my rage still sickened in me, and that did not go away.
Somewhere in the very core of me, in the sap of my heart, I knew what was wrong, but my brain refused to think and the knowledge lurked just out of bounds, over the borderland of the subconscious. I did not reach for it; I think I dared not, though I have dared much in my time. The spider has eaten her, I told myself. I will find nothing left but her bones. There are spells in the house that could fry her to ash . . . She was a mere novice, a stumbling pupil who has forgotten the little she ever learned. She has neither the skill nor the will to injure me . . .
When we reached Wrokeby, I knew she had gone. I could sense the wake of her departure like a violent eddy in the still hollowness of the entrance hall. I felt where she had been as if she had left a spoor. The conservatory.
I remember I ordered the driver to wait. I had forgotten his name, so dreadful was the tension of that moment, but it did not matter. I was stronger now, but it was a damaged strength, as if I had had a limb amputated, or a vital organ removed, and there was an aching vacancy in my being I did not try to comprehend. I walked through the house, Nehemet at my heels. The hag, I assumed, must have been slain. I switched on the lights as I went—the lights of the modern age, which need no flame and work from the same power that makes the lightning in the storm and the crackle on the hair of a cat. Normally I prefer the dark, but something else affected me, beyond weakness, beyond fury, something rare and strange and familiar, draining me more than any physical infirmity. It was a while before I remembered what it was. Fear.
There were no lights in the conservatory: I had never needed them. In the overspill from the house I saw crushed foliage, snapped stems; I heard the silence where once there would have been the soft leaf-murmur of recognition. And I saw the guardian, his great body scrunched like that of any common spider, swatted, stabbed through the head with a single thrust. It had not even taken sorcery: only a pin. My creature, my pet, whom I had nursed and nurtured, skewered through its tiny brain as if by an idle collector! There was contempt in that. I felt my fury grow, reviving my force, but the fear nudged it, and would not go away. When I reached the Tree, I thought I was prepared. It would be uprooted, its bark torn—leaves scattered—branches smashed. It might take me days, weeks, years to restore it to life.
But there was no Tree.
My darksight was returning, and I stared about me in bewilderment and horror, thinking I knew not what. There was the stone pot, cracked when the radix had forced its way through and penetrated deep into the soil beneath. But beside that there was nothing save a spill of blackened earth, a few leaf-shaped cinders, a long resinous smear on the paving stones. And ash powder, finer than dust, sifting through my scrabbling fingers. My nostrils caught the faint, acrid afterscent of something I recognized, a potion I had made myself, distilled from the stolen waters of Azmodel, deadlier than fire. My potion had destroyed my Tree! Now I began to understand both the seeds of my malady and the source of my fear. It was as if a part of my self had been torn away and brutally cauterized, leaving me limping, crippled from within. I may have cried out; I can’t recall. My rage grew from a creeping surge to a great flood, overwhelming fear, restraint, pain. This was a loss that would be too long in the mending. I would have to go back to the parent Tree, take another cutting, trading power for power—and there are some places to which there should be no returning. I have never gone back, always forward, forward to a new conquest . . .
Morcadis had done this. The lost soul I had fostered, the viper I had nested. In that moment, I swore that I would eat her heart.
But what of the fruit—the fruit I had charged my guardian to protect? The first fruit, trembling on the verge of ripeness: the thought