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“What?” Jules stared at the troll king. “You’ve got the wrong person! I can’t do that.”

“Well, if you can’t, you can’t. Not a problem.”

“Oh. Then if I could please go home and—”

“You’ll just die in the morning, that’s all.”

The maid and the blade had made a terrible mistake, which was perhaps predictable considering the duchess’s hiring qualifications. Jules looked around for a means of escape, but none was evident. The box had been transported to a vast cavern. Dim, flickering firelight reflected off crystals embedded in the walls. All around, smaller trolls with luxurious locks of pink, blue, or orange hair toiled away at incomprehensible tasks. Blind white cave toads hopped around their feet. Occasionally, a troll would reach down to stroke one like a beloved pet.

“Wouldn’t you rather have some pretty gemstones?” Jules offered. “I could…I could probably find some for you.”

“No, no.” The troll king shook his head. “I was promised a prisoner who could spin straw into gold, and I will accept nothing else. Besides, gemstones have seriously depreciated in value lately. Some duchess in southern Ecossia has been flooding the market.”

Although Jules had foreseen the possibility of being transported in a magic box to a kingdom of trolls in the western isles, and had together with Lulach and Yudit concocted a plan, it was highly unlikely that rescue would come soon enough to matter. By the time they figured out where Jules was, it would be too late. The situation was direr than it had ever been.

And it was about to get very, very weird.

Chapter Seventeen

The Wasteland

The argument began on our last night in the swamp.

The genius’s map guided us through the safest possible route, but it still wasn’t very safe. Before we got out, we had to fight off a bog wight, a crocodaemon, and a rather large rabbit. We were better armed, at least, now that I had the Spear That Probably Won’t Break. But the journey was arduous and exhausting nonetheless.

And I’d been growing concerned about what would happen when we reached the Red Empire. We were getting there much later than we’d planned, and there was a good chance we’d miss our meeting with Lulach and be left with no way to convey any information to Queen Jacqueline and King Gervase. Or Gruoch. When she didn’t hear from us, would Lulach be commanded to join the Red Emperor’s army in our place? All our efforts to protect him could be ruined.

Even if we did figure out how to get in touch with them, would we have anything useful to say? I’d begun this venture with every confidence in my abilities as a spy. The nearer we came to leaving the swamp, the less certain I was. I needed to come up with a clever plan to get myself well placed; it wasn’t like I would arrive at the Crimson City and immediately be brought before the emperor himself, who would make me a trusted officer on the spot. No brilliant ideas were coming to mind. Why had I ever thought I’d be good at espionage? I couldn’t even defend myself against daffodils without help.

When we bedded down on that final night in the Swamp of Monsters, our campsite was, as usual, wet and uncomfortable. Water seeped through the hanging moss and oozed down the back of my neck no matter where I sat. Sunbeam and Stinky had already fallen asleep, and the stallion’s resounding snores filled the air with the fetid odor of his breath, which smelled even worse than the swamp itself.

I was not in the mood to listen to poetry.

“Then into my humble garret / Flew a large, ungainly parrot,” Yudit recited. “And that parrot without merit ate a carrot on my floor. / ‘Spirit!’ shrieked I—did I dare it? / With more claret I could bear it. / ‘All my gold you will inherit, every karat, if you swear it! / Swear it, parrot! Tell me whereat I will stare at my Lenore!’ / Squawked the parrot, ‘Neverm—’”

“What verse is this?” I asked.

Yudit counted silently in her head. “The twenty-ninth.”

I would have guessed the hundredth, but I took her word for it. “So this poem starts with twenty-eight verses about someone sitting in a chair wondering about a noise outside.”

“Going mad with love and longing,” she said. “I’m building dramatic tension.”

I slapped at a mosquito the size of my thumb, and missed. It fluttered up to whine angrily in my ear.

“Then the noise turns out to be a parrot.”

“Right. And the rest of the poem is the person yelling at the parrot.”

“Which goes on for how long?”

“About fifty more verses.”

“Fifty?”

“Dramatic tension is important.”

I aimed for the mosquito again, and clouted myself on the side of the head. I was anxious, irritable, plastered with mud, spattered with crocodaemon blood, aching from rabbit bites, and now my head hurt. My long-fraying patience snapped. “You know what? I don’t care if it’s only one more verse. I don’t want to hear it.”