"What?" Willow cried. She staggered back a step, and Sundew reached to catch her.

"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 want to make her more powerful? Why would you give anyone the power to control other dragons like that?"

"I don't understand," said Mandrake.

Nettle hissed at Hawthorn, her eyes like daggers. Cricket had her attention focused on Clearwing, her eyes even more confused as she looked into the SilkWing's own.

"If you knew," the HiveWing said, "Why didn't you tell us?"

"I-" Clearwing started, then realized she didn't have an answer. Dread krept up her legs, into her wings, snaking around her spine.

"I'm sorry." Everyone turned to look at Hawthorn again, except for Clearwing, who was still wondering why she hadn't told them.

As I said before, you know fully well why not.

"I'm sorry," Hawthorn said again, "I thought you knew! I thought Sequoia would've told you. Wouldn't you think she would share the whole story before sending someone on a quest this dangerous?"

Ahh, yes. What a useful use of language.

"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 roared. "That is worse! Talk about cowardly!"

"I think you need to tell us the whole story," Sundew turned her eyes on Hawthorn. The green-brown dragon looked down at his cup, fiddling with the handle.

"All right," he said finally. "But can I please start by saying I know you'll hate me by the end of it. That's all right. If you could hold back a little bit, though, I'd really appreciate it. Fifty years of carrying this guilt has been a lot. As you can imagine."

"Less self-pity, more explaining," 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..." He paused, remembering a meeting with the newly-crowned Queen of the HiveWings, "she looked at SilkWings and LeafWings and just 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 of the continent where we might not notice, 'accidental' forest fires that wiped out hundreds of trees. Another hundred to build her first Hive, complete with a theatrical performance art piece when we tried to object; 'Oh, are the LeafWings the only ones allowed to use Pantalan resources now? Why can't I build my tribe a city to live in?' And so forth."

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

"By the time we figured out what she was doing, it was already too late for countless trees. We tried to stop her in all the diplomatic ways, but she would lie to our faces, promising to stop, and then turning 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. Clearwing grimaced.

"A-and then she became even worse," he continued hurriedly, edging away from the LeafWing. "She announced that, according to the Book of Clearsight, the time had come for us to consolidate the three tribes under one ruler: her. She sent Queen Sequoia and Queen Monarch formal instructions for 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 closed his eyes, cupping his talons around the teacup. "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 coiled her tail with Willow's.

"It wasn't supposed to make her powerful," Hawthorn said. "I thought, if I found the plant and we used it on her... that we'd be able to control her."

"When did this happen?" Cricket asked, suddenly spilling out questions. "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, her talons pressed to her temples. "Why would you do this?"

"She threatened our trees, HiveWing," Hawthorn said, a hard note in his voice that made Clearwing think that he still thought his actions were justified. "The trees we loved, our homes and souls. We saw that war was coming. We knew how dangerous she was, and we knew we couldn't just hand over our tribe.

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

"Did the queen know what you were doing?" asked Willow, her talons grasping Sundew's.

"I told her what I wanted to do. She didn't stop me. But I can't say exactly that she 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, his tail lashing for a few moments. "I mean," he continued in a much 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."

"At first, it seemed like nothing had happened. It clearly didn't work," he continued, tracing the designs on the seed. "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 it came to me that we must've caused it. I don't know how she figured out what to do, or where she got the plant." He tapped his claws on top of the seed.

"That's what you get for sneaking and half measures!" Nettle snarled. "It should've been poison in her food instead. THAT would've saved hundreds of dragons."

No one said anything for a few moments.

"The good news," Hawthorn said, breaking the tension like a bowstring, "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, her tone doubtful, "who would control who? Why wouldn't she be the one controlling you instead?"

"Ah!" said Hawthorn, his eyes sparkling. "Those are mysteries I solved with science! Experimentation! Research! Investigation! It's amazing what you can discover when you're alone for fifty years with nothing better to do. Yes, I know, not totally alone."

"Not completely alone?" Sundew tilted her head at him. "Do you mean the snakes?"

