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And he did, just about the time that the current portal let out, leaving him looking around wildly for the next, but finding none.

“What happened?” he asked Gillian breathlessly as they flew through a moonlit night.

“Never mind that!” Rilda said, coming up alongside. And sending a spell at the baby that did nothing except bounce off and hit Kit, making him woozy.

“What are you doing?” Gillian asked her, as several more spells followed the first in quick succession, one ricocheting randomly but the other two hitting Kit. And causing him to fall off the staff onto a grassy hillside.

“That’s not fair!” the young woman said. “What is she doing?”

“I believe she is attempting to make the dragon let go,” his Lady murmured. “But the child’s skin appears to be quite good at repelling spells.”

“Well, she needs to stop it. He can’t fly like that!”

Or crawl, Kit thought, trying to focus his attention but finding it rough going. His eyes kept crossing and his limbs didn’t seem to work. And that was a problem, that was a big problem, unless Rilda closed the damned portal behind them, which she seemed in no hurry to do.

“Let go!” she was panting, having hopped off her broom and grabbed the fat babe by its withers. Kit vaguely understood that she was attempting to pry it off manually, but only succeeded in ripping a claw out of his flesh—with some of the flesh still attached.

“You’re hurting him!” Gillian said, hitting the ground now, too.

“He’s going to hurt a lot more if we don’t separate them,” Rilda wheezed. “My girls can only slow that thing down so much.”

“What girls? What have you done?” Gillian demanded, but she did start trying to pry Kit and the babe apart.

Which only made the child hold on tighter, as it didn’t understand that they were attempting to help it.

“Members of the Amsterdam coven. They’re the next stop on the list.”

“What list? What are you—”

“Do ye think ye’re the only one trying to help these days?” Rilda panted. “We know what ye’ve been doing, girl, and allowed it to continue as it gave the Circle something to watch besides us. They’ve become so obsessed with you that they’ve overlooked what we’ve been up to—”

“And what would that be, exactly?”

“What you just saw. The fey have been helping us to build a web of portals linking covens across a dozen lands. We started even before the Armada, although there was nothing completed that early. More’s the pity, or else we’d have called on our sisters abroad to come help us!

“But we learned from that mistake, and are bringing in more areas every year, along with some in Faerie where we can trade and keep up the old alliance. My alehouse is one; ye’ve just seen some of the others.” She looked up, her eyes savage. “We don’t fight alone anymore.”

“I thought you said you were for peace!”

“Aye, but there’s no going back now. No making allies of the Circle when there’s this much bad blood between us. We have to hide away, fight when we must, but disappear as much as we can. T’is the only way to protect what we have left.”

“And how do we protect him?” Gillian said, because nothing they did was helping Kit, who felt like he had been permanently fused with the babe, to the point that he didn’t know where its body ended and his began.

“We don’t. Leave him—”

“I won’t!”

“You must! We have a fight to get back to! I have to think of my people—”

“Then think of them,” Gillian said furiously. “But I’m not going without—”

Rilda said a bad word, and then glared at her friend. “Ye always were stubborn as the day is long! Very well, the password is Tremolina. Get back into the web and find a place to hide—”

But there was no time for hiding. Whatever the coven witches had been doing to slow down the mother dragon had not been enough. The huge creature erupted out of the portal, with enough force that it shredded the sides and collapsed the doorway. And gave a bellow that sent a mass of yellow leaves swirling.

Kit belatedly realized that they were back in Faerie, right beside the little brook where he’d first come in. And that Rilda must have returned them there so that they could pry off the babe and make a run for the alehouse, only they hadn’t had enough time. And now they were out of it completely.

“Go!” he told Gillian, shoving her away. “Get out of here”