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I’d hoped the genius himself would be in; it would’ve given us a better chance of getting a friendly greeting. But we’d learned something, at least—if he was hunting down the Wild Freemartin of the Swamp, that almost certainly meant Ilyana had been recaptured. We hadn’t come here pointlessly.

After the first rescue attempt, Ilyana’s distinctive scent had been her undoing. This time, we had the means to prevent that from happening. Neither bird nor beast would be able to follow our tracks.

We just had to find her. And set her free.

“Do you mind if we come in and wait for him, then?” I asked. “He said we could stay a few more nights, if we liked.”

It was sort of true. He’d asked us to hang around longer at the end of the last visit. I supposed the truth of it didn’t much matter. The claim that he’d said it would either be enough to make his mother pause before eating us, or it wouldn’t.

There was a long and uncomfortable interval before she answered. I made an attempt at a winning smile. The meadowsweet spreading out from around my boots would soon be noticeable enough to raise awkward questions.

“All right,” she said at last, stepping back and ushering us in. “I’ll have a room prepared.”

“Wonderful!” Alexandra cried as we entered the perilous lair of the genii. “So, what’s for supper?”

Chapter Twenty-Three

The Princess Heist

“Why did she call them egg creams,” Alexandra asked, “if they didn’t have eggs or cream in them?”

“I don’t know,” I said, pacing back and forth across our chamber. The supper we’d been served had been as confusing as the previous one, featuring something the genius’s mother declared to be a rabbit (it was cheese on toast, containing no rabbit whatsoever), spotted dick (which, much to my relief, turned out to be some kind of fruitcake), and the aforementioned egg creams. I ate sparingly. Alexandra had second helpings of everything. Fortunately, she was done before flowers started to sprout from the brasswork table.

After that, we’d retired to our room. We’d been waiting there for hours, delaying until we were confident the genius’s mother had fallen asleep. Daffodils were spreading across the metal floor. The bed was a mass of scarlet poppies. They actually looked very comfortable, but I knew if I lay down on them, I would fall asleep immediately.

I could barely keep my eyes open. I chewed tea leaf after tea leaf, without much effect. Activity had helped me stay awake, and now that we were forced to do nothing, only stubbornness was keeping me upright. There was a fuzzy blackness at the edges of my vision that wouldn’t go away. Sometimes a minute or two would pass unnoticed while I swayed where I stood, only snapping out of it when Alexandra asked if I was all right.

She flopped back on the poppies and yawned hugely, which made me yawn, which made her yawn again, which made me yawn again. I considered screaming at her, but having a second sister not speaking to me would be counterproductive.

“How much longer should we wait?” she asked.

“Let’s go now.” Surely it was late enough. The genius’s mother had to be tucked in somewhere with her head resting on an asbestos pillow.

Besides, after another ten minutes of doing nothing, I would have toppled over.

We snuck through the strange halls of the palace, lit by those ceaseless, smokeless torches. I staggered clumsily down oversized spiral staircases and across mystifying chambers. Alexandra gazed about, wide-eyed, as we crossed a catwalk through a room whose walls, floor, and ceiling pulsed with blue-green light in time to our heartbeats.

“You’re certain that none of these rooms are deathtraps?” my sister asked. “Why build a place like this if you don’t want it to murder anyone?”

“I’ve got no idea. Nothing killed me last time, though.”

“Huh. Weird.”

We went to the dungeon first, but it was empty. The dirt had been cleared away, and the hole in the wall covered with a large sheet of plywood. I hadn’t really expected to find Ilyana here; there’d been no trace of her scent as we approached. We still had to check, just in case.

“All right,” I said. “If you don’t stash your prisoner in a dungeon, where do you put them?”

“Up in one of the towers?” Alexandra suggested.

Weary reluctance made my feet drag at the thought of all those three-foot-high stairs, but she was right. I nodded, and up we went.

We were climbing our fourth stairwell of the night when I caught Ilyana’s scent. Like a flower I couldn’t name, even more alluring than I remembered.

“She’s here,” I said, picking up my pace.

It wasn’t difficult to figure out where she was. A large hasp had been bolted to a door at the top of the stairs, with a brass padlock holding it shut. It was the only locked door we’d come across except for the dungeon cells. Her scent was strong outside it, leaking through the edges of the frame.

Alexandra ran her fingers over the padlock, examining it with a connoisseur’s eye. “Hmm. I’m going to say…three-fifths copper and two-fifths zinc, with notes of lead in the bouquet. That’ll be a chewy, full-bodied variety.”