He couldn’t have said why they felt like they should keep their new relationship a secret. It was as if they didn’t need to deal with all the conflicts around them, if they kept this part of their lives hidden away. Or maybe the whole thing seemed so fragile that it needed sheltering, a seedling that might get tromped on.

Or maybe, as it turned out, it was an instinct for self-preservation.

Bird made Han feel connected, like less of an outsider because she’d chosen him. He wished she weren’t going away. If she weren’t leaving, he might have settled into clan life and accepted Willo’s offer to teach him a trade.

Still, as the time drew nearer for Bird to leave for Demonai Camp, and Dancer for Oden’s Ford, Han felt more and more as if he were sitting on a sandbar in a river of events, and it was rapidly washing away beneath him. Soon he’d be alone, marooned at Marisa Pines, while his friends among the clan moved on to new adventures.

Unless he left Marisa Pines and went to Demonai with Bird. He’d never been to the high country camp in the western Spirits, and he didn’t know anyone who lived there except a few of the traders. Still, if he was going to be an exile anyway, he might as well see the small part of the world he had access to.

If he couldn’t go with Bird and the Demonai warriors, maybe he could find work with a trader who traveled between the camps, and still see her sometimes.

He knew he’d need to ask Willo for permission, so he sought her out one morning when she was mixing medicines in the hearth room of the Matriarch Lodge.

“Bring me the blue bowl, Hunts Alone,” she commanded, gesturing toward her storage shelves. Willo was never one to let a person sit idle when she was working.

He handed it to her, and she emptied what looked like chunks of yellow chalk into her mortar and began grinding them into a brilliant powder.

“Willo, I’ve been thinking about moving to Demonai,” he said, squatting next to her.

She said nothing, but scraped the yellow powder into a cup.

“There’s a lot more trade going that way into Tamron because of the war in Arden,” he added.

“Fetch me the turtle weed,” she said, without looking up.

He lifted down the aromatic branches that hung under the eaves of the lodge and handed them to her. She pulled the leaves free, one by one, and dropped them into the mortar.

“So. I could work with one of the traders over there,” he said, unsettled by her lack of response. “Maybe you could introduce me.”

“I said I would find you work at Marisa Pines,” Willo said.

“I know. Thank you. But I just think Demonai might—”