Can’t we do anything?” Bennie asked as the titan moved over Kiron. They weren’t high enough to see the next ridge over, but Bennie knew that Lone Pine Peak was over there, and many more beside that had been touched by mining in some way or another. Were they alive, too? Motheater had said there were others; maybe Kire was looking for its kin.
“Like what?” Zach asked, his eyes fixed on Kire. It moved like a many-legged beast, a crawling doom. He seemed to have accepted that Motheater had failed after the moths disappeared, shrugged like dust from the titan’s heavy, low shoulders. “Throw sticks at it?”
Jasper squeezed Bennie’s arm gently, pulling away from her.
“I never knew much about Esther’s magic. Her words made incredible things happen, and that was enough. I had no need for faith, I could see it.” He spoke softly, and Bennie turned to him, eyes burning with tears. “But she needs our faith now.”
“So what do I do?” Bennie shook her head. “I don’t know magic.” She couldn’t even talk to the mountain, she couldn’t feel anything around her but her familiar in the air, the heaving death of the moth swarm. That wasn’t her magic.
Jasper smiled, finally, and Bennie started. He was ethereal, beautiful and strange, a creature like Motheater, but shaped into something perfect. No wonder Zach was staring.
“You don’t need to know magic,” he said, unblinking as Bennie collected her wits. “You are magic.”
Bennie had never felt so small. She closed her eyes and shook her head, curling over, hands pressed to her chest, her back arched over. She put her forehead near the ground, held her hands over heart, and reached out, trying to find the threads that tied her to Motheater, to her witch, to this place.
She put her hands on the stone outcrop and tried to feel what she had felt on the road to the Church of the Rock: some kind of connection to the earth, to the mountain. Without Motheater . . . without Esther, it felt impossible. Why didn’t she get witch lessons or something? A handbook would be nice. Bennie hiccuped and tried again, leaning over, trying to drive her soul, her spirit, her familiar-flock-of-blue jay into the stone.
All she felt was anger, rage, hurt. Kire wanted blood. Kire didn’t care—it was corrupted, blackened from the inside out. This was the cost of humans’ meddling in the mountain.
But that wasn’t right. Bennie was the mountain, too.
Bennie pressed her hands against her sternum. She thought about Motheater, all alone, small and brilliant and brave, and she reached out with all of herself. Around her, she felt warmth.
She sent out love, she sent out strength, she thought of the way Motheater laughed when she surprised Bennie, the way she sounded so resigned when faced with something modern, how she was fierce and angry and burning, the way she tended the flock of moths that descended on her every night. She thought of the way her mouth felt on hers, the way she moved in the night, the way Motheater’s blood clung to her hand. This was a mourning love, a last breath, and Bennie knew it. Esther had to undo what she made.
But she wouldn’t be alone.
Bennie sent out love. She sent out all the love she had.