She pushed off from the desk, turning her chair to face him. He stood there with his “teaching” face on, which meant that he wasn’t going to leave until she said out loud what it was that had so troubled her.

“Because there was a sacred pipe in there, that’s why.” She frowned at him, angry at being forced to admit her own weakness and her own deficiencies. “Not just any pipe, either, but a powerful one, created by and for a Lakotah shaman’s use. Dammit, Grandfather, you know I’m not a pipebearer! You know why, too; you know I’m not strong enough, I’m not good enough to handle it safely if it had remembered that the Lakotah and the Osage weren’t exactly best buddies, and decided I was a threat!” She stared him straight in the eyes, all her bitterness there for him to see for himself. “You’ve told me that often enough, and you know you have.”

But Grandfather did not seem in the least disturbed, not by her half-accusations, nor by her bitterness. “I’ve told you that you’ll be ready only when you stop thinking you should be ready. You should listen to what I say, not what you think you hear.”

And with that, he calmly turned and went back into the living room. Back to his Nintendo, no doubt.

She counted to ten, slowly, in English, Osage, and Cherokee. Useful, to have three languages to do it in. Four, if you counted her rudimentary Spanish—so for good measure, she did it in Spanish, too.

Well, now that he’d gotten that out of the way, he’d probably leave her alone about it. Sometimes she wondered just what he thought he was doing when he asked her things like that.…

No, he knows what he’s doing. I just don’t understand it. She sighed, and picked up the little table-fetish one of her clients had sent her as a gift. Bear, and she wasn’t Bear clan—and Zuni, and she wasn’t Zuni—but the thought had been kindly and the gift had meaning because of that. She cradled it in her hand, a lovely cool piece of soapstone, comforting to hold because of its gentle curves.

She had been the only one in the family to have Medicine Power; she would be the only one he had time to train before he died. Was he feeling frustrated too, having to work with a flawed tool?

After all, he’d been teaching her so many things that she was not, by tradition, “permitted” to know. The Medicine of all the other gentes, for instance; and men’s Medicine as well as woman’s—and Warrior’s Medicine.