“Are you saying we should just give up?” he asked finally.
The Sinnissippi glanced over at him. “If I tell you to give up, will you do so?”
“No, not ever.”
“Then I will not ask it of you.”
They reached the bluffs overlooking the Rock. Below them the river wound through its broad channel, silvery and sleek in the moonlight, its clean look belying the reality of its condition. Stunted clumps of dead trees lined the banks on both sides. On the far side, houses sat dark and empty. Once people lived in those houses, families with pets and neighbors and friends, and on nights like these they would laugh and talk and watch television and then sleep peacefully, knowing that when they woke, their world would not have changed.
Logan leaned on his staff. He was hot and stiff, impatient and tired.
“What are you trying to tell me? Because I’m not understanding.”
Two Bears sat cross-legged on the rocks at the edge of the bluff and peered out across the river. Logan hesitated, then joined him, setting the staff on the ground beside him.
“Look around, Logan.” The big man made a sweeping gesture. “This park was beautiful once, a haven watched over and protected by a sylvan, a gathering place for creatures of magic. But it is dead and empty now. No sylvan watches over it. All the sylvans in the world are gone. They were destroyed along with their forests. What will it take to bring them back? What will it take to make the park beautiful again?”
Logan waited a moment, then said, “Time.”
“Rebirth.” Two Bears looked directly at him. “Do you know what lies in this park? My ancestors. Almost all of them, buried in the earth, right over there.”
He pointed to a series of dark mounds visible through the trees not far from where they sat. Logan wondered where this was going.
“I have strong memories of my people, but stronger memories still of a little girl who now also rests here. I met her in this park almost a hundred years ago, when I was younger than I am now.” He smiled. “She lived in a house close by the entrance. She was a friend to the sylvan who tended the park. The park was her playground. When she was in it, she was at her happiest. She was followed everywhere by a spirit creature, a huge wolf dog born of magic. The creature, it turned out, was a part of her. Bad and good, it was a part of her.
She was the most important human being of her generation, but when I met her, she was still just a girl.”
One eyebrow lifted quizzically. “Her name was Nest Freemark. Do you know of her?”
Logan shook his head. “No.”
“I found her first, but two others were searching for her, as well.
One was a Knight of the Word named John Ross. The other was a demon. One had come to save her, the other to subvert her. She possessed great magic, Logan. She was the linchpin to the future of the ?world, able to change the course of history because of who she was and what she might do. She didn’t know any of it. She discovered a part of the truth of things over the course of the next fifteen years, but she did not ever know the whole of it.”
“Why was she so important?” Logan caught sight of a pair of feeders lurking in the trees and forced himself to ignore them. “Is she the reason we’re here?”
Two Bears nodded. “She rests in the cemetery just over the rise, behind the burial mounds of my people. She has been gone from the world for a long time now, but her legacy lives on in the form of a child born to her in the fall of her thirtieth year. It was her only child, a child she hadn’t even known she would produce. It was born of magic, a creature of enormous power, her gift to the world we now live in because it is that world’s best hope.”
“Must be a rather old child by now,” Logan observed.
“Almost eighty, but still only a child. It is not a human child—at least, not as we think of human children. It began life as a gypsy morph, a creature of a very powerful, wild magic. Gypsy morphs can assume any shape, take any form.
No two have ever turned out exactly the same. Only a handful of morphs are conceived in a human lifetime, and most are never even glimpsed. But John Ross trapped this one on the Oregon coast, and after it had gone through its changes and taken the shape of a small boy, he took it with him to this town to find Nest Freemark. Its purpose in life was to become her child, born to her in the aftermath of the battle that took Ross’s life. The morph entered Nest Freemark in one form and emerged in another. Only she knew its origins and its secrets.