“I was always told that grandfather could hear the plants sing!” she said, looking back at me with wild eyes. “I thought they were merely stories. It seems I was wrong!”

Looked that way, I thought, holding on. And then reaching out for Rhea, when a harder than normal bump sent her bouncing off the branch and into the air. Because there were no seatbelts in this thing!

I caught her before she fell off our crazy ride. But the shock interrupted the shield she’d somehow been maintaining, causing it to drop. And the second it did—

The ground rose up and hit me in the face.

Or, at least, that was what it looked like. After a stunned second, I realized that I must have fallen off myself, although I didn’t see how. I’d had a death drip on the branch with my thighs.

Oh, that was how, I thought, as Arsen jerked me up to his face.

“Release me, witch!” he snarled, his fingers digging into the arm he’d somehow grabbed, to pull me off the tree.

“You’re holding onto me!” I pointed out. And only afterward realized that I was speaking another language. Because, yeah, I guessed Pritkin spoke fey as well as understood it, didn’t he?

But I hadn’t been borrowing that particular ability before, and it freaked me out. And so did the mass of fey—like a whole damned battalion—heading for us at a dead run. And fuck that!

I kneed Arsen in the privates, only to belatedly remember that he was still wearing the bottom half of his armor. It was tied onto his gambeson, the long, padded tunic that these guys used to keep armor from meeting flesh, and which had been long enough to hide a solid steel cup. And oh, God, that hurt!

But I had bigger problems right now, because here came the fey—

And there went the fey, as half a forest worth of trees suddenly rose up and ambushed them from both sides. I had a moment to see a churning mass of limbs and silver hair and tossed up ground, and then I was staring up at a frantic looking Guinn, who’d somehow talked the racing tree into doing a one eighty. And then doing another one after Rhea cursed Arsen, sending him stumbling back into the woods, and I scrambled onboard.

We took off, galloping through the forest amid a whole host of other trees like… like a stampede.

“What are you doing?” Rhea yelled at Guinn, as I nursed a possibly fractured knee. “The camp is that way!”

“I know!”

“So, turn us around!”

Guinn stared at her, while hugging a tree limb with her whole body. “Do you see a bridle on this thing?”

“But you said—”

“That I could suggest things—”

“So, suggest they go around!”

“I did. They said an army is behind us—”

“And another one is in front of us!”