As soon as they appeared, the luminous ropes unwound from them and coiled into gilded flowers, each whizzing off to the far side of its respective arena to hover in wait.

Even from half a mile away, I could see Talia grit her teeth, mouthing fuck to herself as she realized that the Grimoire had indeed thrown the dreaded wrench in our plans—they’d been assigned to parallel tracks. It would be next to impossible for Talia to duck out of her challenge, race all the way to the apple trees on the other end of the orchard, and derail Gareth in time to help Rowan secure a win.

Though I could see, by the determined cast of her jaw that I was coming to recognize, that she was going to do her damnedest to get there anyway.

Then the pumpkin patch began to stir.

Both the uncarved gourds and the bespelled fantasia of jack-o’-lanterns suddenly lifted off the ground, trailing vines. As if spun up by some fastidious tornado, they began to whirl slowly toward the center of the patch. Talia watched, slack-jawed with awe, as they rotated around one another like a solar system in miniature, before some invisible force sucked them in toward the center like a black hole.

Snapping them together into a shambling pumpkin monstrosity raining disturbed soil—a construct woven together with vines, topped by the same colossal sugar skull I’d noticed when I was last here with Lin.

The pumpkin gargantuan took two stumping steps forward, bending until it was face-to-face with Talia, sprite flames flickering in each of its ghastly hollow eyes. Then it issued a roar so bone-rattlingly loud it made me flinch even from my safe distance away.

In contrast, Talia endured the howling—so forceful it actually blew back her hair, and I could only imagine how pumpkin-monster breath might smell—with such a languid lack of affect that it was like gourd-based beasts got up in her face every other Tuesday. Then she held out a splayed hand and, like a squid shooting off ink, squirted a sticky mess of ectoplasm like a decaying spiderweb directly into its face.

The roar cut cleanly off, the beast swinging its blinded head from side to side. Talia wheeled around and took off toward the apple orchard—where Gareth was facing down what looked like a heinously ugly apple tree Ent.

The orchard had knit its own amalgam, a giant woven from warped trunk, bristling branch, and strategically placed clusters of fruit and leaves. Gnashing its serrated jaws, it lashed out at Gareth as he approached, snapping branches out at him like cracking whips. Gareth deflected a few blows with his vambraces—it made me grind my teeth to see those dumbshit things come in legitimately useful—and those he couldn’t fend off, he attacked with transmutation spells. Branches that should have struck him senseless turned to harmless wisps of steam, confetti, or what looked like bright ribbons of shredded silk.

Though I logically knew he wasn’t doing any of this for the sole purpose of annoying me, there was something inherently obnoxious about his display. Trust a Blackmoore to make a melee with Evil Johnny Appleseed look like a two-bit magic show, as if it took next to no power at all to manipulate molecules this way.