"The snakes, the foliage, my wooden friends," he waved his claws around at the shelves and shelves of figurines. "I have extremely strong leafspeak, so I can always chat with the jungle when 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 was beaming again. "I tried everything and I finally found this!"

He darted across the room to a chest. It was large, carved of wood, and covered with beautiful leaf carvings so that it almost looked like a bark-colored canopy of leaves. Clearwing couldn't imagine how long it must've taken him to make it. When Hawthorn opened it, he revealed that it contained lots and lots of very small roots. They looked like ginger, but smelled like oranges. "I call it-"

"The breath of evil," Clearwing said, taking a step back as realization hit her like a tree falling over her and knocking the breath out of her chest. Her eyes were wide, heart pounding. "This is the root of the b-breath of evil."

Hawthorn gave her a half bugged, half misunderstanding look. "No, it's the heart of salvation. That's what I call it, at least."

Sundew gave Clearwing an arch look.

"That's what he p-put in the tea," Clearwing said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "Th-that's why it was — why it was almost impossible to tell what it was." Her talons shook, wings shivering as well.

"Oh, aren't you a clever little weed," Hawthorn snarled, spreading his wings and suddenly seeming as big as he actually was. His eyes narrowed, and white curtains fluttered behind them, causing Cricket to gasp. Sundew ran for the door, but a massive dragonbite viper blocked her path.

"There," the LeafWing hissed. "After all, it would spoil everything if you went to warn Sequoia. My whole, brilliant plan, ruined by a talonful of idiots? I think not."

"What brilliant plan?" Nettle hissed, in an attacking stance. "Even if you kill us, you don't know the way to the village."

"See, now," Hawthorn grinned, and Clearwing felt sick. "That's where you're wrong. Because you will lead me to the village, or else I kill her."

Willow let out an eep, and Sundew roared. Suddenly vines snared around her arms, wings, and tail. They did the same to the others. Hawthorn made an "ah, ah, ah" sound, clicking his tongue. Willow stared at him, not moving. There was a dragonbite viper curled around her neck, prepared to sink its fangs into her mouth at the slightest twitch of Hawthorn's tail.

"If you hurt her," Sundew growled in a low voice. "If you dare-"

"Oh, yes, you'll go and do a multitude of horrible things to me, wonderful. But it will be too late, because she'll still be dead. So how about you sit still while we have this talk, and maybe she'll survive... more or less."

"Let us go," Clearwing found her voice, and said the only thing she could think to say. "Remember when we last met? The threat still stands, you know."

"Mph m mnnnm hm!" Coal confirmed, despite not actually knowing the threat.

"What threat?" Cricket asked.

Hawthorn let out a chuckle. "Oh, you think you'll be able to kill me? I've survived the Poison Jungle, little dragonet. It's been my home for thousands of years, after all. It came so close to killing me at last... but then Hawthorn came along and rescued me. Gormless lovely dragon husk. He's been so useful. I think I'm going to keep him forever. Or, at least, until his bones rot and I can't move him anymore."

Silence fell. Horrible, chilling, like when, as a young dragonet, Coal had poked a bee's nest to see what would happen. There had been perfect silence. No birds, no other insects, even the chatter of the dragons around them seemed to have fallen silent.

"...What?" Mandrake said finally.

"Is Hawthorn — aren't you Hawthorn?" Cricked asked.

"Hee, hee," said the dragon in front of them, a sneering sort of wheeze. "The outer bark is Hawthorn, yes."

"The outer bark is not the point."

Clearwing looked up into Hawthorn's flickering white eyes.

It's the Vine. It has been controlling him. I was right.

There was a sudden BOOM, deafening and powerful, and it knocked Clearwing off of her feet, ripping away the vines. For a few moments, all she could see was white and all she could hear was ringing.

Then the world slipped away.

A/N: Hello! In case you can't tell, this is the end of part 2.

Hooray!

I decided that, since Galaxy/Mythic/Whatever they go by isn't on very much anymore and the stupid school limited my google doc sharing, I should start putting in my own author's notes.