Well, okay, she was thinking, you save what you can and let go of the rest. Fair enough. But how was she supposed to save anything if she didn’t know where to start?
“Can you tell me something about the gypsy morph?” she tried hopefully.
He nodded. “Very powerful magic. Very unpredictable. A gypsy morph becomes what it will, if it becomes anything at all, which is rare. Mostly it fails to find its form and goes back with the air, wild and unreachable. Spirits understand it, for they occupy space with it. They brush against it, pass through it, float upon it, before it becomes a solid thing, while it is still waiting to take form.” He shrugged. “It is an enigma waiting for an answer.”
She blew out a cloud of breath. “Well, how do I go about rinding out what that answer is? This morph has become a little boy. What does that mean? Is that the form it intends to take? What does it want with me? It spoke my name to John Ross, but now that it’s here it doesn’t even look at me.”
They stopped on the rickety wooden bridge that crossed the nearly frozen trickle of the winter stream. Two Bears leaned on the railing, hands clasped.
“Talk to him, little bird’s Nest.”
“What?”
“Have you said anything to him? This little boy, have you spoken to him on your own?”
She thought about it a moment. “No.”
“The solution is often buried somewhere in the problem. If the gypsy morph requires you, it may choose to tell you so. But perhaps it needs to know you care first.”
She thought about it a moment. The gypsy morph was a child, a newborn less than thirty days formed, and as a four-year-old boy, it might be necessary that he be reassured and won over. She hadn’t done that. She hadn’t even tried, feeling pressed and rushed by Ross. The morph might need her badly, but needing and trusting were two different things entirely.
“All right,” she said.
“Good.” He lifted away from the bridge, straightening. “Now I will explain my reason for asking to speak with you. It is simple. I am your friend, and I came to say good-bye. I am the last of the Sinnissippi, and I have come home to be with my people. I wanted you to know, because it is possible I will not see you again.”
Nest stared, absorbing the impact of his words. “Your people are all dead, O’olish Amaneh. Does this mean you will die, too?”
He laughed, and his laugh was hearty and full. “You should see your face, little bird’s Nest! I would be afraid to die with such a fierce countenance confronting me! Mr. Pick! Look at her! Such fierce resolution and rebuke in her eyes! How do you withstand this power when it is turned on you?”
He sobered then, and shook his head. “This is difficult to explain, but I will try. By joining with my ancestors, with my people, who are gone from this earth, I do not have to give up my own life in the way you imagine. But I must bond with them in a different form. By doing so, I must give up something of myself. It is difficult to know beforehand what this will require. I say good-bye as a precaution, in the event I am not able to return to you.”
“Transmutation?” she asked. “You will become something else.”
“In a sense. But then, I always was.” He brushed the matter off with a wave of his big hand. “If I leave, I will not be gone forever. Like the seasons, I will still be in the seeds of the earth, waiting.” He shrugged. “My leaving is a small thing. I will not be missed.”
She exhaled sharply. “Don’t say that. It isn’t true.”
There was a long silence as they faced each other in the graying winter light, motionless in the cold, breath clouding the air before their intense faces. “It isn’t true for you,” he said finally. “I am grateful for that.”
She was still fighting to accept the idea that he would not be there anymore, that he would be as lost to her as Gran and Old Bob, as her mother and her father, as so many of her friends. It was a strange reaction to have to someone she had encountered only twice before and had such mixed feelings about. It was an odd response no matter how she looked at it. The closest parallel she could draw was to Wraith, when he had disappeared on her eighteenth birthday, gone forever it seemed, until she discovered him anew inside her.