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“What is so frightening about a field of flowers?” Hawl grum-bled, moving past me, with Neville on their shoulder. The fluffin was asleep on a pillow Hawl had somehow managed to sew onto one of their pauldrons.

Kazmyn grabbed at the bear’s arm. “They’re not flowers. At least, not the kind you’re thinking of.”

I looked past them and into the field. Kazmyn was right—and wrong. The blossoms were like nothing I’d ever seen before. They were tall as my waist, for one. Their petals were moving, furling and unfurling, lifting on thick stems and reaching out.

“Fang flowers,” Zaira declared, marching up.

“Because they have teeth,” Kazmyn added helpfully. “They’re flesh-eating plants. At least, they are when they get the chance.”

“There are stones in the field,” I said, pointing. Scattered flat slabs of stone rose a foot or two above the plants, interspersed but close enough to one another that one could jump to the next.

“Stay on the stones,” Zaira instructed us. “Follow them through the field. The second ward lies at the center.”

“What is with dwarves and killer plants?” Visha complained. “Did the designers of this place only have one good idea and they decided to reuse it for each ward?”

“There were also those eels,” Blake reminded her. “Those were scary but kind of neat.”

“They took a chunk of my flesh, and you call them neat,” Kazmyn protested dramatically. His leg had already healed a lot. Both Zaira and Rodriguez were claiming credit, of course. Rodriguez said it was the anti-infection balm he’d applied before wrapping the bandages. Zaira claimed it was a special salve she’d been cleaning the wound with nightly—one that was exclusive, apparently, to official members of the Emberwatch. They’d been squabbling about that damn salve ever since.

Now Blake looked out at the stones, then back at me. “Stay close.”

I nodded. We moved forward. The leaps were fairly easy. Perhaps they’d have been trickier with slightly shorter legs, but Magda, Zaira, and Kazmyn seemed to be holding their own. I saw Hawl pause to ask Magda if she’d like them to throw her from stone to stone. I turned away, biting the inside of my cheek before I could hear her reply. There was no throwing of dwarves. Instead, we made our way fairly easily. From time to time a flower near us would snap open, revealing an edge of sharp pale green teeth that looked bizarrely out of place along such beautiful petals. But usually the plants opened and closed so slowly that they didn’t pose much danger.

Finally we reached the center of the meadow and the ring of runestones. Zaira moved onto the slab holding the stones, already pulling her blade out. She examined the stones, but her face looked more confident this time. There was less hesitation before she sliced her palm and dribbled her blood over one of the runes.

The rune flared with a faint glow. But then nothing else happened. She looked back at us, frowning. “I believe I have the right rune.”

Blake cautiously stretched a hand out over one of the flowers. The petals didn’t snap at him. “Seems to be good.”

“Not very original,” Visha complained again, as we moved past the runestones and onto the next stone slab, heading for the edge of the cavern where a tunnel beckoned us to the next stage of our journey. “Same trick, different plants basically.”

“We weren’t nearly choked to death, so I think I like the flowers better,” I was saying, then stopped. Magda had paused on the stone in front of us. She’d swiveled her body to look back at the runestones. Slowly, she raised a hand, pointing. There, in the shadows between two of the runestones on the raised slab, lay an arm. It had been severed below the elbow and flayed of all its skin. Notably, it was also missing a hand.

“At least they took the same arm,” Blake said weakly. “Instead of, you know, chopping off the other.” He looked at the arm and shook his head. “Still, pretty fucked up.”

“Poor Lord Sharma,” I murmured. I glanced at Zaira.

“We knew they passed through ahead of us,” she declared loudly, lifting her chin and clearly trying not to let the sight of the arm affect her. “We must move more quickly to catch up.”

“They don’t have a dragon or a fluffin,” Blake said to me, his voice low. “So I figure there’ll be a standoff either way. Eventually, we’ll all reach the same place, right?”

“Sounds wonderful,” I said sarcastically.

He touched my shoulder gently. “We’ll be all right. We’ve been through worse.”

We’d fought House Mortis before. We’d been outnumbered that time, too, and it hadn’t gone well. Blake must have read my expression.

“This is different,” he murmured. “We have excellent fighters with us. Sankara and Magda? Hawl? They’re skilled.” He glanced at the Bearkin. “I bet Hawl could take on a dozen Mortis students single-pawed.”

I tried to smile. “I hope you’re right.” But it couldn’t be that easy. Could it?

The cavern seemed to have read my mind, because that was when I heard it: the sound of water in the distance. A rush that was growing to a roar. The cavern began to shudder. Below my feet, the stone slab trembled.

“Move!” I yelled. “Higher ground!” I looked around. On our left, out past the field of killer flowers, rose a high cliff of stone, like a rampart along one side of the cavern.

“Cliff! Now!” Blake yelled, clearly having seen the same thing I had. “Everyone move!”

We ran—just as the sound of water built to a louder roar. I glanced over my shoulder as I ran through the sleeping field of flowers. Behind us, the tunnel mouth vomited a wall of surging white water. It slammed into the field, flattening flowers and snapping steps.