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“But I won!” I gasped. “I won, I won, I won!”
“By a moment only!”
“It still counts!” I grinned up at him. “So what do I get?”
He didn’t answer. But his lips curved in another of those disturbing smiles, even while his eyes burned. And for a moment, I swear I felt the earth move.
And then I was sure of it, as the platform began to shake underneath us. And a cascade of leaves rained down all around us. And, for a moment, I thought that maybe some new entertainment was starting up, because trolls really knew how to party.
But then the tree actually tilted, almost sending us the rest of the way off the side before Pritkin caught me, pushing me up the now-slanted platform. I grabbed the top and pulled myself the rest of the way up. And looked over and saw—
Something impossible.
The center of the big open space, which a moment ago had been filled with revelers, tables groaning with beer, and a big ox roasting over an even bigger fire, was now a churning, boiling mass of dirt and flaming logs and debris. It looked like the people had managed to jump free, running into the forest or swinging up into the trees, but the feast was gone. And in its place—
“They bypassed the wards by coming up through the ground,” Pritkin said, as silver-haired devils started emerging from the cauldron of earth. “The dark fey’s element is fire. Their wards are smothered by earth—”
“Stop telling me how they got in and tell me what we do about it!” I said.
And then I saw her. A small, dark-eyed girl like the one who had waved at me, standing all alone on what had once been a tabletop but was now a piece of flotsam on a dirt sea. The Svarestri weren’t targeting her, didn’t even seem to notice her, but it wouldn’t matter. Because in a minute they’d be targeting everyone, destroying the last of her people over a weapon they probably couldn’t even use.
A weapon we had brought here.
“Pritkin—” I said, my lips numb.
But he was no longer there. And a second later, neither was I, as an arm swooped down from above. And pulled me up and over the tilted platform, and onto a joist still clinging to the tree.
I didn’t have a chance to ask what was going on, because he was yelling, but not at me.
“Up here!” he bellowed down at the running, screaming, chaotic scene below. The words must have been magically enhanced, because they tore through the forest like he was speaking through a bullhorn, loud and echoing. “Are you deaf? We’re up here!”
And no, I thought, it didn’t look like the Svarestri were deaf. Because he hadn’t even finished speaking when they jerked their heads up, all at once, like they were on a string. And focused. And threw.
The huge tree exploded in a fireball that consumed half a dozen others in the vicinity, like Roman candles. But didn’t consume us, because we weren’t there anymore. A familiar wrenching jerk tore us away right before the bolts landed, sending us sailing through the air back toward the tree I’d come from.
Only we didn’t end up there. Because Pritkin grabbed another rope halfway, one I hadn’t even seen against the dark sky. And a second after that, some sort of pulley system jerked us up even higher, and then—
“What the hell?” I screamed as we started flying forward, skimming through a tunnel of branches barely below the treetops.
“Quick line through forest; it’s their escape route,” Pritkin said breathlessly. “It’ll draw the Svarestri away from the village.”
And then what? I thought but didn’t say. Because it didn’t look like that would be a problem. It didn’t look like that would be a problem at all, with trees exploding all around us as bolt after bolt shot up from the forest floor.
They must have been running and firing, and they were running fast.
“Hold on!” Pritkin told me as a spear exploded just to our left, scattering burning debris and a firestorm of leaves everywhere.
“I am holding on! Holding on is not the problem!” I shrieked, which probably wasn’t helpful, but what would be?
And then I found out.
“You had it?” I yelled as a familiar stick appeared out of nowhere.
“I glamouried a substitute on the way here,” Pritkin told me a second before he activated the staff. And it may as well have been a booster rocket attached to our asses. Because our flight th
rough the treetops suddenly became an express train straight to hell.
We went hurtling through a storm of burning branches and falling leaves, with the forest turning into one long line of fire as bolts hit above, below, and to the side of us. I couldn’t see with a forest’s worth of branches slapping me in the face and smoke and shrapnel flying everywhere and the wind strong enough to make my eyes water without all of that. But that was okay; that was all right.
