He handed it to Brick with a slight shrug.

  Well, he did say dryads were tricky. He helped Jagger onto the small steps descending into the earth and followed him down.

  “Go right at the Great Cavern,” Ash called after them. “Oh, and beware the Lord of All Roots, also known as the Taproot, and you’ll be fine.”

  “The Taproot?” Brick thought he must have misheard.

  “Yeah, he’ll want to encase you in his snare and keep you down there forever. Just remember you’re in his realm and give him his due,” floated down to him before the hole they’d climbed through sealed itself up above them.

  Brick didn’t know if Jagger had heard the dryad’s parting words and decided not to ask him. Tiny white-green lights stuck into the earthen walls shone and lit up the short flight of steps and the mud-and-stone-smelling passage they led down to. He was glad this tunnel was short—it was hard to walk along it like some hunched, bent insect.

  “This must be the Great Cavern Ash mentioned,” he said, at the huge space that opened up before them and stretched all around them. Glowing chunks of rock lit it up a little. His foot crunched on something. A small bone. There were more.

  “That suggests habitation—they’re trodden down,” Jagger said. “Did…you hear something?”

  “Like…?”

  “What lives in caves?” Jagger asked.

  Trolls, Brick tried not to think. Think of sweet little animals instead. But any cuddly thing he envisioned turned into rock rats and cave bats, all pointy claws, even pointier teeth and scabby fur. He shuddered. “Let’s go. Oh, I’m not scared,” he assured Jagger. “I just think we should hurry. Come on.”

  “Go right,” Ash had said. It was a small gap and Brick went first, bending a little and hoping his ass distracted Jagger. It led to a waterway of some sort, narrow, with barely enough space for them to stand against the wall without their feet dipping into the spring that ran down the middle of the tunnel.

  “There’s a fair being held as part of the wedding celebrations, isn’t there?” Brick asked. “What’s your favorite ride or game?”

  Jagger eyed him. “Are you babbling?”

  “A bit,” Brick admitted. “Personally, I never like the ones where you sit in a carved-out log and it rushes along a track that zigs and zags, then splashes into a pool of water at the bottom, you know?”

  “And you’re mentioning this because…?”

  “Because there’s a boat tied up to that rock there.” He inched around to examine what turned out to be a flat-bottomed boat. “It looks sound.” He scrutinized the craft further. “It’s even got paddles.”

  “Paddles? Well, that settles it—we’ll jump straight in.” Jagger threw up his hands.

  “And that’s you being snarky.” Brick took another look around. “You see another solution?”

  “No.” Jagger climbed aboard. “Happy now?”

  “Not particularly,” Brick answered. “And you’re still being a jerk, in case you didn’t know?”

  He slipped the rope free and held the craft steady enough for them to step in. Jagger took the far seat, leaving the one facing the direction they were heading in for Brick, and heaped their possessions in the middle, between the seats.

  Brick pushed the boat from the side and the water carried it, and them away. Soon, the waterway widened, and the walls and roof glowed with more lights, white and occasionally rose-pink, illuminating their journey. Colored gleams shone in the water too, maybe phosphorus fishes.

  It was almost dreamlike, with the swish of the water and the gentle motion of the boat relaxing, nothing like their wilder ride down the Welling River. Jagger took the wooden instrument Ash had given them. It looked like a guitara, with twelve strings set into two rows of six, and he plucked them, tentatively at first, then tried a few major, then some minor chords.

  “You play?” Brick asked, amazed.

  “I learned,” Jagger corrected, his lips lifting in a wry smile. “But with me being so ancient, it was many moons ago.”

  “Oh, you play all right!” Brick told him a minute or two later, listening to the tune Jagger plucked from the instrument. It was mournful with a sense of loss and feel of resignation to fate shot through it, and Brick couldn’t help thinking it was Jagger’s own feelings on his situation seeping from his soul. He bent his head so he could wipe a tear from his eye unseen.

  The music changed, Jagger striking a lively tune, one Brick immediately clapped along to. The look in Jagger’s eyes, as he rested his gaze upon Brick, said he’d caught how melancholy his first one had rendered Brick, and had switched accordingly. It also made Brick admit to himself that he was falling in love with Jagger.

