As if she could, she thought without saying so. As if it were possible. She had encountered Two Bears only twice, but both times her life had been changed forever. O'olish Amaneh and John Ross, harbingers of change: she wondered if they ever thought of themselves that way. Both served the Word, but in different ways, and their relationship was something of a mystery. Two Bears had given Ross the rune-carved staff that was both the talisman of his power and the chain that bound him to his fate. Ross had tried at least once to give the staff back and failed. Each had come to Nest both as savior and executioner, but the roles had shifted back and forth between them, and in some ways they remained unclear. They were fond of her, but not of each other. Perhaps their roles placed restrictions on their feelings. Perhaps fondness for her was allowed, while fondness for each other was not.
She was not certain how she felt about them. She guessed she liked Ross better for having witnessed his vulnerability ten years ago in Seattle, when a demon had almost claimed him through misguided love. He had lost almost everything then, stripped of illusion and hope. In a few seconds of blinding recognition, he discovered how deeply pervasive evil was and how impossible it would be to walk away from his battle against it. He had taken up the black staff of his office once more, reclaimed his life as a Knight of the Word, and gone on because there was nothing else for him to do. She found him brave and wonderful because of that.
By the same token, she guessed, she had distanced herself from Two Bears. It wasn't for what he had done, but for what she had discovered he might do. In Seattle, he had come to observe, to see if she could change the direction in which John Ross had drifted and by doing so enable him to escape the trap that was closing about him. Two Bears had come to watch, but if she had failed in her efforts, he had come to act as well, to make certain that whatever else happened, John Ross would not become a servant of the Void. He had made that clear to her in urging her to go to Ross, even after John had rejected her help, and it had given her an understanding of Two Bears that she would just as soon not have.
But that was long ago, she thought, walking through the park with him, and these are different times.
"I'm surprised you showed yourself to Bennett," she said finally, abandoning her resolve to wait longer on him.
"She needed someone to protect her from evil spirits." He kept his gaze directed straight ahead, and she could not determine if he was serious.
"I had a visit from a demon named Findo Gask," she said.
"An evil spirit of the sort I was talking about. One of the worst. But you already know that."
She scuffed at the frozen ground impatiently. "John Ross is here as well. He brought a gypsy morph to me."
"A houseful of trouble, as you claim, when you add in the young woman and her child." He might have been talking about the weather. "What will you do?"
She made a face. "I was hoping you might tell me." On her shoulder, Pick was muttering in irritation, but she couldn't tell who or what he was upset with.
Two Bears stopped a dozen yards from the river bank in a stand of winter grasses and gray hickory. He looked at her quizzically. "It is not my place to tell you what to do, little bird's Nest. You are a grown woman, one possessing uncommon strength of mind and heart and body. You have weathered difficult times and harsh truths. The answers you seek are yours to provide, not mine."
She frowned, impatient with his evasiveness. "But you asked to speak to me, O'olish Amaneh."
He shrugged. "Not about this. About something else." He began walking again, and Nest followed. "A houseful of trouble," he repeated, skirting a stand of hackberry and stalks of dried itch weed, moving toward the ravine below the deep woods, following a tiny stream of snowmelt upstream from the bayou. "A houseful of trouble can make a prisoner of you. To get free, you must empty your house of what is bad and fill it with what is good."
"You mean I should throw everybody out and start over?" She arched one eyebrow at him. "Bring in some new guests?"
Still walking steadily ahead, as if he had a destination in mind and a firm intention of reaching it, he did not look at her. "Sometimes change is necessary. Sometimes we recognize the need for it, but we don't know how to achieve it. We misread its nature. We think it is beyond us, failing to recognize that our inability to act is a problem of our own making. Change is the solution we require, but it is not a goal that is easily reached. Identifying and disposing of what is troubling to us requires caution and understanding."
He was telling her something in that obscure, oblique way he employed when talking of problems and solutions, believing that everyone must resolve things on their own, and the best he could do was to offer a flashlight for use on a dark path. She struggled with the light he had provided, but it was too weak to be of help.
"Everyone in my house needs me," she advised quietly. "I can't ask them to leave, even if allowing them to stay places me in danger."
He nodded. "I would expect nothing less of you."
"So the trouble that fills my house, as you put it, will have to be dealt with right where it is, I guess."
"You have dealt with trouble in your house before, little bird's Nest."
She thought about it a moment. He was speaking of Gran and Old Bob, fifteen years earlier, when John Ross had come to her for the first time, and she had learned the truth about her star-crossed family. But this was different. The secrets this time were not hers, but belonged to the gypsy morph. Or perhaps to John Ross.
Didn't they?
She looked at him sharply, sensing suddenly that he was talking about her after all, that he was giving her an insight into her own life.
"Not all the troubles that plague us are ours to solve," Two Bears advised, walking steadily on. "Life provides its own solutions to some, and we must accept those solutions as we would the changing of the seasons." He glanced at her expectantly.
"Well, I'm not much good at sitting back and waiting for life to solve my problems for me."
"No. And this is not what you should do. You should solve those problems you understand well, but leave the others alone. You should provide solutions where you are able and accept that this is enough." He paused, then sighed. "In a houseful of trouble, not everything can be salvaged."
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."