Rolling his breeches above his knees, Han soaped the rag and washed the mud from his bare feet and lower legs, rinsing in the basin. Then he began scrubbing his arms and hands. The silver cuffs around his wrists kept turning when he tried to wipe them clean.

“Let me.” Bird picked up a boar-bristle brush, gripped the cuff on his left wrist, and took the brush to it. She leaned in close, getting that familiar frown on her face that said she was concentrating. She’d used some kind of scent—she smelled like fresh air and vanilla and flowers.

“You should take these off if you’re going to get into the mud,” she grumbled.

“That’s helpful,” he said, rolling his eyes. “You try to get them off.” He tugged at one of them to demonstrate. It was a solid three-inch-wide band of silver, and too small to slide over his hand. He’d had them on ever since he could remember.

“You know they’ve got magic in them. Otherwise you’d have outgrown them by now.” Bird used her fingernail to dig out some dried mud. “Your mother bought them from a peddler?”

He nodded. It must’ve been during some prosperous time in the past, when there was money to spend on silver bracelets for a baby. When they weren’t living hand-to-mouth, as Mam always said.

“She’s got to remember something,” Bird persisted. She never seemed to know when to leave off. “Maybe you could find the peddler who sold them to her.”

Han shrugged. They’d had this conversation before, which he mostly got through by shrugging. Bird didn’t know Mam. His mother never came to the camps in the mountains, never shared songs and stories around a fire. Mam didn’t like to talk about the past, and Han had long ago learned not to ask too many questions, lest she slam her switch down on his fingers or send him to bed without supper.

The clans, they were all about stories. They told stories about things that had happened a thousand years ago. Han never tired of listening to them over and over. Hearing a familiar clan story was like sliding into your own bed on a cold night with a full belly and knowing you’d wake up safe in the same place.

Bird released his one hand and picked up the other. Her fingers were warm and soapy and slippery. “These symbols must mean something,” she said, tapping the cuff with her forefinger. “Maybe if you knew how to use them, you could—I don’t know—shoot flames from the palms of your hands.”

Han was thinking he was just as likely to shoot flames from his rear end. “They look clan-made to me, but Willo doesn’t know what the symbols mean,” Han said. “And if she doesn’t know, nobody does.”