I make it to the Destiny first, and she and Isolde aren’t far behind. As Raze passes Leira, who’s still dizzily trying to recover her senses but doesn’t seem horribly burned, he snatches something from her raised hand.

“Thanks for returning this.” Silver gleams in the moonlight as he barrels for the Destiny, ring already slipped back into place on his finger.

Leira is screaming something. Everyone is screaming something. It all blends into a crash of words that doesn’t make any sense, but I hear the door slam shut as I throw myself into the driver’s seat, gripping the wheel with white knuckles.

The Destiny roars to life, and we lurch forward. Birch, who managed to sleep through everything until this point, complains loudly. We leave Leira in the dust, but we can’t just keep going down this same road her reinforcements are already on. We need to go somewhere they won’t follow.

I have another awful idea.

“Seelie.” Isolde’s voice breaks away from the others with the warning sound of my name. “Don’t.”

Well, that settles it. I grit my teeth and turn the wheel sharply, slamming the wagon to top speed.

The arguing harmonizes into a chorus of screams as I send us tumbling off the road into the forest, smashing straight through the TRAVELER BEWARE: FAERIE CIRCLE warning sign in a cloud of splinters.

We bump along the uneven road hard enough to jolt us all up and down, to make the wheels crack under the weight. I push the Destiny as fast as she can go, ignoring the feeling of bolts shaking out of place and wood cracking. Branches smack and snap against the sides as we tumble through the darkness, lit only by the approaching light of Aris’s magic.

Glancing behind us, I see dozens of cloaked figures on horseback weaving between the tress, one with her hand raised to a ball of light. It gleams on what I can barely make out as dragon scales, but the green hides blend in with the trees so well I can’t see how many guard dragons they’ve brought with them. The tawny wings of a nightingale weave between them, skimming the leaves. Ahead, an eerily tranquil clearing, trunks bowing away from a wide circle of pale mushroom caps.

“What are you doing?” Isolde manages to break through the clouds in my head.

Words scramble in my head, so I reach for the only one at the tip of my tongue. “Shortcut!”

The horses sense the faerie circle before their riders see it, and they shy away, bucking and neighing, which sets off the dragons. The nightingale soars straight upward with a rapid-fire angry clicking sound, turning in the air to pull up beside Aris’s ball of light. For a second, I think I see her green eyes, angry and surprised.

“Slow down!” Olani shouts. But I can’t slow down: it feels like we’re going down a forty-five degree incline, totally out of control, gaining speed with each second.