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By the time I hacked through the foot-thick stem, she’d be upon us. “I doubt it.”
“Do you have a sister who can?”
“Not here.” Yudit would have been able to wither the vine with a touch and bring the genius’s mother crashing down. I grabbed Ilyana’s hand and ran into the smoke, a ribbon of bleeding heart blossoms unfolding behind us.
Burning bog oaks swam in and out of sight. We coughed as the smoke grew thicker. Before long, thundering footsteps followed us, growing louder every moment. The genius’s mother was on our trail.
Sunbeam burst out of the haze. His teeth were clamped around Stinky’s reins, dragging her unwillingly along.
“Get on!” he shouted, spitting out the reins.
“What the fluke are you?” Ilyana said, lurching back.
“The last backup plan!” I answered. “Take the mare!”
I scrambled into Sunbeam’s saddle while Ilyana dragged herself onto a trembling, nostril-flaring Stinky.
“Is the talking horse another sister?” Ilyana asked.
“What? No!”
“How was I supposed to know?”
“The ‘horse’ part is a clue,” Sunbeam said, nipping at Stinky’s flanks to get her running in the right direction. “Hold tight.”
Our steeds galloped into the smoke, the footfalls of the genius’s mother pounding in our wake.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Edible
Sunbeam and Stinky took us out of the smoke and into clear air, much to the relief of my aching lungs. As soon as Sunbeam could see, he increased his speed, racing across a landscape dangerously studded with roots and pocked with puddles, lit only by moonlight and flames. Just ahead of him, Stinky was carrying Ilyana at a full gallop, no longer needing a nip to make her run flat out. Terror was serving the purpose now.
I had no idea which way we were going, only that we were fleeing too rapidly for my sisters to catch up on foot—assuming they could even figure out where we went once the smoke cleared. The ground was too waterlogged to hold a hoofprint, and Drusilla’s supernatural powers stopped at hiding tracks, not following them.
“You’re going to break a leg!” I said as I clung to my horse’s neck. “You and Stinky both!”
“Have you got a better idea?” he asked.
The genius’s mother emerged from the billowing clouds, closer behind us than I would have liked. She threw another handful of head-fire. It exploded in the branches of a black willow, showering us with burning leaves. I brushed off the ones that landed on me and Sunbeam before they could set fire to any clothes or hair.
A couple of quick looks back told me she was gaining on us rapidly, running faster than the horses could. I focused on the plants around us, and the grasping roots of a strangler fig stretched across her path at ankle height.
She didn’t even stumble. A single kick shattered the thick roots, scattering pieces into the mud.
“I will devour you, humans!” the genius’s mother bellowed. “I will gobble you for my breakfast, bones and all, and guzzle your horses’ blood for my tea!” She appeared to have forgotten that her son preferred Ilyana alive. Or else she no longer cared.
Ilyana got enough control over Stinky to drop back next to us. “Take my ring!” she shouted, wrestling it off her tan pale brown bronze finger.
“What?” I said.
“It’s magic! It amplifies fairy gifts a hundredfold. Mine are all useless slick-ice bill-shift, but yours aren’t!” She wrenched the ring the rest of the way off and thrust it at my face.
That explained a number of things I had no time to think about. I grabbed the ring—no easy feat when we were riding side by side at a breakneck pace. Stinky pulled ahead again when it was barely in my hand. I almost dropped it, but I somehow managed to jam it onto my finger instead.
And I understood.
The senses the fairy had blessed me with widened until they stretched across an immense distance, thousands of flowers whispering their secrets to me. Before, I thought I’d learned almost all there was to know about plants. I hadn’t. I’d only grasped a fraction of what they were. And now, all at once, there was no part of them that escaped my perception. They’d become as familiar to me as my own fingernails.
