“It is out of my hands,” Willo said, picking up the pestle again. “She is called, you are not. You cannot go with Bird.” She looked up at him, appeal in her eyes. “Why don’t you stay here with me and learn about healing? You already know plants, and you’d be closer to your mother and sister.”

“I’m no healer,” Han growled, thinking he seemed to be better at causing pain than relieving it. “I don’t know what I am, but I’m not that.” He turned around and stalked out of the lodge.

Bird wasn’t any more help. That night they lay side by side on the bank of Old Woman Creek, connected by their clasped hands and recent kisses. The branches overhead leaked moonlight onto their faces. For once the music of water over stone failed to soothe him.

“I want to go with you to Demonai,” he said, staring up at the canopy of trees.

“I wish you could,” she said.

I want to go, he’d said. Not I wish I could go. Maybe he should have said, I’m going.

When Han didn’t reply, Bird hurried on. “It would be hard. Reid says we’ll be traveling the rest of the summer, and I’ll be learning way-finding and weapons and…and the rest.”

“But you’d be based there, right? After all the training?”

“Based there, but I won’t be there much. The Demonai warriors spend most of their time on the move.” Turning onto her side, she propped up on her elbow and brushed the hair off Han’s forehead. He resisted the urge to flinch away. “Maybe…maybe after I see how things are, maybe once this summer is over, you could come,” she said.

“Maybe,” he said noncommittally, wanting to wound her. “We’ll see.”

With that option closed to him, he turned back to his plan to go with Dancer to Oden’s Ford. He wondered how he could make it happen, when everyone around him seemed opposed to it. He tried going around Willo, approaching several of the silversmiths at the Marisa Pines Market, asking if they knew how to remove his cuffs, and if they’d make him an offer for the metal.

They tried their saws and cutters and knives with no effect. When he told them it didn’t matter if the cuffs were damaged, they tried their irons, heating the metal, burning and blistering Han’s wrists in the process. He needn’t have worried about damage to the cuffs. The silversmiths got nowhere. They didn’t even scratch the surface of the metal, or damage the runes inscribed there.

The answer was always the same. They were interested in the silver, intrigued with it, in fact, but had no idea how to get the bracelets off. Or how to work the silver if they did.