“If he had to send me to babysit you,” the cat said, “why did it have to be somewhere so . . . wet?”

“You should have seen the last place,” Alice muttered. She wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to get into a swimming pool again. “Now be quiet. I need to concentrate.”

There was a rustle in the bushes, farther on, and a small creature emerged. It looked a bit like a wingless bird, with an oval body balanced on two clawed feet and a long, pointed beak. The sleek black coat that covered it was fur, though, and not feathers.

It was called a swarmer, and Alice knew that it was not, in fact, a separate creature at all, but only a part of a larger entity, like an ant or a bumblebee. The Swarm had been the first creature she’d bound, back when she’d known nothing of Readers or magic and she’d accidentally stumbled into a prison-book. The individual swarmers could be almost cute, but she couldn’t quite forget the sound of hundreds of them running after her, claws tiktiktiking on the stone floor as they quirked for blood.

Right now she was using a few of them to scout, since the creature that occupied this prison-book was not being terribly cooperative. She could, after much practice, peer through their eyes without letting her real body fall over, but she still wasn’t good at dealing with more than one of them at once. It didn’t help that they were poorly suited to the swamp—they were heavier than they looked, and every time one of them stepped into a puddle, it sank to the bottom like a stone and had to scramble to get out.

Alice herself was far from keen on the swamp, as a matter of fact. It was like the water and the land had gotten mixed up, somehow. Even the dry bits were covered in thick, sticky mud, and the innumerable channels and shallow ponds were covered with floating weeds that made them look just like land until she put her foot in them and muddy water poured into her boot. To top things off, the mosquitoes were eating her alive, and her sunburned skin stung whenever she squashed one.

She checked her swarmers, one by one, but all they could really see were more weeds, a disadvantage of being only a foot high. This isn’t working. She sighed and let them pop out of existence.

At least now I can do something about the mosquitoes. At the back of her mind were the threads of magic that led to her bound creatures. A silver thread for the Swarm, a deep nut-brown one for the tree-sprite, and a deep blue one for her latest acquisition: a big, toothy creature Geryon had called a devilfish, which could let her glow in the dark or breathe underwater.