He bent close to her, pausing. “There are others who know this, too. A few, who have been uprooted and displaced, who have been banished to the road and a life of wandering, who have lost any sense of who they are. Some of these are like us men and women whose way of life has been taken from them. Some of them are looking for a way back home again. Maybe you even know one.”
Nest stared at him in silence.
“Do you still have your magic?” he asked suddenly.
Caught off guard by the question, she fumbled for an answer. “I think so.”
“Not sure, are you? Perhaps it has changed as you have grown?”
He nodded his understanding.
“It may be so. Everything changes with time’s passage. Only change itself is constant. So you must adapt and adjust and remember to keep close what is important and not to forget its purpose. Remember when we sat in the park and watched the spirits of the Sinnissippi dance?”“
She did. On the Fourth of July weekend five years earlier, at midnight, she had gone into the park she had grown up in, the park that Pick warded, to see of the spirits would speak to her. The spirits had came on Two Bears’ summons, and they had danced in the starlit darkness and shown to Nest in a vision a secret her family had hidden from her. It had been the catalyst for her terrifying confrontation with her father, and it had probably saved her life. She had not understood it that way at the time; she had not understood much of what had happened to her that weekend until much later.
“We were searching for truths, you and I-me, about my people, and you. about your father.” He shook his mead. “Hard questions were needed to uncover those truths. But the truths define who we are. They measure our place in the world. That is why they have worth. We search and we learn. It is how we grow.”
He looked out over the bay. “Do you think this country has changed much since we spoke last, little bird’s Nest.” Since you were a girl, living m the park of the Sinissippi? This is a hard question to answer, but the truth it masks needs uncovering. As a country, as a people, have we changed? On the surface we might appear to have done so, but underneath I think we are still the same. Our change is measurable, but not significant. We remain bent on destroying ourselves. We still kill each other with alarming frequency and for foolish reasons, and we begin the killing at a younger age. We have much to celebrate, but we live in fear and doubt. We are pessimistic about our own lives and the lives of our children. We trust almost no-one.”.
“It is the same everywhere. We are a people under siege, walled away from each other and the world, trying to fend a safe path through the debris of hate and rage that collects around us. We drive our cars as if they were weapons. We use our children and our friends as if their love and trust were expendable and meaningless. We think of ourselves first and others second. We lie and cheat and steal in little ways, thinking it unimportant, justifying it by telling ourselves that others do it, so it doesn’t matter if we do it, too. We have no patience with the mistakes of others. We have no empathy for their despair. We have no compassion for their misery. Those who roam the streets are vat our concern; they are examples of failure and an embarrassment to us. It is best to ignore them. If they are homeless, it is their own fault. They give us nothing but trouble. If they die, at least they will provide us with more space to breathe.”
His smile was bitter. “Our war continues, the war we fight with one another, the war we wage against ourselves. It has its champions, good and bad, and sometimes one or the other has the stronger hand. Our place in this war is often defined for us. It is defined for many because they are powerless to choose. They are homeless or destitute. They are a minority of sex or race or religion. They are poor or disenfranchised. They are abused or disabled, physically or mentally.”, and they have forgotten or never learned how to stand up for themselves.