I looked around, confused, until I spied her, sitting twelve feet up in the cleft of a huge old oak. She was looking a lot more like a fey suddenly, with her hair a dark poof around her face and filled with leaves and sticks; her heavy, if stylish, coat gone, and the sleeves ripped off her shirt; and what looked like one of the missing sleeves tied around her forearm. She was acting more like a fey, too, making a sweeping gesture that one of the huge branches of the oak she was riding mimicked exactly—and knocked three running soldiers off their feet.

“Are you deaf? Come on!” she yelled, when I just blinked at her.

And then her tree… started moving closer. It had been partway down the path in front of us, but now it reversed course, the roots spidering over the ground in ways that roots should not do. Causing me to have to fight a serious and profound urge to run screaming in the other direction.

I refrained, since the other direction held fey. Like the ones who were now shooting at the shield that Rhea had just thrown up. I glanced around, but if there was an alternative way out of here, I didn’t see it. So, we scrambled up the tree, which turned out to be the race car of the vegetable world, because as soon as we were up—

“Holy Crap!” I said, as the thing took off, trundling through and in some cases over the confusion like we had four-wheel drive. Or a tank. Or an out-of-control bulldozer, that put two huge limbs out in front of it and just scooped fey out of the way.

That was lucky, as they were everywhere now, leaping up from the ground as if they had springs in their feet, shooting arrows and throwing spells, and using some of those weird energy spear things that I’d seen them employ a few times before to devastating effect.

But the effect wasn’t so devastating now, as a phalanx of trees had formed up all around us. They were lashing out with limbs and roots, knocking fey out of the way, slamming them back into the forest, and trampling them underfoot. Or under root, I guessed, which made my head hurt and complain about the things I got it into. And then, in one memorable event, several fey were sent ping ponging between the wildly waving branches of half a dozen trees, until they finally managed to find free air—about thirty feet up.

I didn’t think their adventure in horticulture had managed to kill them, as they’d had shields, but it hadn’t made them happy. I, on the other hand, was feeling the first optimism I’d known in a while. I looked at Guinn, and shouted to be heard over the creaking wood and yelling fey and exploding spells.

“How are you doing this?”