He shook his head slowly. “You can be homeless in different ways. You can be homeless like those of my people you see here, living on the streets, surviving on handouts, marking time between the seasons. But you can be homeless in your heart, too. You can be empty inside yourself because you have no spiritual center. You can wander through life without any real sense of who you are or where you belong. You can exist without purpose or cause. Have you ever felt like that, little bird’s Nest?”

“No,” she said at once, wondering where he was going with this.

“Indians know,” he said softly. “We have known for a long time. We are homeless in the streets and we are homeless in our hearts as well. We have no purpose in the world. We have no center. Our way of life was changed for us long ago, and it will never return. Our new life is someone else’s life imposed on us; it is a false life. We struggle to find our home, our center, but it is as faded as the Sinnissippi. A building is a home if the people who inhabit it have memories and love and a place in the world. Otherwise, it is just a building, a shelter against the elements, and it can never be anything more. Indians know.”

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 if the spirits would speak to her. The spirits had come 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.