Page 47 of A Fae’s Guide to Tactical Botany

He was not a man to resist a challenge.

She gave his sleeping form one last smile and retraced their steps to the flower she’d called forth for him. It was pale and colorless in the moonlight, but she knew its truth. With a sigh, she traced the petals, treasuring each ruffle and fold, the fragile silk of its splendor.

It was not possible to lie to the elements. To Ethan, yes, of course. Words were almost always lies of one sort or another. And to herself. She’d lied to herself for so long she barely knew how to be honest. But the elements, the magic, always knew the truth. Knew when it was time to bloom, time to wilt, time to fall.

She had been forcing herself on her garden, begging and cajoling and inducing the plants to bloom as she willed, to uphold her self-deception. But she was listening now. She was ready to listen.

And so she reached into herself, gave herself to the flower, told it the message of her deepest truth.

It’s time to let go.

Chapter eighteen

Your Princess Is In Another Castle

Ethan woke with the sunrise. It was hard not to when you were camping—even in his tent, the glow of the dawn on the nylon was inescapable, and last night he had fallen asleep on the ground. Mara had molded it to his body, of course, so he wasn’t as stiff as he could have been, but still. It was the ground.

He pushed himself up to sitting with a groan, blearily looking around. There was no sign of Mara. Of course. He didn’t think he’d rudely fallen asleep mid-story, but there was no reason for her to stick around after he’d crashed. Maybe she’d come say goodbye when he was done packing.

Or maybe not. Maybe she had already done her own hasta la vista, baby, don’t let the cholla hit you in the ass on your way out thing and was back to making flowers bloom with her grief.

Maybe he would never see her again.

Fuck.

Still, he couldn’t dwell on it. He had a campsite to pack and a hill to trudge painfully down and ugh, he hoped Mara had either left his boards and ladders in place or de-weaponized the cacti, or he was screwed.

She wanted him to leave, though, so she’d probably made him a path already. Nice and easy.

He was digging in his cooler—which wasn’t all that cool now, but at least worked for storage—for one of his last remaining protein shakes when he saw it.

His drone.

His goddamn buried-forever-with-no-treasure-map drone.

And there were his power tools, too. Everything Mara had sucked away into the earth, sitting in a neat pile next to his tent. Just as if she’d never whooshed them away.

His notebook was on top of the pile, the breeze riffling the pages.

He scrambled over to it, snatching it up.

It was a diagram of Mara’s hill. There were the blooming plants, the maze leading up to the top. At the peak of the hill, a doodled grove of trees with a long-haired stick-figure woman in their midst.

At the top of the page were two lines written in Mara’s swooping cursive.

Your princess is in another castle.

And below that: Come and get me.

He looked up and saw her.

She was perhaps halfway up the hill, separated from him by several rows of her plants. There was something different about them, but he couldn’t care about that. Not when Mara was gazing down at him with a challenging smile.

With a toss of her hair, she danced out of sight.

Ethan scrambled to his feet, frowning at the hillside. It was wrong. It was weirdly wrong, and what was—

The flowers were gone.