“Then I’ll make sure it’s gone,” he said simply.
I didn’t like the look in his eyes. “I don’t like the look in your eyes.”
He grinned, and there, under the branch and bramble, in the wet and green, he looked wild as honey, free as a wing.
“You’ll want to step back, maybe,” he said.
“How far? Antarctica?”
He laughed. “Have a little faith in me, Ricks.”
“You’re gonna use magic, aren’t you?”
“Might as well.”
“If someone sees you...”
“I will be subtle as a whisper,” he said. “Trust me.”
I shook my head, but got moving. An electric charge gathered around him, magic building like the far-off hum of a summer thunderstorm, the taste of it a zing of tart berry crushed between tongue and cheek.
When Card drew upon his magic, he was dazzling. Alive. A part of something wondrous, but not the least bit dimmed by its magnificence.
I knew, right then and there, that no matter how much I tried to convince myself to be logical about him, my heart yearned.
My heart loved that wild, chaotic man.
And I had no idea what to do about that.
I walked with one eye on him, the other on keeping me from tripping over the stones, grasses, and wood cluttering the soggy ground, until I was standing next to the swamp siren again.
“He doesn’t need your axe?” she asked.
“Oh, I wouldn’t trust him with it.”
Lilt Keyva turned her attention to him, a man without a sharp blade of any kind in his hands, then back to me.
“Is he going to ask the tree to chop itself down?”
I thought about it. That might be exactly what he was planning. Despite what Lilt Keyva had accused him of, he was still heart-rooted to his tree. It gave him power, it gave him persuasion over the green and growing. Maybe he was going to ask the tree to bend, to grow more to one side.
The fact that he was also half wizard would help get the message through to the old tree too.
“He’s not doing anything,” she said.
“Give him a minute. That man doesn’t know how to hold still.”
But he was holding still. He had settled down on one of the roots crooked like a knuckle out of the muck.
His back was pressed to the trunk now, his hands resting on his thighs. I didn’t know how a man with that many muscles, and thighs that big could sit in an easy tailor position, but he had folded down like it was natural.
And for him, when it came to reaching out and connecting with the green, with an old tree, it was.
A beam of sunlight twisted between twig and moss to brighten the side of his hair and cheekbone, making him glow.
He lifted one hand and called on magic.
Magic came to him softly, like a breeze, like spring, like the dewy brush of dawn.
