Lacey pushed invisible forces toward her hands, but nothing happened. Lacey shook off his hands and then shook out her hands to stall for time, but the truth was that she didn’t even feel the magic in her anymore. The fireflies were gone and so was all that lovely tingling. It wasn’t like it hadn’t even existed, but it wasn’t there now. More disconcerting was that at least a hundred eyes were watching for their miracle to appear and she didn’t have a manual for how to produce for them.

“No, you can’t get tense, or it’ll stuff you all up,” the White Wolf reprimanded her but without heat. “Relax and let it flow through you.”

Lacey took a deep breath and let it out slowly through her mouth, but just as she started to search for the feeling again, they were interrupted by a commotion outside that also crashed into the tavern. The bell began ringing frantically as a small wolf-child poked their head into the tavern and whispered to the one nearest the door.

“RAID!” bellowed the bear-man, turning to push through the door.

“Impossible,” the White Wolf’s eyes glinted with a bit of fear. “We need time for you to learn your magic.”

“I’m sorry,” Lacey stumbled to say. “I’m trying.”

“It’s not your fault,” he growled over the noise of all of them heading for the doors.

It was another chase through town and toward some hills where all Lacey saw was a cloud of dust. Lacey was pretty sure that it was her fault. Maybe she didn’t know how, but it sure felt like it was. Lacey didn’t need to be coddled, but she let the White Wolf hold her hand as they rushed toward the grass-dotted hills. The whole crew were armed for combat already, like they were always at least a little ready. Even as they ran, Lacey was trying to access the magic inside her, but it seemed stubbornly blocked somehow. It was a race to the peak of a set of hills that was adorned with a half-wall like it had once been a fence between neighbors, but now the stone fence stretched the length of four wide hills. Weapons were sheathed and bows were drawn from back harnesses.

As they reached the top of the hill, their little band had barely beat the goblins to the peak and that had been the point of running because the goblins were now forced to contend with their party using the wall for defense to rain down upon the attacking horde. While the band of renegades were a ragged bunch of maybe sixty fighters, the goblins were like a mass of roiling puss in a cauldron. Green bodies ran at full throttle, dotted with the grinning yellowed teeth and flapping red tongues. Weapons as simple as sturdy sticks were side by side with gleaming strips of metal. While the rebels wore leather and metal, the goblins wore rags. What they lacked in wealth, they made up for in numbers as there had to be more than two hundred of them. Lacey gulped and tried again to reach into where she’d felt the miraculous magic before.

“It’s but a small raiding party,” Graham proclaimed, rolling up cuffs to his elbows and pulling back a string on a bow larger than four goblins stacked on top of each other.

“Stay down,” the White Wolf commanded, pushing on the top of her head until she was sitting behind the wall. He hadn’t needed to tell his forces to fire at will as they already seemed to know this drill as over two dozen twangs seemed to go off together. “Try to summon your magic. We will handle this small intrusion. She’s just sent a nuisance squad to distract us from you.”

Lacey tried to focus on fireflies and summoning them back into her body. The noise of the battle behind her receded only a tiny bit, but it was enough to give her a chance to pull the energy into her hands. It was like pulling taffy only the taffy was this thing that seemed like an industrial-war-machine of a rubber band and the pulling was like fighting with a bodybuilder in a game of tug-of-war. It didn’t take so long to finally start to manifest a single firefly into her palm, but no sooner did she do that as she was smashed out of the tug-of-war by a more manifested arrow thunking into the ground near her left big toe.

“Poe,” the White Wolf called out around his own bow snapping another arrow out. “Get over here with a shield and keep these arrows off of her.”

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“Since when do they come with bows?” a small weasel-like man complained as he shuffled over to hold a shield over Lacey’s head.

“They’re crappy bows,” Graham scoffed from the other side of the White Wolf. “Barely more than twigs bent with strings.”

Lacey looked at the crooked, sharpened stick that she’d taken for an arrow and wondered how they’d gotten it over the wall in that condition. “Lucky shot?” she said, pulling the stick up out of the ground. “Ouch!” Lacey was shocked by something almost like a little bee sting as she picked it up.

