Vexxidrn Wither knelt in the wet dirt of his crypt and fed the seed a strip of his own ear. The husk drank the blood and shivered. It wanted more than a cat-folk necromancer could give. It wanted a living host, a pump to force sap through its veins, and six ingredients he did not own. Once fed and planted, the seed would spread carnivorous vines across every acre of the marsh. That was the point. That was the whole point. His greenhouse-crypt smelled of rot and sugar. Forty-three varieties of man-eating stinkweed hissed in their rows. Variety twelve, replanted where it had killed his assistant, snapped at his tail as he passed. He noted the snap in his ledger. Then he shouldered his bone staff and left through the drainage tunnel before dusk. Dr. Elwood Cringe answered his own door with a peppermint stick in his teeth and burns fresh on both hands. Vexxidrn showed him the seed. Elwood looked at it a long time. "Need a pump," Vexxidrn said. "Mana-electric. Strong enough for a host body." "Have one. Coils are shot." Elwood spat the peppermint into a jar. "Take it. Bring me a cutting when it fruits. Whole cutting. Roots too." They shook on it. Elwood wrapped the pump in oiled cloth and pushed him back out the door before the swamp went black. The willow academy was harder. Vexxidrn climbed the outer stair while the lamps still burned in the upper branches. He knew the ingredient list by heart: bone-ash chalk, three tincture vials, a jinx-thread spool, a jar of feather-mold, and one shard of astral glass from the field-study annex. He took the first five from a storeroom on the third landing. Students slept in the next room. He did not wake them. He climbed higher, toward the annex, and that was where the guard heard him. A figure in matte black armor stepped from behind the trunk with a bright quill-sword drawn. The blade lit the leaves pink. Vexxidrn froze against the bark. The spell-sword sniffed the air, turned his helmet, and swept the blade through the vines a hand's width from Vexxidrn's throat. Sap ran. Vexxidrn did not breathe. The guard moved on toward the stair. Vexxidrn slipped sideways into the annex, pried the astral shard from its cradle, and dropped from the balcony into the willow's hanging roots. He hit the ground running. He reached Fogmont Cairn at first gray light with every ingredient in his satchel and the pump strapped to his back. The seed opened its husk when he set it on the altar. He fed it the astral shard. It swallowed. Somewhere behind him, beyond the swamp, a pack was already reading the cuts he had left in the willow bark. They would come looking. He had a day, maybe two, to find the seed a body.