  Which made him all the more determined to win the elf his freedom from the stupid prophecy and its horrible obligations. That wasn’t the only thing spurring him on. Brick was beginning to suspect something was happening between them that would account for the odd things he’d noticed, like Jagger acquiring wyvern characteristics, and Brick being able to tolerate the presence of magic. No. Interspecies bonding is very rare. Almost unheard of. He tried his best to push the B word, and that he’d met Jagger while celebrating the interspecies bonding of two other races, to the back of his mind.

  The tunnel widened and broadened into a round cave, and Jagger stopped playing to stare at the long tapering wisps hanging down from the ceiling of the grotto like bunting. He touched one as they passed.

  “Rock,” he said.

  “And these.” Brick scraped a finger across a column growing up from the floor and sticking out of the water in a twist. There were several and they looked like teeth, giving the circular cave the look of a mouth. “We’d better get out?”

  They didn’t have much choice. Steering between the spikes hanging down and the points sticking up would take a lot of effort and skill, and there didn’t look anywhere to sail beyond this basin. Jagger got out first, and Brick passed him his bag. He tied the boat up to an iron semi-circle fixed into the wall but wondered if it would float back the way it had come, all on its own.

  “I’ll be glad to be in the open,” Jagger admitted. He stamped a foot. “This feels grassy. It can’t be far to the outside.”

  Walking ahead of him, Brick found it was springy underfoot. He almost tripped over a root and tsked at his clumsiness. He hadn’t been that inept around Jagger so far, but maybe his luck was wearing thin. He stumbled again and shook out his foot.

  He put it down and tried to bring the other up, only to find a stem around his ankle. Brick twisted his foot to get it out, but it pulled tight, and another shot from the ground and enmeshed his other foot. “This is crazy!” he exclaimed. “Jagger—”

  “A little help here?” Jagger called and Brick, not liking the note in his voice, turned…to see him trapped, roots springing from the ground and ensnaring him from his feet to his knees.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Before Brick could tell Jagger he was coming, and to stay where he was—and then smack himself on his forehead for his stupidity—the stems around his own ankles tightened and lengthened, becoming as thick and long as vines. Maybe they were vines. All Brick knew was that them on him was a horrible, icky feeling, like damp, sharp-smelling snakes not just circling him but slithering up him. It didn’t take even half a minute for him to be as immobilized as Jagger was.

  “Keep your arms free!” Jagger shouted, vined up to his hips now and struggling to get at his sword. “Do you have a blade?”

  Brick didn’t, but he had talons. “Apologies in advance!” he shouted to Jagger, just in case he farted or burped in trying to partially shift. But there was no loud parp and no noxious stench, just the ominous rustle of the climbers and shoots slinking from the ground and onto them, and the only smell was the almost musky one of the vegetation. And claws. There were claws. He had claws!

  He lunged down and almost overbalanced, saving himself by slapping a hand on a bumpy stone wall at the side of him, scraping his knuckles on its fissures. Fingerlings of tree roots protruded from the wall and grew as he watched, elongating and joining in with the snares coming from the ground to trap him.

  “That’s not fair—two against one,” he railed at the cave. “Well, three—” He’d spotted similar vines swinging down from the roof, snaking in to join the party. He ducked out of the way of one, so it smacked against the wall instead. Brick started struggling in earnest, using both hands to slash through the bonds that were imprisoning him and trying to get him in a full-body lock.

  Broad, heavy creepers dropped from above to lash him, the whippings stinging and hurting.

  “You okay?” he gasped to Jagger.

  “Oh, wonderful,” came back to him through gritted teeth. “Just be glad you have short hair…”

  The glance Brick could spare showed him that tendrils, stronger than they looked, had shot from the walls and wrapped around locks of Jagger’s hair, yanking his head from side to side and back and forth. With those rocking him and other shoots slapping his face, he was having difficulty in using his sword.

