"Is this it, Doctor?" the Rigfennid bellows at me. "Is this the peaceful parlay you would have with us?"

Out in the courtyard, and I am sure at two other points within scenic walking distance of each other, everything is darkening, hanging limp. Through it all, there's a noise, piercing, almost mechanical. Pained. Like a dog that's been kicked and doesn't understand why.

"Take me to your power source," I tell him. "Now!"

"Oh, certainly, Doctor," he smiles. "Finn, take him to your sister."

One of the Fianna steps away from the group, to a door on my right, onto the courtyard. Now that he's not just one of a faceless mass, I recognize him. At the Tian Lu Quan, he was the one that stole Jessica from under my nose. Madame Song's 'if-I-can't-have-her' approach to negotiations. Finn, the Brother of the Ash, is to take me to Jessica.

"Why did you bring her here?" I ask him. He closes the door behind us before he'll answer me.

"Because my father asked me to." I confirm that he means the Rigfennid and he continues, "Because the land was dead without her."

"You Tir used to have a queen, what happened to her?"

"Her highness Queen Niamh no longer had the interests of the people at heart. She would have destroyed us in the end."

"Oh, you're a cheery bunch, you lot."

Young Finn is leading us through the overgrown garden. If you're watching the right places you can see great swathes of dark and withering being tracked through it all. If you listen carefully, whenever you see one of those great waves go by, that impossible noise shifts up a pitch.

"I'll fight with my father against anyone who dares to hurt our sister."

There's information there to be mined about Jessica's genetic irregularities, but I trust Rory's met somebody in his cell and can fill me in on all that later. I myself am just a little bit distracted right now.

I've been sitting in that war room talking to the Rigfennid, or rather at him when he wasn't listening to a word, and all that time Jessica was not thirty feet away tied to a tree.

Well, I say 'tied'; bio-organically fused is better, it's just a bit of a mouthful, when all I really mean is that the ash in her body has grown part of the ash at her back. When I finally get her to open her eyes she looks pleased to see me. "Morrigan am have said him to be coming."

"I know about River, Jessica, you don't have to cover that up."

"Riversing am said. And am said tells him heretimes that after am not its fault."

"Why, Jessica, what happens after?"

Wide-eyed, distant, "Not knows. Riversing am said tells him it am just a…" And here she pauses, trips syllable by syllable along an unfamiliar word, "bat-ter-ree."

I look up at Finn. "No," he's saying, "nobody comes here but me."

"Get through many double-A sisters, do you?"

Then, from miles up and far behind me, "Doctor!"

"Rory?" Jessica hears him too, and she calms. Stays curled up against pain, but calms.

"I'm still in the tower. Don't worry if you can't see. I called Amy. She says it's pesticides. River's trying to stop them, but there's too much going on."

Of course. That's what the great big swathes are; spraying hoses. Human chemicals safe enough for human gardens but not for flora that have never suffered so much as a city fog. I waste a second with my head in my hands. Then I straighten away from Jessica and grab young Finn by the torc, push him close to her. "Look at her. Is this what you do to your sister? Now I know it doesn't look like it to you, but those humans up there are only doing what they think is a really great idea and all for the best. They are getting it typically wrong, but their typical hearts are typically in the right place. Don't make her suffer for that."

"But Doctor, if she were free how would we fight back?"

"You don't, they're not fighting, why does nobody here listen to sense?"

I would give him more of an argument, except that just at that moment, Jessica's hand flashes out and snatches mine.

At first she doesn't say anything.

Rory does. Shouting down again, "Doctor? I was over at the other window then and…"

"The quick version, Rory, if you wouldn't mind!"

"That Richfenny guy's out there talking to what looks like most of Tirinnanoc. Bad stuff, mostly. Angry, hateful stuff, mostly."

Jessica is hearing this, and nodding. "Jessica not does it. Them does. Doctor am to believe it, not it, am not bad, am having stopped being bad, him am not to be punishing her please again."

I sit on the arm of her rough-hewn throne. Her head falls against my knee and I put one hand on her hair. "Why wouldn't I believe you? You're just the power source, I know that."

She looks up.

Jessica, normally, is very pale. Lived indoors most of her life, so that's natural. She's not now, though. She's flushed like she's standing in front of a fireplace. The hand still holding mine is fiercely hot, and I can feel her pulse pounding through it. "Because am being the same," she says. And a first red teardrop breaks rank at the corner of her eye. "They kills them dead in both their hearts."