“What?” Willow cried. She staggered back a step, and Sundew reached to catch her, their wings sliding together like falling petals.

Hawthorn’s words didn’t seem to fit inside Sundew’s brain. She couldn’t link them properly to reality. They just didn’t make sense.

“You gave it to her?” Cricket said. “The breath of evil? What do you mean? When? You didn’t really … why would you do that? Why would you make her more powerful? Why would you give anyone the power to control other dragons like that?”

“I don’t understand,” said Willow.

“Me neither,” echoed Mandrake.

“I understand that someone’s been lying to us! And keeping things from us!” Nettle snarled. “I may not understand what those exact things are, but I know that I’m angry about it!”

Hawthorn held up his front talons, palms out. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew! I thought Queen Sequoia would have told you. Wouldn’t you think she would share the whole story before sending someone on a quest this dangerous?”

“I WOULD think that!” Nettle snapped. “She SHOULD have!”

“Maybe she thought Hawthorn was dead, and if he was, then no one would ever have to know the whole truth,” Mandrake suggested.

“That is not better!” Nettle cried. “That is worse! Talk about cowardly!”

Sundew was angry, too, but she mostly felt as if she’d been walking along a strong branch and it had suddenly snapped off and sent her plummeting to the ground and the ground was extraordinarily far away and her wings weren’t working, and it was difficult to focus on being mad and trying not to plummet at the same time.

“I think you need to tell us the whole story,” Sundew said to Hawthorn. I must have misunderstood something. He didn’t mean he went looking for the breath of evil. He can’t possibly mean that we did this to the HiveWings.

Hawthorn looked down at his tea and fiddled with the handle on his cup. “All right,” he said. “But can I please start by saying I know you’ll hate me at the end of it. That’s all right. If you could hold back a little bit, though, I’d appreciate it. Fifty years of carrying this guilt has really been a lot. If you can imagine.”

“More explaining, less self-pity,” Nettle hissed.

He nodded again. “Yes. Well. Let’s see. Queen Wasp was dangerous from the moment she inherited her crown. Her mother, Queen Cochineal, was deceitful and power-hungry, but at least she respected the separate tribe monarchies. Wasp, though … she looked at SilkWings and LeafWings and only saw more dragons to crush under her talons. She wanted everyone to bow to her. That became clear very early on.

“But that wasn’t the worst of it. She thought our power came from the trees, and she thought that if she cut them down, we’d become weak. She did it stealthily at first. Stretches of forest cleared in faraway corners where we might not notice. ‘Accidental’ forest fires that wiped out hundreds of trees. Another hundred cut down to build her first Hive, and a dramatic performance art piece when we tried to object: ‘Oh, are LeafWings the only ones allowed to use Pantalan resources now? Why shouldn’t I build my tribe a city to live in?’ And so on.”

He paused to sip his tea again, then nudged one of the other cups toward Nettle and Mandrake with a hopeful expression. Nettle scowled at him, and he sighed and returned to his story.

“By the time we figured out what she was doing, it was too late for countless trees. We tried to stop her in all the diplomatic ways, but she would lie to our faces, promise to stop, and then turn around and keep doing it. Or she’d have her guards throw us out — the queen of the LeafWings, tossed out of Wasp Hive like a spider that crawled in the wrong window! Can you imagine?!”

“I can imagine tossing you out a window,” Nettle offered.

“And then she became even worse,” he continued hurriedly. “She announced that according to the Book of Clearsight, the time had come for us to consolidate the three tribes under one queen: her. She sent Queen Monarch and Queen Sequoia instructions for formally stepping down and handing their subjects over to her control.”

“We know this part,” Sundew said. “Queen Monarch said yes, Queen Sequoia said no, and the Tree Wars began.”

“Not immediately,” said Hawthorn. “First we tried to talk her down. And second … we tried something else.” He cupped his claws around the teacup and closed his eyes. “I thought we could stop her. I thought we could save everyone.”

“By giving Wasp the most powerful weapon in the world?” Cricket asked.

“Yes, please do explain the logic there,” Sundew said.

“It wasn’t supposed to make her powerful.” Hawthorn looked down at his talons. “I thought, if I found the plant and we used it on her … that we’d be able to control her.”

Willow turned her face in toward Sundew’s shoulder, hiding it for a moment as she breathed in a small, hiccuping way. Sundew wound her tail around Willow’s and tried to think straight.

We were trying to turn the HiveWing queen into our mind-controlled zombie.

We would have done that to her — the same terrible thing she’s done to her subjects.

Instead we made her stronger than any other dragon. We gave her a way to keep her claws on her tribe’s necks, and the power to use them against us.

She glanced over at Cricket, who was staring at Hawthorn in horror.

I thought we were the good tribe. How could we do something like this?

“When did this happen?” Cricket asked, questions suddenly exploding out of her like flamesilk erupting from Blue’s wrists. “And how did you give it to her? How did she get her talons on more of the plant? How did she figure out what to do with it?” She stopped, pressing her talons to her temples. “Why would you do this?”

