was in her bamboo grove when he came, and she already knew — she generally already knows — and she let him ask anyway, which is its own small lesson, because the asking is the thing he needs to practise.
I killed a tree, he said. He did not dress it up. He had learned, somewhere in the last twenty chapters, that dressing it up for her was a waste of both their time. The ginseng-fruit tree at Five Villages. Tore it up by the roots because two boys called my master a thief. Now the owner's going to fry the master in oil unless I bring it back to life, and I've asked everyone in the upper world, and they've all sent me here.
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