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“I’ll throw in the cards for free! Standard, euchre, pinochle, piquet, any kind of deck you want. All of them, even.” He was beginning to sound desperate. “And you shall be my guests! You’ll stay the night at my palace, and none there will do you harm!”

That was the most tempting offer he’d made so far. Drying off and getting a good night’s sleep—and perhaps a meal if our host was gracious—would do wonders for our chances of survival. I was still uncertain, though. Promises could be broken, and trust could be betrayed. You don’t grow up under the care of someone like Gruoch without learning that lesson. And he’d as much as admitted that he viewed people as tasty treats.

“Please!” the genius said. “I’m only here because I was trying to find a betrothal gift for my bride-to-be. Would you let me die and leave her bereft?”

Yudit sucked in a deep breath. Oh, hell. I knew what was coming.

She turned to me, her eyes as round as two full moons. “We have to save him,” she said. “He risked his life for love.”

My sister, the hopeless romantic.

“All right,” I sighed. “We’ll give it a try.” I’d never hear the end of it otherwise. I dug the rope out of Sunbeam’s saddlebag. If the genius tried to gobble us up once he was free, we’d just have to deal with it then.

But while my sister might be a romantic, there was at least a reasonable chance she’d recognized a kindred softhearted soul here. Someone who meant us no ill and just needed a hand.

“Thank you!” The genius had sunk in up to his armpits. “You won’t regret this!”

“I hope he’s telling the truth about that,” Sunbeam muttered.

“We’ll tie the ends to the horses,” I said, knotting the rope around Stinky’s chest. “Like a plough hitch. Then we’ll throw him the middle bit.”

When the rope was ready, we tossed the slack to the genius. Even with arms as long as an entire human body, he could barely reach it. He scrabbled at it with his fingertips until he was finally able to grab hold.

“On a count of three,” I said. “One, two, HEAVE!”

Yudit slapped Stinky on the flank and the horses strained forward. My sister and I fell in behind them and pulled, contributing whatever we could to the effort, which probably wasn’t much.

At first, nothing happened. Then, with a sound like someone slurping down a bowl of stew, the genius moved forward an inch. And then another. Soon he was moving more quickly. When he was halfway to safety, he dropped the rope so he could grab a pair of trees with his enormous hands. With a ferocious tug that made his biceps flex into two hillocks, he pulled himself the rest of the way free.

He rose to his feet, towering above us, covered in dripping muck from the chest down. He did have legs, as it turned out, not tentacles or howling wolves or anything similarly upsetting. A simple cloth wrap was tied around his waist, the color impossible to determine beneath all the sludge.

“I am grateful to you, my friends,” he said, clasping his hands together and bowing, the heat from the fire on his head warming our faces as he bent low. “Follow me back to my palace, where endless delights await you!”

He strode away. After a moment of hesitation, we trailed behind him. It looked like he wasn’t going to kill and eat us, at least not right away. Maybe there really was a palace of endless delights in our future.

“So, what’s your name, genius?” Sunbeam asked.

“Name?” He sounded puzzled.

“What should we call you?”

“Ah! You may refer to me as ‘the genius,’ ” said the genius.

There was solid ground beneath our feet as long as we followed his path. The genius hadn’t lied when he said he knew the swamp well. He walked so quickly that soon he pulled ahead and we had to chase after him.

He didn’t appear to be much concerned about being attacked by other monsters. And indeed, nothing burst from the trees to threaten us as long as he was nearby. I was fairly sure I glimpsed a skunk ape and a freshwater kelpie slinking off into the depths of the swamp as soon as they caught sight of him. That boded well if he was genuinely well-disposed toward us—and very, very poorly if he wasn’t.

Yudit jogged ahead to keep up with the genius’s enormous strides. Yellow flowers covered in fine, translucent hairs popped up in my footsteps until I caught up. The genius didn’t notice them, which was for the best. I’d rather keep any powers we had concealed until we had a better sense of how friendly he truly was.

“Is your fiancée another fire genius?” Yudit asked.

“What? Oh, no. She isn’t any kind of genius. She’s a human woman.”

The expression on Yudit’s face said she was making a mental readjustment. I was having trouble picturing how that would work myself.

My sister tried again. “You must love her very much to brave such danger for her.”

The genius shrugged. “She’s all right.”