“Obviously!” He deflects another root with a powerful swing, the brutal impact skidding his low stance backward. Our escape route is the way we came in this morning: the little island west of Windonhigh, connected by the cloudbridge. Lucien assured us it was a magically charged space; it would be a simple matter for him to teleport all of us down to the ground from there without exhausting himself. But how are we going to make it? These roots—they’re vicious. Attacking viciously, as if in ironic retaliation for the tree we uprooted.

you invaded, the hunger insists. invaded where no one should, with your human pride and your human blood…

And then it hits me. Varia is the Bone Tree. If Varia can control the Bone Tree’s power while being eaten by it, then the High Witches being eaten by the Glass Tree…can they control their tree? Are they the Glass Tree? Is that why Lucien was afraid of being overheard? The raw glass all over Windonhigh…can they listen through it? All that raw glass…is that them?

Is this seven High Witches, combining their power to stop us all at once?

Cold fear hardens my face. I pull Fione to the left just in time as one of them pierces in from the side, around Lucien’s witchfire wall, and he snarls, the fire extending around us even farther in a deep semicircle. The black-purple flames reflect frosty in the glass, like candied violets with a particularly furious bloodlust.

Next to me, Fione makes an awful gurgling noise, sticky trails of blood sloughing out of her mouth and down her clothes. If the fine shards lodged in her mouth or her throat, she’ll live longer. But if they got in her lungs, we’re running on extremely borrowed time.

“The stairs,” I urge her. “C’mon. We can make it.”

She staggers, her grip on her crossbow cane white-knuckled and smeared red, her other hand clutching the book close like it’s the last thing left in the world. Lucien rotates with us, defending us from the front with his witchfire wall. It doesn’t stop the glass roots or destroy them, but it does make them hesitate, and that’s all we need to inch across the clear floor, step-by-bleeding-step. Bloody footprints across the glass, drag marks, dripped pools. We can make it. Every step, every ring as Malachite lets out a roar and deflects, the blazing crackle of the witchfire as it eats nothing—we can make it.

The stairs are so close when it happens.

And that’s what makes the fall so terrible.

The roots stop all of a sudden. Malachite pants; Lucien keeps the wall in place, watching and waiting. The glass roots all pull back at once, quivering, and then pierce down.

Into the floor.

Glass melding with glass. Glass roots squirming inside thinner glass, below it, peeling it apart like a pliable skin over milk.