“Oh, yay,” he whispered, “we can take notes. Publish a paper. Posthumously. It’ll make us famous, but oops, we’ll be dead, attacked by rampaging tree spirits. What a pity.”
“They don’t seem hostile.” They were merely watching, silently, with their fiery eyes, from everywhere. Twisting around, she glanced behind her and saw, beside the sprawling immense bear, yet another one on the roof of the cottage, half-hidden behind the chimney and perched on a branch that hung over the kitchen. The cactus, she noticed, was huddled in a corner of the garden, beside a basket, doing its best impression of a lifeless rock. Occasionally, though, a few of its needles trembled.
Kiela took a step forward.
The shadow-clouds shifted, as if blown by a breeze.
She stopped.
Raising her voice, she asked, “Can we help you?”
It seemed to be the right question to ask.
A whisper of a breeze swept through the garden, but Kiela didn’t feel its breath on her face. She waited, and a few seconds later, a cloud bear about the size of a cat inched forward from behind one of her plants. It was holding a leaf in its wisp-like paws. Laying it on the ground at Kiela’s feet, it looked up at her with its flickering-flame eyes and then it scurried back behind the plant.
Kiela picked up the leaf. It was long and slender, supple and green.
“Willow,” Caz identified.
Another tree guardian scooted forward—this one even smaller, the size of a rabbit. The little cloud bear laid a tiny branch covered with apple blossoms at her feet and then retreated. Kiela picked that up as well.
“Apple tree,” Caz supplied.
A third cloud bear swept toward her at the speed of wind, and this one wasnotsmall. It loomed over her, so large that she couldn’t breathe. Everything in her screamed to run. It could envelop her in its mist, swallow her whole. But it merely dropped a shriveled branch at her feet that was covered in dead leaves. This time, the cloud bear didn’t retreat. It sat in front of her and looked down at her with ember eyes.
“Sycamore,” Caz said. “I think. Why—”
“I can guess,” Kiela said. She knelt and picked up the twig with the dead leaves. “You want us to fix your tree, like we did the willow and the apple trees?”
The windless breeze echoed through the garden again, and all the cloud bears crept forward until all she could see in every direction was a kind of waiting fog, with eyes. It was, to say the least, disconcerting. Caz scooted closer to her until his root ball pressed against her foot. She felt stray bits of soil drop into her shoe.
Softly, she whispered to Caz, “It’s okay. I think they just want our help.” Louder, she said to the bears, “Wait here—I’m going to get the spells . . .”
“Remedies,” Caz murmured.
“. . . and then you can show us where the sick trees are, okay?”
She had no idea if that was okay with the tree guardians or not, but they didn’t move as she and Caz went inside to retrieve the basket of pine cones. She had no idea how many sick trees there were in the forest, but judging by the number of tree spirits in her yard . . .
“We were going to sell those,” Caz said mournfully, trailing after her. “That was the plan, so you can eat and not get as sick as the trees.”
“I know, but they need our help.”
Caz humphed. “Did anyone help us when we needed help? Did anyone tell us to evacuate when the library was breeched? Did anyone check to see if we were okay? If the smoke had reached our floor? Did anyone care that we were in danger?”
Kiela thought for a moment. “Larran came when he saw smoke. He fixed our chimney.”
Another snort. “Larran thinks you’re the answer to every question he’s ever had.”
“He . . . what?” That was absurd. “He doesn’t ask me questions.” He mostly talked about his merhorses, which she didn’t mind, but . . . “What in the world do you mean by that?”
“If you have to ask . . .”
“I do have to ask, obviously,” Kiela said. “Because you aren’t making sense.”
Outside, she heard the wind pick up—orwasit the wind? She glanced out the window over the kitchen sink, and it was crowded with cloud bears, their ember eyes staring in at her and Caz.
She shot Caz a look. “We’ll continue this later,” she told him.
