Chapter 11: The Queen Tree

Dulcie tore one of the notices off the wall and stuffed it in her jacket.

"For the slate," she said.

"Put it back."

"No. I'm framing it."

We left the carriage at a stable by the river and walked the rest of the way in the dark.

Merriwether House was on the edge of the city, where the streets gave up and the fields began.

It was a gray stone house with a slate roof.

Behind it, inside a high brick wall, lay my father's orchard.

The windows were lit.

Somebody was playing the spinet badly in the parlor.

Ottilie. She'd never practised a day in her life.

I led them around to the back lane.

There was a place in the orchard wall where an old plum had pushed the bricks loose.

When I was eleven I'd made a gap there to sneak out and buy sweets.

Nobody had ever fixed it. Nobody fixed anything in that house after my father died.

Cassian looked at the gap. Then at himself.

"No," he said.

"Go over, then."

He went over the wall in one step. Dulcie and I squeezed through the gap.

And there it was.

My father's orchard in the moonlight.

It held thirty years of his work: apples on the low ground, pears by the house, plums along the lane.

The trees were bare now, black against the sky.

I knew every one by its shape.

I walked through them with my hand out, touching the bark as I passed.

Cassian came quietly behind me. He didn't say anything.

The Greythorn Reds were where they'd always been, twelve of them in a row against the south wall, where the bricks held the sun.

I went down on my knees by the first one and put my forehead against the trunk.

Then I got up and took out my father's knife.

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