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Ilyana kept her gaze on the cards, not looking up at me. “It was three fairies. I didn’t meet them, exactly. They came to my naming ceremony when I was a week old. I’m pretty sure the stronger ones get sent out for princesses.”

“You’re a princess?”

“I would be, if the Red Empire hadn’t conquered Moersbad. Officially, I’m the daughter of the hereditary administrator. I guess it was close enough to count.”

I knew a little about Moersbad; it wasn’t that far from Tailliz. It was a marshy Red Empire province lying on the northeastern edge of the Swamp of Monsters. That explained a great deal about how she’d come to end up here. A swamp-dwelling genius who wanted to capture the world’s most beautiful woman only had to lurk at the border until she left the safety of her castle.

Something still didn’t quite make sense to me, though. “Surely even princesses don’t usually get gifts like that,” I said. “There are plenty of princesses, but there aren’t dozens of Most Beautiful Women running around.”

“How would that even work?”

“All right, point taken. But is there another Most Adjectival Anybody? Of any kind? Most Eloquent, Most Sincere, Most, um…Tidy?”

Her eyes flicked up to meet mine again. “Your gifts are unusual, too.”

“They are?” The rest of my family had gotten some strange ones when the fairy ran out of ideas, but the fae folk were fond of pretty things. Flowers and jewels were in keeping with expectations, although the wording was usually better.

“Your powers,” she said evenly, “aren’t the kind that usually get given to boys.”

I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing came out. I was caught somewhere between denial, admission, misdirection, and explanation of something I wasn’t entirely sure I understood myself.

Fortunately, I was saved from making an immediate reply when the top of the back wall crumpled. The noise drowned out all possibility of conversation. I hoped the genius and his mother were sleeping too far away to hear. It sounded like a gathering of blacksmiths hammering iron rods into hoops.

Ilyana twisted around to look. Trickles of dirt rained down through the widening gap. “I don’t see you spitting out any rubies,” she said when the noise died down, “so you’re doing that with flowers?”

“Flowers can do a lot, if you give them time,” I answered. “It won’t be long now. We can probably play one more round.” I flipped over the trump card. Hearts.

Roots don’t actually have a lot of penetrative power. A sheer wall of metal or stone will stop them completely. But they do have one impressive trick. If they can find the tiniest crack in that wall—such as, for example, the riveted seam between two brass plates—they can wedge themselves in and expand. The crack will grow larger, and more roots will work their way in. And then more. Over a long enough interval, they can tear apart the strongest of barriers.

Normally, that interval can be measured in months or years. When those roots happen to belong to flowering trees, however, I can speed up the process considerably.

I cast around for a new topic of conversation as we traded the first few tricks back and forth. Something that wouldn’t lead her so perilously close to penetrating my masculine disguise. Unlike the gems, that wasn’t my secret alone. I was on a spy mission, and it would be a very bad idea to break my cover on a whim. More lives than my own might depend on it.

“Why won’t he get a soul?” I asked.

“Sorry?” She put down a Royal Marriage and added forty points to her score.

“The genius. You said you’d made sure of it. How?”

“Well, I don’t know if he’ll never manage it, but it won’t be by marrying me. Moersbadian law allows me to demand a betrothal gift. So I’ve sworn that I’ll never wed until someone brings me the Wild Freemartin of the Swamp.”

“The what? What’s a freemartin?”

“A female bull.”

I tried to parse that. “You mean a cow?”

“No, a female bull. Anyway, the Wild Freemartin is a powerful magical animal. No one’s ever been able to capture her. Even if that cork-stacker pulls it off, well…there’ll be a surprise waiting for him, let’s leave it at that.” She flashed a grin that showed her teeth (straight and even, then gapped in the middle, and then, rather to my surprise, filed to sharp points) and took three quick tricks in a row.

The far wall produced another earsplitting metallic shriek. Dozens of roots burst through the opening, lengthening and thickening as we watched. The trickles of dirt grew into streams.

There couldn’t be much left holding the brass plate in place. “You might want to watch out for—”

The rest of the wall collapsed. An avalanche of earth and mud poured into the cell. Ilyana was slammed against the bars, then buried beneath the landslide. I leapt away as it surged through the bars into the hallway, piling up higher than my head.

“Ilyana?” I called out. “Ilyana!” I’d told her it would be safe. I’d been wrong. Very wrong.

I started digging, throwing handfuls aside. Pointlessly. How would I get through the bars? Marsh marigolds and swamp lilies sprang out of the loose soil as I scooped it away.