“It’s spelled,” the White Wolf growled, breaking the stick that he’d grabbed out of her hand. “How did she get here so quickly?”

“She’s here?” Lacey gulped. “As in the Goblin Queen is here?”

“So much for her being low on magic,” Graham shook his head, twisting to put his bow away. As Lacey looked down their row of fighters, she realized that most of them were switching from bows to hand-to-hand weapons. Were they that close? If she focused, she could hear the thunder of the approach of hundreds of feet and maybe even the pounding of it in the earth itself.

“I’m sorry,” Lacey fumbled an apology out, feeling helpless. “I just don’t know what I’m doing yet!”

“Just keep trying,” the White Wolf growled, but his eyes were on the approaching hoard.

Grabbing her deepest feelings of frustration and fear, Lacey placed her hands on the ground and pulled the magic viciously, first into her and then out of her hands and into the earth. The zap of the arrow had awakened something primal in her, some ownership of the very spark that had defied her by being against her. It pulsed in her mind and down in her body as she pulled it in and then pushed back at the thundering of the very earth beneath her.

“What the hell?” Graham exclaimed, and Lacey jolted at the first emotion that wasn’t gruff to come from that bear-man.

“Did you do that Lacey?” the White Wolf asked in awe. “Tell me you did that!”

“What did I do?” Lacey tried to turn and peek up over the wall, but her shield-bearer pushed her back down.

“It doesn’t matter, kid,” Poe insisted with an excited look. “Just do it again.”

The ground wasn’t shaking anymore, so Lacey wasn’t sure what to do without knowing what had happened at all. All she could see was this side of the wall where fighters were sheathing weapons and pulling out their bows again.

“You pushed them back a hundred feet,” the White Wolf told her, a grin on his face that transferred onto her own.

“I did?” Lacey grinned back at him and closed her eyes to focus again.

“Do it again!” Poe prodded her unnecessarily.

Lacey reached for the magical rubber band eagerly, but it wasn’t there. Knowing what it felt like, she reached further, demanding for it to come back to her, but it was like trying to catch a rattlesnake. It was buzzing with what could only be fury. The spark of the arrow was nothing compared to the bonfire Lacey found at the other end of the rubber band. That muscle-bound bodybuilder on the other end of the rubber band had turned into a full-grown, pissed off troll. That wasn’t what bothered Lacey nearly as much as the fact that she’d lost her end of the rubber band and so couldn’t even begin to pull back.

“That pissed her off,” Graham was back to being gruff and annoyed.

“What did?” Lacey wanted the information as much as she wanted to grab the other end of the rubber band. The flaming arrow that scorched its way through Poe’s hairline was her answer and his little weaselly yelp was enough to have Lacey grab back her end of the rubber band. It wasn’t that she had to search for it, she thought, ridiculing herself. It was her. It was inside of her and anchored there. How had she not seen that?

Lacey sent her own zap of fury through the connection and felt it slacken, if only a tiny bit. Lacey avoided the idea of what and who was really on the other end of the connection. The very thought of a Queen with tons of practice at this sort of thing fighting against her made Lacey feel very small and insecure, so she pushed that thought away.

Lacey wrapped the magic around her and gave a pull worthy of a tractor truck. This time, instead of sending it into the earth, Lacey sent her fury straight up into the cloud of dust that had reached her side of the fence long before the burbling mass of goblins. This time, she got to watch around the edge of the shield as thunderclouds churned and rumbled. Lacey poured her lifetime’s worth of hurt into those clouds and filled them with the seemingly endless tears she’d shed at her grandmother’s hospital bedside. Then she filled it with the resentment of her timeless trudging through life. Lightning surged and snapped as the clouds started to twirl the dust of the hoard into its funnel of angst. With a sigh of emotional release, Lacey sent the storm into their enemies.

“If this is what you can do with almost no idea of what you’re doing, just remember that Poe here is your best bud, okay?” Poe darted wild eyes back and forth between her and the storm, even as Lacey wilted.

“Impressive,” Graham was saying, but Lacey was feeling like maybe she didn’t have a lot left.

“Are you okay?” the White Wolf ignored Graham and the storm to kneel next to her.