“Shoots from stone,” it demanded, threat and a hint of exasperation coloring its rusty tone.

“Are you serious?” Gareth snapped. “Thorn already told you! Or asked you, whatever.”

“We have to cast, too, numbnuts,” Talia muttered, gritting her teeth as she spread her hands in preparation. Though this was probably the easiest plant spell in the book, one she could certainly do—shit, even I could pull off Verdant Awakening, given enough time—as an Avramov, it wouldn’t come as easily to her. “Welcome to the fucking competition.”

“Do you seriously have to be so nasty all the time, Talia?” Gareth complained with a curled lip, affronted. “You’re the one who’s cheating, I haven’t even done anything to—”

“Oh, eat my shorts, Blackmoore, why don’t you.”

As the two of them began casting, still sniping at each other, I sped off after Rowan, who was hurtling down a long hallway decorated with tapestries of fox hunts and medieval battles, gargoyles clinging to the interstices between the high ceiling and the walls. One of them abruptly came to life, with an awful grinding sound like a trash disposal trying to chew up a stray fork. It uttered a shrill caw, before dropping down into the hallway with a crash that seemed to shake the castle down to its fundaments, spreading its wings to block Rowan’s approach.

“Feathers from clouds,” it croaked. It was some kind of gryphon, falcon headed and lion flanked, a serpentine tongue flickering out of its mouth as it spoke.

Rowan’s face twisted in confusion. “The hell is that one,” he mumbled to himself, fisting a hand against his knotted forehead. “Feathers from clouds, feathers from clouds, come on, man, do the thing . . .”

My heart pounding, I waited for him to unravel this riddle—I didn’t know the question/answer myself—before Gareth made it through. But before Rowan could do anything else, the Blackmoore scion rounded the corner at a dead sprint. Once he knew what he had to do, Verdant Awakening had barely taken him two minutes to cast, damn the Blackmoores and their stupid, shitty strength.

“Feathers from clouds,” the gargoyle repeated, fixing Gareth with a stony glare.

I bit my tongue, hoping this one would stump him, too, but his face lit immediately. “Angel’s Breath Cantrip!” he called out, with a fully unironic fist pump. “I mean, uh, wait . . . What is the Angel’s Breath Cantrip?”

The gryphon nodded creakily, fluttering its wings. Gareth opened his mouth and exhaled, his breath visible, as though the hallway was much colder than it actually was—then his exhale turned into snowy white feathers, which spun lazily toward the floor.

A transmutation spell, and again, a fairly simple one; by magical logic, feathers were the same general kind of airy thing as breath, though chemistry and biology might have taken some issue with that, had anyone cared to consult either discipline. And of course Gareth knew this one right off the bat, I thought to myself in disgust. It was precisely the kind of showy illusion spell Blackmoores used all the time.