taken from her spirit-animal, student as she
was in the teaching of one of the Little Old Men of theNi-U-Ko'n-Ska, the Children of the Middle
Waters, whom the Heavy Eyebrows and Long Knives called "Osage." By birth and by spirit, she was
gentleTzi-Sho gens, the peacemakers, and here lay the irony, for not only was Mooncrow teaching her
the peaceful medicine ofTzi-Sho, he was teaching her the medicine of the warriors, the Earth People, the
Hunkah.

And, as if that were not enough, he was teaching her the special medicines reserved for each of the
clans! For that, she had thought, one had to be a Medicine Chief and not simply a shaman. Grandfather
had never once come out and said that he was—

Then again, maybe he was simply living up to his contrary nature.He wasn't registered, either; nor were
any of his forefathers. And he wouldn't use any of the Peyote rituals that had crept into, and indeed
supplanted, most of the Osage ways; they were like kudzu or mimosa in the red-clay soil—not native,