The Thread That Binds the Bones by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Richard Bober

the last time I was a bird?”
    She gasped, her hands pressing against her chest over her heart.
    “You agreed to come with me then. Come with me now, Maggie.”
    Tom heard the golden thread in Carroll’s voice, the bait angling for a bite.
    “Come home and talk to me,” Carroll said. “I never knew you could talk. Did this akenar cast a spell on you to give you a voice?”
    Maggie glanced at Tom, her breathing ragged and deep. One of her hands floated toward him.
    —Use Othersight, Peregrine murmured.
    Tom blinked, and saw golden tendrils reaching from the black bird to the girl, twining around her head. Tom reached out and pinched the threads. They tarnished and fell apart instantly. Maggie straightened. Her eyes looked enormous and stormy. “Always had a voice, you stupid paragar ,but I hid it! There’s a part of me you’ve never had.” She took a step toward the raven. “And now I’m big and you’re little, and—”
    The bird fluttered and dipped and muttered.
    —Spellcasting, Peregrine told Tom.
    Tom rubbed his hands together, imagining that he spun smooth silver metal between his palms. Heat tingled under the skin of his hands. An almost weightless substance grew around his hands as he rubbed them. Open-handed, he threw what he was crafting toward Maggie, instructing it to form a shield around her. Sweat trickled down his back, under his arms, beaded on his forehead and upper lip. He watched as shimmering silver streamed from him to form a globe around her. An instant later something red spun from the raven and struck the shield, and Tom felt it as if the shield were an extended portion of his skin. The spell felt soft, fibrous, and sticky, but it slid off the shield and melted.
    The raven screamed and leapt at Tom again. He closed his hands and opened them, imagining a globe enclosing the bird. Suddenly the raven was trapped in a bubble just big enough for it, stubbing its wings against the sides, peeking with its beak, squawking, its noise muted by its prison. Tom’s hands burned with a heat that did not consume them, but hurt anyway.
    Maggie picked up the bubble and threw it toward a rock. “Hey!” Tom cried, and reached with something other than flesh to the bubble, which was still connected to him as the shield around Maggie was. He stopped the bubble in mid-air, though Carroll still spun inside. “No, Maggie.”
    “You don’t know what he did to me. How he helped me, took care of me, promised to cherish ... then ... how he ... raped me ...” Tears streaked down her face .. “He uses everyone. He’s the worst of the lot. Want him dead.”
    “I’m not going to help you kill him.”
    The bird quieted in its globe.
    Maggie said, “Do it on my own, then.”
    “Do you want to tie a knot around the worst thing that’s happened to you and drag it with you everywhere you go? Don’t do it, Maggie.”
    “It’s not the worst—” she began, frustrated, then asked, “Is that an order—Master?”
    “A suggestion,” he said. Her smoky eyes troubled him.
    She glared at him, then at the bird, suspended in a bubble in the air. She climbed back into the car. Eddie patted her shoulder.
    Tom closed the car door, picked the bubble out of the air and walked away into the woods with it. When he reached a clearing, he sat on a log and set the bubble on the ground and waited.
    Subdued, the bird stood silent.
    Tom twitched his fingers, inviting the bubble to release its captive and return to him. It dissolved. Coolness flowed into his fingers, soothing the heat. The raven hopped away, then returned.
    “Why did you hurt Maggie?” Tom asked.
    “Hurt her? I rescued her from a brute of a tanganar . I asked her if she wanted to come with me, and she said yes. Well, not said, because she never did talk—think of the power in that girl, to keep silent all this time—but she indicated assent. Her choice.” The raven cocked its head, studying him.
    “Did you rape her?” Tom felt a strong sense of unreality