“She threatened our trees, HiveWing,” Hawthorn said, with a hard note in his voice that told Sundew he still thought his actions were justified. “The trees we loved, our homes and souls. We saw the war that was coming. We knew how dangerous she was, and we knew we couldn’t give her the LeafWings.

“So we held a peace summit and I … I put it in her food that night.”

Willow took one of Sundew’s clenched talons, smoothed it flat, and looked up at Hawthorn again. “Did the queen know what you were doing?”

He made an inscrutable face. “I told her what I wanted to do. She didn’t stop me. But I can’t say she exactly told me to do it. She could have stopped me, though. I was so loyal. I always listened to her. If she had told me not to do it, I wouldn’t have. She never said no! This is really —”

Hawthorn stopped himself, lashing his tail for a moment. “I mean,” he continued in a calmer voice. “Of course it was my fault. I found the plant; I slipped it into Wasp’s food. That was me. Even if I did it with the noblest of intentions.”

He really does still think he did the right thing, Sundew thought. And that it just … went wrong.

“At first, it seemed like nothing happened. It clearly didn’t work,” Hawthorn said. He put one talon on the wooden egg again, tracing the leaves with one claw. “Wasp behaved exactly the same, both that night at dinner and the following morning during negotiations. We tried to steer her onto a peaceful path. We tried subtle suggestions, and when those didn’t work, we tried to order her to back down. She hissed at us and promised war, just as she always did. So we thought we had failed. No harm done … a long shot attempt at salvation that didn’t work.

“It wasn’t until later, when I saw her mind control, that I realized we must have caused it. I don’t know how she figured out what to do, or where she got the plant.” He tapped his claws on the top of the egg.

“That’s what you get for sneaking and half measures!” Nettle growled. “It should have been poison in her food instead. That would have saved hundreds of dragons.”

Nobody argued with her, but Sundew could see the consternation written all over Willow’s and Cricket’s faces. She’s right, but she’s also wrong, Sundew thought. Even I don’t think anyone should poison dragons at a peace summit.

“The good news,” Hawthorn broke in, slicing through the tension, “is that now I know what we did wrong. We needed to ingest the plant ourselves. Otherwise there was no connection between our minds and hers.”

“But if you both ate it,” Cricket asked doubtfully, “who would control who? Why wouldn’t she be the one controlling you instead?”

“Ah!” said Hawthorn, his expression lightening. “Those are mysteries I solved with science! Experimentation! Research! Investigation! All the careful procedures I wish I’d had time for back then. It’s amazing what you can discover when you’re alone for fifty years with nothing else to do. Yes, I know, not completely alone.”

Sundew tilted her head at him. “Not completely alone?” she echoed. “Do you mean the snakes?”

“The snakes, the foliage, my wooden friends,” he answered, waving his claws around the little house. “I have extremely strong leafspeak, so I can always chat with the jungle if I get lonely.”

“So you’ve been experimenting on the snakes,” Cricket said, “and you’ve figured out how to mind-control them? Is that also how you found the antidote?”

“Yes, exactly!” Hawthorn said. “I tried everything, and I finally found this!” He darted across the room to a wooden chest, ornately carved with hundreds of tiny leaves. Sundew couldn’t even imagine how long it had taken him to carve it. He lifted off the lid, grunting slightly at the weight of it, and laid it on the floor beside him, then beckoned Cricket to look inside.

Sundew edged closer so she could see as well. The chest seemed to be full of tiny gnarled bits of roots — they looked like ginger root but smelled more like old oranges. From the look on Cricket’s face, though, they might have been made of gold.

“This is the antidote?” she said to Hawthorn in a hushed voice. She reached in and lifted out one of the roots, turning it between her claws. “What is it?”

“It’s another plant I found growing in the jungle,” he said. “I call it ‘heart of salvation.’ ” Nettle snorted and he shot her a half smile. “I figure if we’re going to be all dramatic with our plant names, I might as well join in.”

“Wow,” Cricket said reverently. “And it really works? It breaks the mind control?”

“As far as I can tell,” he said. “It works on snakes … but who knows about dragons? I haven’t exactly had any test subjects for that, have I? Oh! Maybe you could eat one, and we’ll see if it works on you!”

She shook her head ruefully. “I’m not susceptible to the mind control,” she said. “Queen Wasp never injected my egg, so it doesn’t work on me. Which means we wouldn’t learn anything from me eating this.” She sighed and put it back in the chest. Hawthorn watched the movements of her claw intently, as if he was trying to think of a way she could still be useful to the experiment.

“So to test it out,” Sundew said, “we’ll have to find a HiveWing who is all zombie-brained, force them to eat it, and see what happens.”

“I’m afraid so,” he said, wringing his claws together.

“Well, luckily for us, there’s probably about a thousand of them heading this way right now,” Sundew said. “Pack all the weird knobbly salvation roots you have and let’s go.”