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Now, she let her whole body relax, sinking into the damp chill of the stony ground without any apparent care in the world. She was clearly no threat to this illusion. It didn’t have to fight to hold her. She wasn’t even struggling against it! She was just being herself, silly and pretty and thoughtless, certainly not worth worrying about …

And as she felt the first soft, questing tendrils of vegetation slip across her toes, a dull roar began in the distance. It thundered into raucously approving cheers all around her as the fresh air warmed her skin once again. Lorelei tipped her head back to feel the true sunlight on her face, and the welcome scent of fresh green life filled her senses, that dank, chilly illusion shattered by a force far more powerful than any individual fae: the land that sheltered all of them as Sylvana’s gift.

Thank you, Lorelei whispered with deep sincerity.

Then she sprang to her feet to rescue her infuriating prisoner.

At first, all she could see was the green field spread around her—far vaster, now, than the original clearing that had been crossed by every fae visitor before this tournament began. Now that the official games had started, that green area had been magically stretched and tugged in every direction until it spread, from each partnership’s point of view, all the way to each horizon, while the spectators looked down upon it with a telescopic focus from their distant, newly erected stands of living willow.

Lorelei’s first challenge had kept her trapped in one small section of that field; now, as she narrowed her eyes and looked again, more carefully, across that vast, seemingly empty area, her gaze snagged on a telltale blur of air only fifty feet away.

There!

She leapt forward, aiming herself at the spot where that translucent patch of air rippled above the grass so gently that she’d missed it in her first scan. Something was hidden behind that illusion—no, someone: Gerard, facing off against who-knew-what and fighting for his life without her.

Unacceptable. Lorelei wished with sudden, burning intensity that she had the wings of some of her mother’s other subjects—or that she’d at least thought to bring her gorgeous riding gryphon, Bluebell, to speed her way through the tournament. As it was, all she could do was sprint across the soft grass, powered by fury and an irrational, growing panic.

No one was allowed to kill the Golden Beacon on her watch!

… No one apart from her, obviously. But that was different.

This time, she didn’t pause to think through clever strategies or worry about magical conservation. She simply flung herself forward through that resistant magical barrier, refusing to allow it to stop her—

And as she broke through with a sparkling explosion of magic that blinded her for an instant, Gerard’s voice rapped out:

“Close your eyes!”

That dungeon-deep voice, in that tone of command, could have sent an armed battalion to its knees. Lorelei shut her eyes in immediate, uncharacteristic obedience.

An inhuman screech of rage sounded only two feet away. Gritting her teeth, she didn’t flinch. The sound was muffled an instant later, followed by a physical collision so close, it shifted the air against her skin.

Lorelei held perfectly still, with every muscle braced and every sense but her own cruelly denied vision flaring with agonizing awareness. Harsh pants of breath mingled nearby with thumps and snarls and something that sounded like a human grunt of pain.

Damn it, if he didn’t release that high-handed injunction soon…!

“Very well.” Gerard’s voice was ragged with breathlessness, but his tone was matter-of-fact. “You may open your eyes.”

“How very generous of you.” Dryly, she echoed his earlier words. However, they took on a different meaning as her eyelashes lifted and she finally absorbed the sight before her. “Oh, my.” Blinking, she fluttered a cloud of glitter into the air, hoping to distract him from the expression on her face.

Her strategy backfired as specks of rainbow glitter landed on one bare, muscled shoulder.

Lorelei choked back an involuntary whimper. Sylvana, save me!

This simply would not do. She was a scandalous rake of a queen, not some innocent to be gobsmacked. She’d seen plenty of handsome men’s naked bodies in her time …

And yet, to see General Gerard de Moireul himself—always so very proper and correct—standing unexpectedly shirtless before her now, gleaming with sweat, his lightly furred, broad chest rising and falling from his exertions above his belt-free woolen trousers, so tantalizingly close that she could easily—

No! Just in time, she yanked back her right hand, which had begun to lift of its own traitorous accord. Leave the pretty alone. Danger!

Gathering her wits, Lorelei raised one disdainful eyebrow and prayed he hadn’t noticed her gaping at him like a lovestruck fool. “Goodness, this really is my lucky day. Did you find it just too, too unbearably hot to remain clothed? It might earn us extra points in our challenge, but I should remind you, before you go any further with this delightful disrobing, that we do have an audience.”

The look he gave her in return was distinctly unimpressed. “Perhaps, Your Majesty, if you look down by your feet, you might spot the answer to your question.”

Ah. Yes, there was still a whole world around them, wasn’t there? Embarrassingly enough, she hadn’t noticed anything but him since her eyes had reopened. Now, she finally looked past that overwhelming, destabilizing, half-unwrapped temptation of a man …

And both of her eyebrows shot up as she took in the whole scene around them, from the narrow ravine that closed them between two tall and rocky cliff faces to the piled and curled-up mass of scaly brown-and-red muscle that lay sulking on the ground beside her, its big, lethal head covered in Gerard’s missing shirt, which was firmly secured there by his belt.

“A basilisk?” No wonder he’d warned her to close her eyes! Meeting that reptilian gaze would have frozen her into permanent stone. But …