Chapter 2

The Detritus of an Epic

A rather tumbledown, grey-walled hovel sat in the centre of the clearing. Flowerbeds surrounded the hut, but they were overgrown with mouldy-stemmed weeds and thistles. A picket fence surrounded the hovel and its gardens; most of the pickets were snapped off. The once-white paint had faded and peeled from the pickets that remained whole, so that the fence resembled nothing so much as the sad mouth of a senile gape-brained man.

Ur's enchanted nursery had fallen into unhappy days.

Two women sat on a garden seat set in a small paved area.

Several of the paving stones had crumbled, and dust crept across the uneven court.

The Mother wrapped Her fingers around a cup of tea and tried not to sigh again. She was tired —

the effort of closing off the trails to the Sacred Groves against any incursions by the Demons had been exhausting — but more worrying was Her overwhelming feeling of malaise. The Mother did not feel well.

In truth, She felt profoundly ill.

Tencendor had been wasted by Qeteb, the Earth Tree was gone (surviving only in embryonic form in the seedling She had given Faraday), and the Mother could feel the life force ebbing from Her.

But not before — oh gods, not before! — that life could be restored elsewhere!

"Is it gone?" a cracked voice beside Her asked, and the Mother jumped.

"What? Oh, no, thank you, I still have a half cup left." And yet almost everything else had gone, hadn't it? Everything ...

Ur grumbled incoherently into her cup, and the Mother looked at her. The hood of Ur's red cloak was lying over her angular shoulders, revealing the woman's bald skull. The skin over Ur's face was deeply wrinkled, but it stretched tight and angry over the bones of her skull.

Ur had lost her forest. For over fifteen thousand years Ur had tended her nursery hidden deep within the trees of the Sacred Groves. As each female Avar Bane had died, so her soul had come here to be transplanted out as a seedling in a tiny terracotta pot. Forty-two thousand Banes had transformed in this manner, and Ur had known them all — their names, their histories, their likes and loves and disappointments. And, having cradled them, Ur had then handed them over to Faraday to be replanted as the great Minstrelsea Forest.

Which, after only forty-two years of life, Qeteb had then turned to matchsticks.

Matchsticks! Ur rolled the word over and over in her mind, using it as both curse and promise of revenge.

Matchsticks.

Ur's beloved had been reviled, murdered, and utterly destroyed by the excrement of the universe.

Her lips tightened away from her teeth — incongruously white and square — and Ur silently snarled at her ravaged garden. Revenge ...

"It is not good to think such thoughts," the Mother said, and laid Her hand on Ur's gaunt thigh.

Ur closed her lips into a thin hard line, and she did not speak.

The Mother fought again to repress a sigh and looked instead out to the forest beyond Ur's decaying garden.

Everything was fading. The forests of the Sacred Groves, even the Horned Ones themselves. The Mother had not realised how closely tied to Tencendor the Groves were — as was the health of all who resided in them. Tencendor had been wasted, and if DragonStar could not right the wrong of Qeteb and his companion Demons, and finish what the Enemy had begun so many aeons before, then eventually the Groves would die.

As would Herself, and all the Horned Ones, and even perhaps Ur.

The Mother shot another glance at the ancient nursery-keeper. And perhaps not. Ur appeared to be keeping lively enough on her diet of unremitting need for revenge.

"But We are safe enough for the while," the Mother whispered. "Safe enough for the while."