  Not that it could have been easy under any circumstances to use a sword to cut away tight bindings from his body, without nicking himself on the blade. Unless he’d had lots of practice at it? Brick wrenched his mind from wandering to just what kind of practice Jagger might have had at that, and what kinds of bonds and who’d tied them. He had enough real, urgent problems of his own to deal with at the moment. Like the vine ribboning itself around his face, blocking his nose so he could hardly breathe and binding his eyes to blind him.

  Wet trailing down his cheek as he tried to slash through that constraint told him he’d cut his own skin. Worse—a clang then clatter of steel on stone told him Jagger had lost his grip on his sword. “You still okay?” he called.

  Silence as the only answer had his heart stopping. Using all his strength, he wrenched his head free of the fronds imprisoning it enough to see Jagger. He was alive, his face wreathed by shoots, preventing him speaking. Another sped around his eyes, cutting off his sight. Then, as if in prearranged synchrony, creepers caught at Jagger’s and Brick’s arms and pulled them away from their bodies, making any attempt at peeling off their bonds impossible.

  Vines as thick as leather belts sprang down from the ceiling in a grim mockery of party decorations. A memory of the bunting and flags decking out the meadow and the palace grounds for the royal nuptials hit Brick and for the first time since he’d started on this stupid adventure, he wondered if he’d ever see his family again.

  “Get off me!” Brick shouted against the gag muffling him when the roof creepers caught him and raised him. Them—Jagger was being treated similarly, hoisted high as if he were an acrobat about to spiral down from a vaulted ceiling on a golden ribbon at some fancy dinner. The whip-cracking of hanging tendrils up ahead gave Brick an inkling of what was about to happen. He struggled, but it made absolutely no difference—he was tossed from one set of vines to another and another down the length of the cave.

  Some of them seemed to have a sense of humor—they rolled him up, as though he were sausage meat in a cabbage leaf, to be baked in the oven, for the fronds they threw him to then unroll. His head span and he retched, glad his stomach didn’t have enough in it to bring up.

  Make it stop! he silently implored whatever gods were listening, and whichever were in charge of caves. Or people being held captive by vegetation in caves. I’ll be good, I swear. I’ll listen when Father is droning on and on about which kingdoms we should travel to or have visiting us, or when Gules is telling us the national dishes and drinks of those places, or Mother’s boasting about her friendships with all the VIPs in each one. I promise!

  Maybe someone heard him, because the last throw tossed them from the large cave and into a smaller one—and more exactly into side-by-side cages hanging from the roof of the cave. The small pens rocked wildly with the momentum of he and Jagger being thrown into them, and gradually swung themselves to a stop. The vegetation whipped itself away from their bodies, slapping and flicking as it did so, and they were alone, in a horrible empty silence.

  “Like birds!” His head still spinning and his stomach still roiling, Brick grabbed the bars and tried to bend them. They felt damp and organic in his hands, not inviting to the touch, but he forced himself. He couldn’t force the slats though—they didn’t budge an inch.

  “Forgive me if I don’t feel like singing.” Jagger got to his knees and cast a look down at the ground below.

  It wasn’t that far—they could probably jump. Or he could shift. He was a lot stronger in wyvern form too. Strong enough to rip through these stupid cages. Blood spurted from his nose as he tried to change. Damn. “I’ll keep trying,” he promised, holding his forearm over his nose.

  “No. Don’t. At least not yet.” Jagger looked a mess, his curls tangled and wild, his clothes disarrayed. Brick must look worse. “What did that dryad say? I couldn’t catch it all?”

  “Ash? Oh.” Brick understood. “Beware the Lord of All Roots, also known as the Taproot. Ah. We didn’t exactly.”

  “And got caught in his snare. Wasn’t there something else?”

  “I don’t remember,” Brick lied. He risked a tiny peep at the other cages in the room. They were all empty…of anything living. Small heaps in some might have once been people but were now bones. “He’ll want to encase you in his snare and keep you down there forever.”

  “Ever get the feeling someone or something doesn’t want us to reach the Horrorcle?” Jagger asked suddenly.

  “What? You think forces are trying to stop our quest?” Brick hardly imagined so. “What’s so important about us?”

