Granted, he was a Cherokee, and normally Osage of her forefather’s time hadn’t much use for the Thing-On-Its-Head People, but these were mi-ah-luschka, and they were a law unto themselves. It didn’t take much to wind up swelling their ranks, if they decided to take you.

But after she had saved him from blowing himself to bloody bits, and had confronted them, they had truly seemed less angry than resigned. There hadn’t even been any serious argument when she claimed David was already under her protection and implied that he was acting on her behalf.

They did make certain he saw every single one of them, though, and they took a great deal of glee in his obvious fear. It was probably the first time he had Seen something not of the physical world, but of the Medicine world, at least as an adult. It had obviously come as quite a shock. And she had to admit, she had taken just as much enjoyment in his fear as the Little People had.

Maybe they knew that; maybe that was why they hadn’t given her much of a fight.

So now he was a believer—in the Little People, at least. And she thought he might have seen her two spirit-echoes as well, her Medicine Woman-self and her Kestrel-self. The way he kept giving her strange looks when he thought she wasn’t watching was proof enough that he had seen something odd about her.

Grandfather had hinted obliquely at something of the kind, and David had gotten a queasy look. David hadn’t wanted to believe. He was one of those for whom the old legends were wonderful, but hardly applicable to modern times.

Odd. She should have been the one with that attitude. She was the one living in the Heavy Eyebrows’ world, making her living their way. She was the one who actually fit into that world, at least outwardly. He was the activist, the rebel, who wanted at least a partial return to the Old Ways.

But that wasn’t the oddest thing she’d had to deal with lately. On the face of it, she was as contrary as Mooncrow. …

At least David’s experiences had made him a lot more tractable when it came to persuading him that there was a lot more going on with this situation than what appeared on the surface.

After talking with him for four hours, she had to concede that he had changed some over the years. He wasn’t as much of a chauvinistic brat as he had been. He wasn’t as narrow-minded as she’d assumed, either. He still wasn’t going to win the Nobel Peace Prize by any means, but he wasn’t as bad as he had been; he could compromise; he could be flexible when he chose.