In this place, odd things had happened: orange and lemon trees grew beside a warm pool, trees that should never have survived these winters. And there were other trees beyond, with strange hairlike leaves and long fronds, and twisting red branches that seemed to rake the sky.

A stream tinkled through the meadow. A family of deer there drank at a small pool. The pale forms of flowers and herbs sprouted everywhere, blossoming in profusion.

Exotic forests rose to both the east and the west.

Even this late in the evening, with the sun having fallen, the drone of honeybees filled the air.

Gaborn inhaled deeply, and it seemed that the scents of all the world’s forests and flower gardens and spices rushed into his lungs at once. He felt he could hold that scent forever, that it enlivened every fiber of his being.

All the weariness, all the pain of the past few days seemed to wash out of him. The scent of the garden was rich. Intoxicating.

Until this moment, he thought, he’d never truly been alive. He felt no desire to leave, no hurry to leave. It was not as if time ceased here. No, it was a feeling of . . . security. As if the land here would protect him from his enemies, just as it protected Binnesman’s plants from the ravages of winter.

Binnesman bent low, pulled off his shoes. He motioned for Gaborn and the serving wench to do the same.

This had to be the wizard’s garden, the legendary garden that some said Binnesman would never leave.

Four years earlier, when the old wizard Yarrow had died, some scholars at the House of Understanding had wanted Binnesman to come, to assume the role of hearthmaster in the Room of Earth Powers. It was a post of such prestige that few wizards had ever rejected it. But then there had been a huge uproar. Binnesman had published an herbal several years earlier, describing herbs that would benefit mankind. An Earth Warden named Hoewell had attacked the herbal, claiming that it contained numerous errors, that Binnesman had misidentified several rare herbs, had drawn pictures of plantains hanging upside down, had claimed that saffron—a mysterious and valuable spice brought from islands far to the south—came from a specific type of flower when, in fact, everyone knew that it was a mixture of pollens collected from the beaks of nesting hummingbirds.

Some sided with Binnesman, but Hoewell was both a master scholar and a ruthless politician. Somehow he had succeeded in humiliating and disaffecting a number of minor herbalists, even though, as an Earth Warden by training, his own magical powers dealt with the creation of magical artifacts—a field apart from herbalism. Still, his political maneuvering swayed a number of prominent scholars.