Mistrals Kiss   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

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It didn’t spread over everything like the herbs on the island. The grass sprang up in a path where we ran, and nowhere else.

“Try something else,” Rhys said from the other side of us. He was shorter than the rest, and his voice showed the strain of keeping up with the longer legs of the others.

What could I call from the ground, from the grass, that could save us? I thought it and had my answer; one of the most magical of plants. “Give me a field of four-leaf clover.” The grass spread out before us wide and smooth, then white clover began to grow through the grass, until we stood in the center of a field of it. White globes of sweet-smelling flowers burst like stars across all the green.

Doyle slowed, and the others slowed with him. Rhys said it out loud: “Not bad, not bad at all. You think well in a crisis.”

“The wild hunt is of ill intent,” Frost said. “They should be stopped at the field’s edge.”

Doyle sat me down amid the ankle-high clover. The plants brushed against me as if they were little hands. “Four-leaf clover is the most powerful plant protection from faerie,” I said.

“Aye,” Abe said, “but some of what is coming does not have to walk, Princess.”

“Make us a roof, Meredith,” Doyle said.

“A roof of what?”

“Rowan, thorn, and ash,” Frost said.

“Of course,” I said. Anywhere that the three trees grew together was a magical place — a place both of protection and of a weakening in the reality between worlds. Such a place would save you from faerie, or call faerie to you — like so many things with us, there was never a yes, or no, but a yes, a no, and a sometimes.

The earth underneath us trembled as if an earthquake were coming; then the trees blasted out of the ground, showering rock and dirt and clover over us. The trees stretched to the sky with a sound like a storm or a train, barreling down, but with a scream of wood to it. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. While the trees knit themselves together above our heads, I looked back. I could not help it.

Sholto was covered in the nightmares he had called. Tentacles writhed; bits and pieces that I had no word for flowed and struck. There were teeth everywhere, as if wind could be made solid and given fangs to tear and destroy. Sholto’s uncles attacked the creatures with blade and muscle, but they were losing. Losing, but fighting hard enough that they had given us time to make our sanctuary.

Frost moved to stand so that his broad chest blocked my view. “It is not good to gaze too long upon them.

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