I stared upward, feeling my face flush, as Guinn and Rhea waved at me frantically. Damn it all! I’d said to go home. Did nobody listen to me anymore?

Of course, that would imply that anybody ever had.

I couldn’t hear them from there, especially over the din of battle, but the implication of those beckoning arms was obvious. I threw my hands up, and made a few telling gestures of my own. At the derelict state of the path, at the way it swayed alarmingly at every touch, at the sheer improbability of anyone surviving a climb like that, even if they didn’t have an army on their tail!

“You have got to be fucking kidding me!” I finally yelled, which only caused the beckoning to get more exaggerated. “Yes, yes, I know what you want. You’re just insane!”

“Is this… the plan?” Mircea asked, crouching beside me.

“There is no plan.”

“Excuse me?”

I gestured at my pathetic outfit, at my missing patch of hair, and at the general me-ness of the moment. “Do I look like a person with a plan?”

He wisely did not answer that.

“Just go on up,” I told him crossly.

“Go up… what?”

“That.”

He looked at the path, which I let go of the end of, and which fell in front of him with a whump. He eyed it without favor. “That?”

“Yes, that, that! This isn’t a perfect rescue!”

“I had noticed.”

“You think you can do better?” I said angrily.

“Obviously not.” He paused to kiss me. “Don’t die.”

“Yeah.” I traded the goat for the sword. And then bit my lip as he and goat boy started the ponderous climb upward, which would have been easier if they didn’t both look like death. And if there were any railings on that thing. And if it wasn’t close to an eighty-degree angle after a short distance, and also full of holes.

But while it wasn’t pretty, it was better than staying here. Anything was better than staying here. But I still needed to find—

Them, I thought, as Arsen and Pritkin stumbled out of the smoke, which had gotten ridiculously thick and was now boiling over the ground like the clouds at the base of the fey capitol. I couldn’t see much at all anymore, just flailing limbs—of both species—and random balls of fuzzy-looking light from exploding spells. But I got the impression that some of the fey were now attacking other fey, which made no damned sense at all.

“A few are loyal to me,” Arsen said, before I could ask. “They are attempting to slow down pursuit, but they can’t hold for long. We have to hurry.”

Yeah, I thought, staring upward.

And then I got to hurrying, because what other choice was there?