Alice lost track of Soranna in the confusion, and for a heart-stopping moment she thought the girl had tripped after all. Anyone lying in that field would be trampled under a hundred clawed feet, whether the bird-things were trying to do so or not. But, a moment later, she caught sight of Soranna at the entrance to the shack, ghosting through the sleeping bodies of the creatures there and then slipping into the door itself and out of view. Alice let out a long, shaky breath, unclenched her hands, and got to her feet.

She made it. I knew she would make it. There were red marks on her palms from her fingernails. Now we just have to hope Isaac will listen. She thought he would. Isaac is pretty sensible when he’s not being an idiot.

Alice counted to thirty, then dug in her pocket and came up with the last of her special acorns. She reached out for the brown thread that led to the tree-sprite, and gave it a solid tug.

The creature popped into being, a short, elfin thing with smooth skin the color of a freshly budded leaf. Alice handed it the acorn, which it took with the gravity of someone accepting a sacrament. She pointed toward the flock, and echoed the command in her mind. The tree-sprite nodded and hurried out across the turf.

Her count had reached sixty when the little creature stopped at the edge of the flock. It pressed the acorn against the ground, and through the thread Alice could feel the shivering explosion as the life energy inside poured out. Roots slammed through the soil, shouldering the grass aside in their haste, and a thin tree trunk sprouted upward. It thickened rapidly from the bottom up, like a flat fire hose filling out when the pressure is turned on, and blasted upward and outward, maturing in seconds into a mid-sized oak tree with long, leafy branches. The tree-sprite grabbed hold of one branch and let the growth pull it into the canopy. Bark from the tree slid across its tender green skin, flowing like water until it formed a suit of tough, leathery armor tipped with resin-hard claws.

A few of the bird-things, on the edge of their melee, took note of this new intruder and veered off to investigate. Alice let them get close to the tree, honking curiously. Then, with a twitch of its claws where they were buried in the tree trunk, the tree-sprite brought a mighty oak limb around in a sweep that smashed two of the bird-things completely off their feet and sent them tumbling to the turf, whistling and shrieking with surprise and pain.

In one motion, the whole flock turned around and rushed toward this new threat. Chips of wood and bark began to fly as the bird-things attacked the tree with beaks and claws, heedless of the branches that slapped and thrust at them.