“Sorta. She tol’ me she’s purt pleased with what I been a-doin’, so as long as I git all m’work done in th’ mornin’ she give me leave t’go do what I want ev’ry arternoon now. An’ I wanted t’come down here.” She didn’t add to see you, because that would have been awfully forward of her, but from the way his grin widened, she got the feeling he understood it.

“Wall, Cavenel sent th’ marble, like he promised. I got all th’ rotten stuff hacked off, an’ I ’bout got the statchoo roughed in.” He gestured to the ovoid on his workbench, which was just about the size of an actual baby plus the angel wings, so far as she could tell. “It gits more finicky from here. But leastwise, we ain’t a-gonna need a cart t’git this back ter Ducktown. I might could take her m’self ridin’ th’ mule with a saddlebag.”

There wasn’t much to admire, but she admired it anyway. “Reckon y’all c’n stop fer a liddle bit?” she asked, hopefully.

He made a show of shaking out his hands and arms. “Reckon I better, or I might start missin’ what I aims t’hit,” he laughed, and set hammer and chisel aside. There were several tall stools here in the workshop; he pulled one out for her to perch on, and dropped himself down atop another. The breeze picked up a bit, and she gathered herself some straw from the floor and started finger-weaving it to make a flat bit she could fan herself with. “Wall, this does give me a chance t’arst y’all iffen y’all really saw them liddle critters in the wagon t’other day.”

Well that wasn’t exactly what she wanted to hear from him—but it was one of the subjects she had determined to talk to him about.

“Plain as plain,” she assured him, on second thought relieved that he had been the one to broach the subject so quickly. “Tha’s parta why I come down here. See . . . seein’ them thangs . . . it means y’all got magic. Like me, an’ like Aunt Jinny.”

She waited, a little apprehensively. How was he going to react to that?

The prospect did not seem to alarm him in the least. He nodded. “I been a-wonderin’ ’bout that. But—I got magic?”

“It’s th’ on’y way y’all c’n see ’em,” she said. “Aunt Jinny, she says thet’s the fust sign y’all got magic, is seein’ ’em.”

“Huh.” He scratched the back of his head. “I thunk mebbe they was some kinds o’ hants, mebbe somethin’ Cherokee.”

“They ain’t hants. Some on ’em’s Cherokee, some ain’t,” she said. “Leastwise thet’s what Aunt Jinny says. When’d y’all fust see ’em?”

“Started seein’ ’em this spring, when I started workin’ on th’ angel-baby. Figgered at fust I was mebbe lettin’ my ’magination run off, on account’a this’s the fust time I ever done a death-piece fer a chile, but then they started helpin’ me.”

She blinked. “Helpin’ y’all? How?”