Far down the lengthy hallways, the children from Grimere went in pairs from room to room, blasting fire at anyone hiding in order to flush them out. They used their fiery breath and the few spells they’d learned to defend themselves against dissenters who reached for a component and tried to fight. They shooed the people out into the hallway, and when a room was fully checked and cleared of all hiders, they cast glass panes in front of the doors so the dissenters couldn’t easily get back in. Faced with the threat of fire, most of the confused and frightened dissenters put their hands in the air and pleaded for mercy as they backed down the hallway.

“We’re going!” cried one. “Please don’t hurt us!”

“We didn’t want to have this war in the first place!” cried another. “I don’t even like Frieda, and I hate fighting.”

“She abandoned us hours ago!” the first accused. “What kind of leader does that? She was staring out the back door.Then she took out an invisibility paintbrush and applied it. I haven’t seen her since. I’m sure she took off running into Quill like a coward.”

The children from Grimere didn’t understand much of what was shouted at them, but Asha thought she understood the part about Frieda running to Quill, so she tucked the information away in case it would be useful to share with Thisbe later. She and the others held back from harming anyone who was going willingly to the staircase to be wrangled by the actual mages. For the most part, only a few fought back, and the rest surrendered… at least until they got to the main floor.

Down there, Fifer and Thisbe were whipping off freeze spells as more people were evicted from their hiding places and trying to make a run for it. Those who succeeded in getting outside without being hit by spells were stopped and corralled by Panther or the dragons. Florence continued to transfer the frozen ones from the mansion windows to the area around the rock outside, since his mouth was full by now.

Once things started to calm down, Florence called Gorgrun to assist on the ground. First she had him uproot a section of trees in the jungle and bring them to the lawn. Then she instructed him to lay four trunks lengthwise in an imperfect square around the dissenters. He stacked more logs on top of the first ones, building walls. They formed a pen with space at one corner for a door.

Once the structure was solid, Gorgrun and Quince picked up the mansion’s roof, which they’d removed earlier, and set it on top of the pen to keep the dissenters from climbing out. Panther and Simber guarded the openings and methodically put more and more fleeing Artiméans inside, despite their cries of surrender and pleas for freedom. “You’ll get yourrr chance to speak,” Simber snarled at them. “But forrr now, I advise you to be quiet. Orrr else.” His words were frightening enough to silence the group, at least for a while.