  “Maybe not us, but the foretelling?”

  Brick tried to make his brain work on that, to examine it from all angles and see all the consequences, like his parents or Gules or even Milly did with situations. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted. It sunk in how dire their situation was. He changed position, and it rocked the cage. A few more pushes and he swung near Jagger.

  “Catch me?” he asked, and Jagger stuck out a hand and grasped Brick’s fingers. “I’m sorry.”

  Jagger’s forehead creased. “For what?”

  For so much. Jagger should be out in the world, striding through the palace or carousing in the tavern, larger than life and twice as much fun. Instead, meeting Brick had taken all that away. “If it weren’t for me…”

  “Hey!” Jagger squeezed his fingers hard. “You’re talking like this is it.”

  Brick…kind of thought it was. He’d met the man he loved, the man he wanted, the man whose life he was predestined to ruin thanks to some stupid old prophecy. And because he’d been running away from that, here they were. There was so much he wanted to tell Jagger. His feelings for him, for one thing. That the bonding process had started—he kind of thought—for another. No, that last would make him mad. No point issuing bad news under the circumstances. He tried to speak but it came out as a slight shrug.

  “Look at me.”

  He made himself obey Jagger.

  “If it is, then I’m glad I’m facing it with you,” Jagger declared.

  “Really? But I’m useless!” Brick blotted a tear from his eye. “I’m clumsy, I get things wrong, I’m too big—”

  “Damn right you’re big.” Jagger’s smile was a gleam of starlight in the gloom. “I— What’s that?”

  “A noise.” Brick had no idea how to describe it. He couldn’t see anything, but the air felt like it did just before Sylph appeared. It was too much to hope that the Ruby Throne’s air elemental servant was popping in to rescue them.

  “And noises are never good.” Jagger readied himself. “I’m guessing I don’t have time now to go into all the things about you I want to mention, so we’ll keep that for later, okay?”

  “Okay,” Brick agreed. Curiosity as to what Jagger would mention gnawed at him. “Erm, good things, right?”

  Jagger blew out an exasperated breath. “Yes!”

  The air in the cave grew cold and a figure began to manifest.

  “The Lord of All Roots, I presume?” Jagger asked.

  “Also known as the Taproot,” Brick added.

  The figure should have looked comical, like someone decked out for a Maying, but the shaggy green man exuded an air of menace. His face was almost flat, not really distinguishable from the leaves of the fronds or roots making it, and branches sprouted from it. Brick was kneeling, still trying to break apart the bars keeping him a prisoner, when the cages holding him and Jagger vanished, and they fell.

  He’d been right in that it wasn’t far, but it was a distance enough and the cave floor hard enough to whump the breath from him.

  “I am so tired of falling from things!” Jagger exclaimed.

  “I’ve fallen from more than you have,” Brick protested. “I fell from the window in the tavern, and you didn’t.”

  It seemed Jagger didn’t like being contradicted. He got to his feet and glared at Brick. “I fell from your back when you shifted in mid-air.”

  “We both fell from the sky! That puts us the same!” Brick wanted to stomp his foot like Scarlet did.

  The Taproot shook a little, as though their bickering annoyed him.

  “We’ll call it even?” Jagger suggested, his hand on his sword.

  Brick gripped the javelin. The Taproot thickened and the air in the cave thinned. The light dimmed everywhere but the figure, as if he were absorbing it. Brick coughed, his throat dry. No—closing. Well, something was making it hard to breathe. He clawed at his throat as though that would help. Next to him, Jagger was on his knees, pulling and snatching at his neck as if trying to loosen invisible bindings choking him.

  “Oxygen?” Brisk gasped. “Isit tak’ our oxygen?”

  “Don’t want to find out,” Jagger wheezed.

  Living things needed air, and that included plants and…flowers. Brick remembered the small pointy ones he’d felt impelled to pick. Struggling, he got them free of his pocket. He hadn’t looked at them since he’d taken them and even in this dim greenish light, they glowed the bright pixie-pink he’d imagined they would. Their stems had interlaced, making them into a posy.