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sounded so much like a death rattle that she could not help but pad through the trees. She wrapped her neck fearfully around a trunk.
    A plump man lay on the ground, immobile. His face and neck were swollen and pink. It took Snow White a while to recognize from his ripped clothes that it was Wolfsbane.
    Shock turned her stomach.
    Oh my God.
    He wheezed, and her chest clenched to see this once magnificent man reduced to a bloated mass. His face turned painfully at her approach. She held her ground, slightly afraid.
    “You,” he rasped hoarsely. Even his voice was strangled beyond recognition. “I was . . . going to let you . . . go.”
    A hard lump came to her throat.
    “Queen,” he went on, clearly on his last breath, “wants you dead. Far north are Laplands. Go. Make your . . . home . . . ”
    And he breathed not another word. His glassy eyes stared at her like a final rebuke.
    For a long while, she did not move. The sweet scent of flowers came to her on the wind, but she did not heed them.
    “But I didn’t mean to kill you.” Her voice came out puny and frightened. “Does it still make me guilty . . . if I didn't mean to?”
    She slid down to her haunches. Her knees trembled. She rocked herself back and forth. I’m a killer, a killer, a killer , her momentum seemed to say. I murder people who are trying to help me. I’m no better than she is.
    Dark thoughts chased one another, along with darker images. She saw herself in a different tapestry of the Enchanted Forest. The handsome horned devil was in the center once again, amid wild beasts that wore the faces of Tom Cherry and his brothers. She was woven into the scene with silver thread, a scarlet dash for her lips. Her feet were doused in flames.
    She remained in this position for a long while, until a realization struck and she looked up, as if awakened from a trance. Another type of buzzing tugged at the air. Flies were beginning to settle on the body.
    A large vulture floated down from the sky to land on a branch.
    She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she said to Wolfsbane’s corpse. Her voice cracked.
    Gathering her courage, she crept to the body and wrested the hunting knife from his side. She could feel the skeins of steel vibrating within the wooden handle. Then she turned abruptly and ran from the place, never to set foot upon it again.
     
    #
     
    In the center of the Hive, the Wormhole flared crimson and orange and blue and green. A rainbow tongue, not unlike a solar flare, leaped to where Aein stood on the gallery, his heart in his throat.
    Find the Blue Planet guilty, no matter what. Thulrika’s request echoed in his ears. This went against everything he had been taught. Everything a Knight of the Redwood Table stood for.
    The irony of it. To save Spora, he would have to betray her holiest values.
    Mechanical golden beetles swarmed around him and the Blue Planet carapace he would occupy. He gazed at it in its open chrysalis. Its alien form was staggering. And to think that his flesh, his very soul, would be sucked into it and fused; his DNA molded into a moist, molecular soup. The actual metamorphosis would take months, and yet all this would be accelerated in the distorted time of the Wormhole.
    He would be in the Blue Planet before he knew it.
    He was suddenly floored by the enormity of it all.
    On a dais, his mother, the Hive Queen, sat on a makeshift throne. Six feelers squirmed from her head to imbibe the air. She too was malformed. She no longer walked or flew. She had to be carried on a luxurious golden litter strewn with precious leaves and scented twigs. But her disability stemmed from copious childbirth, not genetics. She had born whole and pure, and fed with a special brew to make her Queen. Now, her distended abdomen hung around her in pendulous folds.
    “Aein, my son!” she exclaimed, her eyes reflecting his image a thousand-fold. Her voice was thick with emotion. “You have a final chance to change your mind. I found a clause