15. The Staff

It was still dark when Micah climbed out of the tent wearing his green jeans and a knit blanket draped over his shoulders. He hadn't managed to get his arm back into a sling on his own with Andrew sleeping, but leaving his left arm limp at his side was tolerable enough.

When he emerged Fionna lifted her shaggy head. She blinked amber eyes at him, and Micah felt a pang of guilt as she made him think of his father. Julian would be horrified if he knew what had happened. But it might also be the case he would start to be happy if he didn't quite know everything.

The wolf inspected him in silence as he inspected her. She looked like an ordinary beast with her tawny paws delicately crossed and her strong shoulders drawn back. But then when he kept watching her, her thick pink tongue poked out the side of her lips and made her look silly and…not quite like an animal. Her tail thumped once against the ground.

Micah held his fingers out toward her. She bowed her head and let him scratch the coarse fur between her ears. As if satisfied, she then laid her head back on her legs and closed her eyes.

Micah sat cross-legged beside her, laying the birchwood staff across his knees. He experimentally closed his left hand into a loose fist. His fingers tingled, and his shoulder cramped. From the little he knew about physiology, the tingling told him there was nerve damage in his shoulder. Scowling, he set his fingers on the staff and curled his good hand around it.

Truthfully, he had no strong feelings at the moment. This week was the longest Micah had been in Lilydale at one time, and it was so…unexpectedly lovely. The Folk in Lilydale were simple and sweet, wanting to experience simple pleasures and play all day.

But the sense of rightness was offset by life below in the human city. A dead witch. The nasty way things were left with Diana. Not to mention his tea shop. The kids were probably going insane with curiosity.

The contrast between the two worlds, and the sweet and the sour, was enough so that it all canceled out.

He was so overwhelmed that it all jumbled into numbness.

Good.

He had a point to prove. With himself, and the strange dual natures fighting within him.

For so long, he couldn't do anything. He just watched things happen. Or they happened to him whether he liked them or not.

Then, after he met Andrew, something began to open in him. He had power in his blood.

But it was locked away where intense emotion was his only key. It was just…no way to continue.

Honestly, Micah thought, staring north toward the glinting skyscrapers downtown…he deserved more.

He deserved to be formidable.

Chewing his lip, Micah looked back down at the birchwood staff he'd snapped off a sapling and claimed for himself. If that small stick could grow, then so could he.

Micah ran the pad of his thumb along the small ridges of the branch. Splinters pierced the whorls of his skin and left behind pinpricks of blood in the wood.

He settled the seat of his pelvis more heavily into the ground, took a shallow breath, and visualized the branch sprouting triumphantly back into life.

Something stirred deep in his belly, tickling its way up his sternum, along the cleft of his lip and to the crown of his head. He watched with distant delight as the branch rippled and cracked like an eggshell, the wood splitting first where he'd left a thin trail of his blood.

Bright green leaves broke through the fissures, twining hungrily into the air, small and wrinkled at first and then uncurling into glossy green coins.

His lips twitched. But it wasn't enough.

Micah shut the door on the stream within himself feeding into the branch.

Immediately, the small leaves withered and floated off the staff and onto the packed snow under him. The wood smoothed back down, the bark unruffling like a preening bird.

His heart lurched with a strange grief. He acknowledged the grief of life waning, and then released the feeling.

Micah used his good arm to stand the staff up in front of him like it was a mirror of his spine as he sat erect in the cold winter air.

He frowned faintly, considering his options. Beside him, Fionna twitched in her sleep.

Micah searched for that piece of raw energy that was tickling inside him. He told it to move, nudging it along his arm, through the palm of his hand, and up the birch to its gnarled end facing skyward.

The point of the staff began to spark with soft green light, emanating in the dark like the light on a radio tower.

Micah's lips parted. He leaned on the staff and pulled himself to his feet. Gingerly, he reached his injured arm forward to touch the light with one finger. It felt like…him.

Planting his feet, he swung down the branch and tapped its glowing tip on the skeleton of a dormant cluster of lilies. The light danced off the tip of the staff and onto the dry, papery leaves, which began to stir as if someone stepped into them. Beginning deep down near the stems, the color of the leaves grew brighter, supple, stretching out as if waking from a long sleep. Long spindles of lily stems curled up and the heavy buds emerged before his eyes. Bright orange petals unfurled, trembling slightly in the cold.

Tears springing into his eyes, Micah started to grin.

Obscured by the leaves of her winterberry bush, Ingrid sat cross-legged outside her hut and watched Micah unnoticed. When he brought the lilies back to life, Ingrid's lips split in a joyous smile as she leaned against her door and hid her tearful face in her hands.