Page 23 of A Fae’s Guide to Tactical Botany

He’d spent the whole time wondering if she’d figured out an even more effective countermeasure that she was just waiting to unleash. And instead she’d left him entirely alone.

She had to be planning something.

Unless she was asleep. Maybe she was extra susceptible to alcohol, and his truce offering of mead had been an accidental Trojan horse. In which case honor would dictate—

Screw honor. If she wasn’t paying attention, that was her problem. It wasn’t like he was assaulting her.

So he implemented the next part of his plan, depositing his current burden on the rock Mara had leaned against earlier and then heading back across his bridge and down the stepladder for another load.

It took more trips than he’d needed to bring everything to the hill from the Jeep, and he almost lost his balance and tumbled into the cacti several times, but eventually all of his supplies, his tools, his cooler, sunshade, and camping equipment had been transferred from the lower level of the hill to this one.

“Can your remote-controlled gophers handle this?” he panted at last, dropping into the sand. His last task had been to untie the plank from the steplapper, hurry across its wobbly length, and then drag it up to set with the rest of his supplies.

He’d trapped himself inside her fortress. On purpose.

He was either a strategic genius, or he was gonna die within a week.

It had taken him most of the day to get this far, and Mara was still a no-show. Though she could be watching him invisibly. Maybe he should strip for her.

Fuck it. He was too tired to be sexy.

The sun was already low on the horizon, so he hastened to erect and stake down his compact pop-up tent, then chugged a protein shake and set out for more recon, using his drone video as a general guide.

It wasn’t a very good guide, as it turned out. All of the paths he had previously mapped out as possible points of entry were now choked with fresh cactus growth. Just thick enough to stymie his usual two-board entry and just high enough to block his stepladder bridge. He had two more of the stepladders, besides the one he’d been forced to leave behind, but they weren’t tall enough anymore.

But about halfway around the hill, he spotted a possibility. A path that had been blocked, true, but that seemed to continue past the blockage for a good ways.

He just needed a taller ladder.

Was she watching him now? He had to assume so. And so he continued around the hill, considering the various blocked paths, pretending to analyze even the worst of them as if they were serious contenders, until the sun was low in the sky.

She didn’t appear even once.

He told himself he wasn’t disappointed. Which was a lie, but not a very big one, since he was mostly worried. What was she planning?

Ethan returned to his mound of supplies, considering them. He’d left most of his gear down by the Jeep still—anything that wasn’t needed for survival or conquest—but he’d lugged all of his lumber and his fully charged cordless power tools along, and he had a single solar-powered lantern that had been sitting in the sun all day.

He sat on the rock, sketching and erasing by the light of the lantern until he was fairly certain he had a design that would work using minimal lumber and just one more ladder.

And then he tore that sketch out, turned the page in his sketchbook, and designed an entirely different design, one that he knew wouldn’t work. One that he wasn’t going to bother building, crossing a cactus cluster not at all like the one he planned to cross. He doodled a stick-figure woman at the top of the page, then placed the open sketchbook on the rock with a cold can of mead beside it and turned away to prepare or bed. He tucked the torn-out sketch under the flat vinyl of his air mattress and started pumping it up.

Ten minutes later, there was the faintest rustling of sand from the direction of the rock.

Gotcha, he thought grimly.

How did the phrase go? Old age and treachery, yadda yadda, youth and skill. He might not be old, but he knew which side of the equation he belonged on. Mara had all the skill, all the power.

All he had was tenacity and sneakiness.

They would have to do.

After assembling the pieces of his new siege engine, he slept as well as could be expected on an air mattress that was neither long enough nor wide enough for his body, in a tent that he’d outgrown when he was twelve, and awoke the following morning to the glow of the morning sun through the vinyl of his tent.

The can of mead was gone, though his sketchbook was still there on the rock, pages riffling in the wind. He couldn’t help but grin at what Mara had left in exchange.

Confident swirling cursive writing next to the stick figure he’d drawn of her, reading, “Your princess is in another castle.” She’d also added surprisingly realistic prickly pear paddles to each of the stick figure’s hands.

Double gotcha. There was something charming about Mara knowing a meme reference like that. Or maybe she was a secret classic gamer, complete with a goddess-cave of vintage Nintendos and CRT screens to play them on.