Aton began to regret his contemptuous sloughing off of Chthon’s emissary. What was there about the hvee that could save Coquina for a man it had deemed unworthy? A quality that a knowledgeable third party could predict?

Think...

Aton thought. His steady jog carried him across the countryside, familiar from his childhood. He could smell the light perfume of the scratched tree barks, of scuffled earth and crushed weeds and wild forest flowers. He could see the black outlines of the taller trees against the starry sky, and hear the nocturnal scufflings of minor foragers. Memories stirred in him, small poignant recollections of detail that became important only because it was unimportant. The feel of a dry leaf, the whiff of an idle breeze—all the wonderful things set aside by adulthood. Soon, now, he would pass near the spot where he had met the minionette, where he had acquired the wild-growing hvee.

The minionette had plucked it from the ground, and he, too knowledgeable at seven, had prevented her from keeping it. “Hvee is only for men!” he had asserted, and so she had made him a present of it, and it had been his until his betrothal. It had been his after that, too, for it would not live in the possession of a woman who did not love him. The hvee loved its master, and tolerated the lover of that master, so long as that love endured, and so long as that person was worthy.

The minionette had plucked it.

The minionette!

The hvee had fixed on her! She was its mistress!

Suddenly it fell into place. He had loved her sufficiently, or perhaps his minion blood had loved her, to preserve the plant. And she had after all been worthy, not evil. The hvee responded to true emotion, and did not notice inversions. The hate Aton had thought he felt for her, later, had been false hate. The hvee had not been misled.

The death of the minionette had taken with it not only the evil chimera, but also the good hvee—except that the hvee, in the possession of the lover of the lover, had not known that its original object of affection was gone. Coquina had seen the dead minionette, but she had not understood that this was the mistress of the hvee—and the hvee had taken her innocent faith for its own. Love, not reason, was its essence. Even its apparent judgment of worthiness was illusory. It loved the man who, basically, loved himself, and rejected the one who genuinely hated himself.

Had the hvee really belonged to Aton, it might have died anyway.

But he had not actually been condemned. It had died because he knew the fate of its mistress, and knew her link with it, though never consciously aware of it. When the hvee came back to him and his knowledge, it had to wither.