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not focus light on his invisible retinas. Betsy had no magic like that, but she was an experienced thief and she must have gotten away. She might even have sneaked inside the building and might be making her way back to—
    Jarvey shrank behind the gnarled black trunk of one of the trees, his hand gripping the rough bark. Augustus had just stepped outside the door, and with him his father. The two distant, tiny figures seemed to be arguing, though from this far away Jarvey could see very little of them and could hear nothing at all.
    He backed away until he came to the last and biggest tree, growing right up against the bare marble wall. Jarvey stretched to grasp the lowest limb, grabbed hold of it, and swung himself up. He crept higher in the tree, hauling himself from limb to limb to a place where leaves concealed him well, but where there was a little tunnel through the leaves that let him see the garden. The branches hung heavy with masses of fragrant apple blossoms, and if Jarvey hadn’t been so scared and exhausted, he might actually have enjoyed the climb, except maybe for the bees.
    Golden honeybees buzzed all around him, and from this height he could see rows of square white wooden bee-hives in a long line against the marble wall over to his left. Jarvey fanned with his hand, trying to discourage the honeybees from investigating his sweaty face. They were real insects, not illusions. Jarvey supposed the Midions needed them to pollinate the garden, and maybe to produce honey—wait, something was going on out there, something moving slowly toward him like a spread-out, gray mist.
    Jarvey gasped and scrunched himself small. Walking through the rows of crops, still far away but coming toward him, stalked a whole row of men in dark evening dress. Junius Midion must have summoned members of his phantom audience to join in the search. At the very center of the line, Junius and Augustus strode along, peering this way and that. Where was Bets? He couldn’t see her. He hoped she’d found a place to hide. If Junius Midion got his hands on the Grimoire ...
    But right now he had to worry about being caught himself. Jarvey desperately looked around for some means of escape. He had none. The tree was too far away from the next one for him to move over. He couldn’t climb down without the risk of being spotted.
    But perhaps he could climb higher! This was one of the tallest of the apple trees, and its old, twisted branches thrust up and up and then spread out in all directions. It might be just possible, Jarvey thought, to swing out onto a branch and reach the roof of the first terrace.
    He climbed slowly, inches at a time, not wanting to draw attention to himself and not trusting the old branches to hold him. At one point a curious bee landed on his face. Jarvey froze and felt the maddening itch as the insect crawled over his forehead, down his closed eyelid, and across his right cheek before taking off and buzzing away. Staying still and keeping quiet for that was about the hardest thing that Jarvey had ever done.
    The higher limbs were smaller and less sturdy. Jarvey found one that crooked out and overhung the terrace, and he swung his way out on that one, hand over hand, with his feet dangling, but the old wood creaked as though in warning, and the branch began to bend and shake. A few leaves fell spinning from the smaller twigs.
    With an effort, Jarvey got himself just far enough out and, stretching down, stood on tiptoe on the flat roof of the marble terrace, still gripping the branch. He released his hold carefully, letting the limb swoosh back up into place as slowly and quietly as possible. The marble underfoot had collected years of fallen apple-tree leaves, and these had decayed into a kind of mushy, slippery soil. Jarvey edged his way out of this mess and onto the smooth bare stone, backing and crouching at the same time. The ghostly searchers had walked more than halfway across the garden by then.