What was in his voice? Cassidy wondered. Annoyance? Bitterness? It would take years for these trees to grow and bear fruit, but wasn’t a living symbol better than a dead one?

She didn’t ask. Didn’t really care. What mattered was not wasting what someone had gone to great lengths to preserve.

Gray filled pots with soil as Cassidy held each pear at the right depth, releasing the fruits gently one by one until there was only one left in the chest that hadn’t turned to mush.

“One more,” she said.

“No more pots,” Theran said.

“There has to be something.”

“We got twelve planted.”

But there’s still one left.

She ran to the shed, probably pissing him off because she didn’t take his word for it, but she couldn’t care about that.

Something, she thought as she searched under the potting bench and then the rest of the shed. Anything.

The jumble of broken tools in the back left corner looked like it had been rummaged through already, but she pushed things aside for another look.

And found a pot with some bad chips around the rim.

Old, she thought as she shifted it to get a better look. And smaller than the others because it was divided into two sections, but still big enough.

As she picked it up, she felt something give way at the bottom of the pot.

Damn. If it was broken at the bottom, it wouldn’t be of any use.

She set it on the potting bench to get a better look at it. Then she just stared.

The small piece that broke off revealed a compartment under the pot—and the corner of a yellowed piece of paper that had been placed inside.

Time was running out. She had to get this pot to Gray before the pear decayed. But even though she was certain she would feel foolish about wasting time when she saw what it was, she took those moments needed to pinch the corner of the paper and use Craft to pass the paper through the pot.

The paper had been folded to fit the compartment and bore the Grayhaven seal. And on the front, in faded ink, was written, “For the Queen.”

Cassidy looked at that corner of the shed and struggled to breathe.

Spells releasing. Realigning. A jumble of old tools that never seemed to get straightened out. Had this been there all along, waiting?

For the Queen.

“Mother Night,” Cassidy whispered.

Then she heard voices shouting. She vanished the paper, grabbed the pot, and ran back to where the others waited.

No time, she thought. Or just enough.

“Found this,” she said, dropping to her knees next to Gray. As he started filling one-half of the pot with soil, she cradled the last honey pear before it sank into the mush of the ones that hadn’t survived.