He looked to his teacher. She was on her back, teetering on her pack like an overturned tortoise, but her dark-rimmed eyes were fully awake and focused on Green.
A terrible clarity touched a single cold finger to his brow and he had the urge to scream.
He did not scream.
Words came to him.
A croaking voice that seemed to fall into his thoughts from somewhere in the dark sky.
Make the choice.
He tugged on a crooked smile.
Already ice was crystallizing in his beard, spreading like lichen on stone.
He reached for the acorn, pulling it from his pocket. Bringing it up to eye level, he spoke to the little nut.
“Magic. Because I say so.”
Catskill spoke within his mind. There was pain in the words.
Holding difficult…it is stronger now.
Green nodded to Valentina. She watched him, her face a frozen mask of pain. He held the acorn up in the space between them and repeated the Crow King’s words.
“A beacon. An anchor. A wellspring of courage.”
He spoke the words, his choice, his meaning, into the acorn and did his best to believe his own voice.
Hold slipping…
He walked to his teacher and placed the acorn in her coat pocket.
“Plant it.”
Something drew his eyes down and down beneath his feet, a watchfulness he could feel, something too distant and dark to conjure any images in his head. There were words down there, too, a voice like Catskill’s but different.
Protect my pup, mountain-kin.
Green thought his response down deep into the world.
He turned and walked to the fawn.
There was his teacher’s way.
The math of the situation. Knowledge. Close the hole to remove the threat.
There was Catskill’s way.
Attack the invader bodily. Strength. Let it feel the jaws of the mountain.
There was Green’s way.
A childhood memory surfaced, scooping up a small brown spider in a juice cup. Carrying the tiny creature from the kitchen to his mother’s tomato plants on the back porch. Returning it to a world of leaves and dappled sunlight.
“So. Let’s get you back home.”
He stepped up to the glass fawn.
