She was huge again, larger than he had ever seen her, looming like a great black shadow in the space below the window, with her immense white fangs bared at the three men. They were falling over one another to get away backward through the door. Abdullah turned and ran after the soldier, gratefully. He was pelting toward the far corner of the inn. The fourth constable, who was outside holding the horses, started to run after them, then realized that this was stupid and ran back to the horses, which scattered away from him as he ran at them. As Abdullah bounded after the soldier through a sopping kitchen garden, he could hear the shouting of all four constables as they tried to catch their horses.

The soldier was an expert at escapes. He found a way from the vegetable garden into an orchard and from there a gate into a wide field, all without wasting an instant. A wood stood across the field in the distance like a promise of safety, veiled in rain.

“Did you get Midnight?” gasped the soldier as they trotted through the soaking grass of the field.

“No,” said Abdullah. He had no breath to explain.

“What?” exclaimed the soldier. He stopped and swung around.

At that moment the four horses, each with a constable in the saddle, came jumping over the orchard hedge into the field. The soldier swore violently. He and Abdullah both sprinted for the wood. By the time they reached its bushy outskirts, the horsemen were well over halfway across the field. Abdullah and the soldier crashed through the bushes and leaped onward into open woodland, where, to Abdullah’s amazement, the ground was thick with thousands upon thousands of bright blue flowers, growing like a carpet into far blue distance.

“What … these flowers?” he panted.

“Bluebells,” said the soldier. “If you’ve lost Midnight, I’ll kill you.”

“I haven’t. She’ll find us. She grew. Told you. Magic,” Abdullah gasped.

The soldier had never seen this trick of Midnight’s. He did not believe Abdullah. “Run faster,” he said. “We’ll have to circle back and collect her.”

They rushed forward, crunching bluebells, suffused with the strange wild scent of them. Abdullah could have believed, but for the gray, pouring rain and the shouts of the constables, that he was running over the floor of heaven. He was rapidly back in his daydream. When he made his garden for the cottage he would share with Flower-in-the-Night, he would have bluebells in it by the thousand, like these. But this did not blind him to the fact that they were leaving a trampled trail of broken white stems and snapped-off flowers as they ran. Nor did it deafen him to the cracking of twigs as the constables shoved their horses into the wood behind them.

“This is hopeless!” said the soldier. “Get that genie of yours to make the constables lose us.”