An uncharacteristic smudge of green snaked across Lilith’s cheek. A cloud of green hung in the air over her, and puffs of green came from farther afield where Jacob, Matthew, Thomas, and Rebekah worked.
“Where have you been, Ishmael?” She looked annoyed with him. Before Ishmael could answer, Lilith turned to Phoebe. “And what are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to help,” Phoebe said.
Lilith put her hands on her hips. “You can’t even see color. How are you going to help?”
“I found a new way to color the leaves,” Ishmael said. “I want to show everyone together.”
Lilith pushed her hair off her face, leaving behind yet another streak of green on her forehead. “Another experiment? Really, Ishmael? We don’t have time for this.”
“I know, but this will make the work go faster.” Ishmael called for the others.
They weren’t far, and Ishmael heard irritation in their voices as they approached.
“I had just gotten to the top of that tree when you called,” Jacob said. “What do you want?”
“Phoebe has something to show you. She’s come to help.” He nodded at Phoebe.
“Right now?” she asked.
Ishmael pulled the vial of green from his pocket. “Anybody have a swab?”
Jacob handed him a swab from his pocket.
“Wait. Where’s Hannah?”
“I think she went to the far side of the posticum,” Jacob said. “She probably couldn’t hear you call.”
Disappointed by Hannah’s absence, Ishmael dipped the swab into the green and held it up. “Go ahead,” he said to Phoebe. “Sing.”
She opened her mouth and began to sing. The sound eased the green off Ishmael’s swab. The color swirled through the air, twirling and jumping, until it landed on a low leaf of the nearest tree.
Ishmael couldn’t help but be thrilled at the sight. Lilith’s jaw dropped. Phoebe sang until Lilith walked over to the leaf and touched the spot of green, rubbing her thumb gently over the ridges of the leaf. The green stayed. Phoebe’s voice trailed off as Lilith looked at her in amazement.
Just then, Michael burst through the trees, holding a contraption that looked just as strange as the last one. “I’ve got it!” he declared.
No one noticed.
“Did I just see that?” Rebekah asked.
Ishmael nodded.
“See what?” Michael asked.
“Phoebe, did you …? The color …?” Lilith said.
Phoebe nodded also, and Lilith let out a whoop of joy. Jacob picked up Phoebe and swung her around.
“The song of the heart brings joy to the hearer,” Thomas said.
Matthew twisted his fingers through a narrower belt he wore around his waist, tightening it, and Jacob broke out into the widest grin Ishmael had ever seen.
“Wait! What did she do?” Michael said, looking from one to the other.
“Do it again!” Lilith said.
“Do what again?” Poor Michael had no idea what had happened. “Ishmael, tell me what’s going on.”
Ishmael held out a vial of green. “Her song moves color.”
Michael’s eyes lit up, and he beamed at Phoebe. “Really?”
Lilith held the vial, and Phoebe began to sing again. The green rose in a cloud, swirling around them and growing denser as Phoebe’s song grew louder. It kept coming, pouring forth, and as Ishmael watched the cloud strengthen, he realized he had no idea just how powerful this could be.
The green hovered.
Ishmael squeezed Phoebe’s arm, watching the green sway and shift. There was a terrifying beauty in the power of her song as it led each particle of green up, floating, into the sky—a beauty that he could never have anticipated.
Phoebe straightened her shoulders and dug down into the ground with her heels, as if she could harness power from the foundation, filter it through her feet and legs and torso, and give voice to that power. Ishmael could see the effort it cost her. The sound dipped, then jumped, and her voice soared.
The green rose again, blotting out the copse of trees nearest them. Phoebe kept singing, and the wave of green draped itself upon the crowns of both the small, young trees as well as the larger trees from the topmost leaves all the way down to the roots sticking up out of the foundation. In a moment, about twenty of the closest trees in the copse were covered entirely in green, both trunks and leaves.
Lilith touched Phoebe lightly on her shoulder and nodded. Phoebe stopped singing and gasped for air, breathless from the exertion. She put her hand out and leaned on one of the trees. After a minute, she sank to the ground.
Thomas, Lilith, and Ishmael followed. Matthew walked over to a leaf and touched it.
Michael, still beaming and blind to the near-disaster, said, “Did she do it again?”
“What just happened, Ishmael?” Phoebe turned to him. “Did it work? You all looked strange, and I wondered if I did something wrong.”
“When you colored the rag in the library, you colored a spot about this big.” Ishmael held his hand out, making a circle with his thumb and forefinger. “Just now you colored about twenty trees.”
She turned to look at the tree she rested against. “The whole thing?” Her eyes traveled up the trunk to the topmost branches.
“Yes, the whole thing.”
“Twenty of them?”
“Leaves to roots.”
“Oh.” She looked at the trees. “No wonder you looked strange.”
“I’ve never seen that much color loose—except the time you emptied all the jars in the workroom,” Ishmael said. He looked at her, and she looked at him, and they burst into laughter.
“That’s not funny!” Lilith protested, but then she giggled, too.
“We would have had a much easier time collecting the color if we had known you could do this,” Jacob said.
“I would have had a much easier time cleaning up the workroom if I had known I could do this.”
That sent them into peals of laughter again.
“But how does the color get there?” Michael asked.
“I directed my song outward and let the sound carry it.”
“Maybe with less color, the placement will be more exact?” Ishmael said.
Michael thought about that for a second. “Possibly.”
“Wait, why are you here?” Rebekah said.
“Yeah, why are you here?” Jacob said.
Michael held up the device in his hands. “Ishmael asked for help, so I come bearing help.”
“What is that thing?” Thomas asked.
“If you have some color, I’ll show you.”
Lilith held out the vial to Michael. He dumped what was left of it into a funnel and began turning a crank. Simultaneously, he lifted a nozzle on the other side and pointed it toward a tree behind him.
A fine green mist emerged and drifted onto the foliage.
“Can you aim it any higher?” Jacob suggested.
Thomas stepped forward, dropped his bundle of vials and said, “Give it to me.” He took the nozzle and lifted it as high as he could reach. The color sifted down through the leaves, staining them green. When he ran out of color, he put the nozzle down.
“It’s not fancy, but it’s faster than what we can do with sifters and swabs,” Thomas said. He surveyed the trees left to color in that section. “We might just be able to do this in time. But as Gram said, Do not praise yourself while going into battle; praise yourself coming out of battle.”
“We could ask Sound Master for more help, too,” Phoebe said. “There’s a full Hall of apprentices that can do what I just did.”
“Do you think he’ll agree?” Lilith twisted a lock of her hair. “What’s he like, anyway?”
“Sound Master is brilliant with sound. Listen. Can you hear the music in the wind? It’s a marvel. He composed that music.” Phoebe looked up toward the sky. She closed her eyes and cocked her head.
Thomas lifted an ear. “But I thought Aaron had to do all the sound in here.”
“Oh, he did. It’s just a variation on the work Sound Master did years ago.”
Ishmael listened. He heard a branch rubbing against another and in the distance, the sound of the waves churning in the sea. It sounded sort of … blue. He looked at Lilith. She shrugged her shoulders. Thomas shook his head. Jacob frowned, while Matthew wore a look of intense concentration, trying hard to hear music in the wind. Michael was still perplexed by what had just happened and tapped one of the tree trunks, as if hoping to figure out what exactly Phoebe had done.
Phoebe opened her eyes and hummed a few notes. “I don’t know if he’ll allow the others to come or not. He’s a bit … temperamental.”
“How could he not?” Ishmael picked up a stone and tossed it in the air, catching it.
“Yeah,” Michael said. “How could he not?”