Codex Born by Jim C. Hines Page B

down. I twitched my foot out of the way, and the hoe gouged the floor.
    She attacked again, more confident now. I allowed her to drive me back, then sidestepped, snatching the hoe with one hand. As my fingers curled around the old wood, I felt…a
memory
was the closest word I could find to describe it. An ash tree standing in the sun, roots gripping a grassy hillside. The ash that had been cut down and shaped into this tool.
    The handle of the hoe reacted to my touch. Roots sprouted from the end, twining around Marion’s hand. She screamed and pulled away, but the roots bound her fingers.
    I imagined Frank standing over us, watching us battle for his affection. Seeing proof of how much we loved him. Joy suffused my blood. My delighted laughter filled the barn, and I twisted the handle until the bones of Marion’s hand snapped like old sticks in winter.

    O NCE NIDHI AND JENETA had left, I returned to the house long enough to change into warmer clothes and fetch my sleeping bag from the closet. Even in August, the U.P. could get chilly at night. I stopped in the kitchen and searched the refrigerator, but nothing looked appetizing. I settled for grabbing a handful of vitamins, which I washed down with a Sprite. Even that was enough to make me queasy, but I clenched my stomach until the surges of nausea passed.
    I tacked a makeshift curtain over the broken door, then picked a handful of books from the library and a small reading light, slung my laptop case over my shoulder, and returned to the garden. Attempting more magic so soon would be madness—literally, if I wasn’t careful—but I couldn’t stop thinking. Our enemy knew Lena’s tree, and that meant she was vulnerable. She had survived the loss of her tree before, but while she had never spoken much about the experience, I got the sense it had come closer to killing her than she wanted to admit.
    She had transferred herself into this oak. Perhaps it would be wise to do so again, to find a tree deep in the woods that nobody knew about. But would that be enough? The insects had found her here. If they could sniff out the magic of her tree, what was to stop them from tracking her down no matter where she went?
    Better to defend her tree, strengthen it against attack. There were plenty of books that described magical fertilizers and spells to empower plants. With the right combination, I could grow Lena’s oak as tall and strong as Jack’s beanstalk. Though given the end of Jack’s tale, perhaps that wasn’t the best plan.
    Or I could grow Lena a new tree. Did she have to live within an oak? I could grow a whomping willow from Harry Potter, giving her tree the ability to defend itself. No, Gutenberg had locked Rowling’s work. Perhaps one of the ent knockoffs from various fantasy tales, a tree with the ability to uproot itself and move about.
    What would happen if I planted Yggdrasil, the world tree from Norse mythology? I doubted such a seed would fit through the pages of a book, but if I could break off even the smallest twig for Lena to graft to her oak…
    “Right,” I muttered to myself. “Because nobody would notice an enormous tree growing miles into the sky.” The roots would probably devour most of Copper River. I tried to imagine how much water a tree like that would consume. It could drain half of the Great Lakes, killing off most of the surrounding vegetation in the process.
    I set the book aside, jumped up, and paced the length of the garden, doing my best to avoid stepping on the plants. At the rate the pumpkins were growing, we were going to have some amazing jack o’lanterns for Halloween.
    What if Lena grafted branches from her oak onto multiple trees? Would spreading herself in such a way help to protect her from attack, or would it splinter her mind?
    My thoughts were scampering about with all the frantic energy of Smudge in a rainstorm. I hadn’t even begun to considerwhat Jeneta had done tonight. Why had my magic set things off like a rock