It’s #BookQW and Cor has to be ‘present’ to understand this magic.
More from chapter 18:
Lady Pina was waiting on the roof of her home in the hollowed log. She perched on a seat made from a curved branch that overlooked a patch of moss with several small, evergreen cowberry bushes and one three-foot-tall Scots pine, a spindly thing. It wouldn’t be for long, so why was she risking the roots growing into her roof and weakening it?
She snapped a pocket watch closed. “Timely. I appreciate that,” she murmured and gestured to a stump seat.
He kept his question to himself and sat.
A penny whistle appeared in her hand. She played, quite well, a pretty lilting tune he’d never heard. She lowered the instrument. “The first stanza. The words are”—she began singing— “Seed cracking. Cracking, cracking. Narrow crevice forming.” Before she put the whistle to her lips again, she said, “Sing along to acquaint yourself with the tune.”
“I, uh, don’t sing.”
She paused as if considering this. “Then you have wasted your time with that music device stuck in your ear.” She stood up.
Spells, he was losing this. “Seed cracking, cracking,” he sang. “Cracks, uh, forming.”
She sat down again. “Seed cracking. Cracking, cracking. Narrow crevice forming.” She began playing, and he sang the inane song, something a toddler could pick up, over and over.
“Second stanza. Roots spreading. Spreading, spreading. Exploring through the soil.”
The thing went on with the first shoot growing, the imaginary seedling reaching for the light, the roots finding water. If you had a primary-schooler’s education in plant growth, you could remember it. By the seventh and last stanza, Cor had grown bored.
Lady Pina asked him to sing the entire thing from start to finish. He did, and she lowered the penny whistle and it disappeared. “That’s the base of it. In the version we use, and that you must master, some parts are drawn out, others peaked. It starts low and dark as a seed would, then rises to a crescendo of photosynthesizing interspersed with beats of rest representing night.”
“What does singing this song do?”
She paused before answering, like this should be obvious. “It enables you to integrate your magic with that of the pinewoods. Each stanza is a magical act that we perform in caring for these trees, guiding the techniques going back generations in my family. Many of the pines on this isle were sprouted by my great-grandfather using this technique. It’s what they know and through which they produce the bulk of the magic for Giuthas.”
She was out of her tree, as his dad would say, making it this complicated, but he didn’t argue. He’d learn the song, sing it and do what he always did to boost his saplings and protect mature trees. The last stanza about the dying ones returning to the ground wasn’t anything they did at the estate, but likely it’d be like siphoning off energy from any plant. Cor nodded his supposed agreement.
* * *
Want to know more about this scheming teen? Meet Cor here.
It’s the countdown for Guardian of the Pines: In 9 days, on Arbor Day, April 26, 2019, it releases.
Gift yourself a ‘present’ & take advantage of the .99 preorder sale.
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