once.
“Rorpin knew. He didn’t say anything, but he knew, for all that he’s acting so sweet to the kid now. He was hungry, too.” Massy took a deep breath. “When I think of it, how my kids’ faces looked after they’d eaten their fill, how they fell asleep like kittens, I’d do it all over again.
“But now—” She began to cry again. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to them. Rorpin’s no father to them. If I’m gone, who’ll look after my children? What does one dead kid matter—who’s not even dead anymore —compared to four living kids?”
The crowd grumbled its disapproval. “I got hungry kids, too, and I never chopped up one to feed the others,” muttered a woman standing near Nora.
“Well, I tell you, if Massy gets off, she won’t have any trouble getting her kids to behave,” said a man. “Especially right before dinnertime.”
Aruendiel’s voice cut harshly through the commentary. “What of the innocent man who was almost executed for the crime you committed?”
“It wasn’t I who said he should die!” she said, flaring up. “And what if they did kill him? He was lucky to get off with losing a hand when they found him with the boy!”
Aruendiel looked at her for a long time before he spoke again. “Massy Rorpinan, you took a human life, and you have shown little or no remorse,” he said. “Under the law and custom of this land, you deserve to be put to death.”
Both Horl and Sova were crying now.
“You have pleaded that your children will suffer if they are deprived of their mother. Yet it hardly seems a kindness to let them be raised by a mother who has already killed a child.”
Massy groaned and drew her son and daughter so close that it seemed she would smother them against her body. She cried, “It’s death for my kids, too!”
“No, only for you,” Aruendiel said. “But there is another way. As you say, the child Irseln has been restored to life. The unfortunate Bernl was not actually executed. The harm you have done has been remedied. I can offer you an alternative to the rope. Imprisonment, of sorts.”
An audible wave of disappointment moved through the crowd. The headman narrowed his eyes. “We don’t have a place to lock her up, your lordship.”
“You could stay here, Massy Rorpinan, with your children. You could live in their midst as they grow up. It would not be life as you live it now, but it would be life. Your punishment would be that you could not see them or hold them or speak to them.” Aruendiel paused, and his mouth twisted sardonically. “You would, however, be able to feed them.”
Massy looked frantically at Aruendiel. “What do you mean?”
“I mean exactly what I say. You have heard my offer.”
“Not see my children?”
“No.”
“Never!”
“Very well,” said Aruendiel, with a slight nod, as though to courteously acknowledge her choice. “As suzerain of these lands by blood and sword, taking into account the crimes of which you stand guilty, I hereby condemn you, Massy Rorpinan, to die by—”
“Wait!” Massy shrieked. She was trembling. “You say—the other way—I would live?”
He nodded.
“Then I choose that way!”
“You are sure?” he said, folding his arms.
“Yes,” she said, sounding not sure at all.
With the rest of the crowd, Nora waited for Aruendiel to reply, to pronounce the legal formula that he had begun to recite before.
Instead Massy uttered a gurgling, half-strangled cry. Nora had the impression that she was getting to her feet—no, Massy was actually growing taller, her body elongating to impossible proportions, losing its human shape. She loomed swaying over the crowd, like a bent and twisted column. Eight feet above the ground, her thin face looked down, distorted with surprise, and she opened her mouth to say something. But the words were never heard as her features thickened and disappeared under the dark tide of a coarse, encroaching carapace devouring her skin. Massy spread her arms as if in entreaty, stretching them and bending them, snakelike, until they stiffened, grew hard and still, while dozens of twigs bearing leaves like green flags sprouted triumphantly from what had been soft flesh a few moments before.
The new apple tree growing next to the old one trembled in the morning light, its thousands of leaves whispering urgently of fear, remorse, love, or only the movement of air.
The crowd of onlookers stepped backward almost as one. The two children, stunned into quiet, stared up into the canopy of leaves above them, looking at the spot where Massy’s face had been. After a moment, an apple fell from a branch and thudded into the dust near Horl’s feet.
He picked it up and looked at it as though he had never seen an apple before. Then he wiped it off and tucked it carefully inside his shirt.
Even after the horses were saddled, the headman seemed reluctant to let them go. “Twenty years, you say, twenty years she has to stay inside that tree? Why twenty years?”
Nora could see that Aruendiel was irked to hear Pelgo say—as people already had many times that morning—that Massy was
“So the child Irseln will have time to grow up,” he said, shrugging.
“And does it hurt her, being inside there?”
“She’ll suffer the way trees suffer, if there’s no rain. Or if the winter’s bad,” Aruendiel said drily.
“It doesn’t seem like much of a punishment, then, does it? I would have hanged her, myself, but then I’m not a wizard.”
“No,” said Aruendiel, with a cold smile. “Oh, you might tell your villagers that there’s a curse on anyone who takes an axe to that apple tree before the twenty years is up. Just in case someone decides that Mistress Massy hasn’t suffered enough.”
“A curse? No need to do that, your lordship. No one will touch the thing. I wouldn’t even eat the apples, myself.” He spat, painting a dark mark in the dust.
“Just as well,” Aruendiel said. “They’re not for you.”
The village seemed almost deserted as Aruendiel and Nora rode through it. The brief holiday excitement of crime and punishment was over, and the villagers were back at work, in their fields or huts. Or, Nora thought, intercepting a few glances from behind chinked shutters, they had decided to make themselves scarce until the magician had left town. When she and Aruendiel stopped at the baker’s hut to buy bread for the journey, it took a long time for the door to open, as though the baker had to gather his courage to answer Nora’s knock.
Coming out of the hut with two loaves under her arm, Nora saw Horl and Sova watching from behind the corner of the building. “Hello,” she said hesitantly.
The children looked at her, their eyes serious, until Sova broke the silence. “That wizard turned my ma into a tree.” Sova sounded almost proud of this fact, but Nora heard something accusatory in her words, too.
“I know,” she said guiltily. “You must be sad about that.”
“Irseln pulled my hair because I wouldn’t give her Princess Butter.”
“Well, you should share,” Nora said, feeling a faint sense of deja vu. She’d said the same thing, in English, about a thousand times to her own sisters when they were around Sova’s age.
“Princess Butter doesn’t like her,” Sova said haughtily.
Horl made a sudden movement as though to silence his sister, exactly the same gesture Massy had made that morning. “That man, that wizard—what he did to Ma—I’d like to—”
“You’d like to do what?” Aruendiel came up behind Nora.
“I’d like to kill you!” Horl exploded.
A faint smile coiled its way along Aruendiel’s mouth, as though the threat rather pleased him. “You’re
