"Very. I understand they're easy to enchant compared to, say, chairs with straps to hold you in nice and snug, but there are actually staggering numbers of broom accidents if you look at the per hatpoint statistics." Pause. "That being the witch-only term for per capita."

Tony cracks up.

Bella taps the point of her hat and smirks. "I didn't make it up, but I will take full responsibility for propagating the term."

She giggles some more.

"We're coming up on the lime-flavored river," Bella observes after they've been walking for about half an hour. "There's a bridge, but it doesn't hold still, so I can't tell you how to intercept it."

"I feel confident that we can track it down."

"Quite probably!" agrees Bella. "We should also watch out for giant watersnakes. They can't get at the bridge itself, but they can and do hang out on the banks of the river."

"I am duly warned."

"I suppose you must have already crossed this river to find my house, sorry. Unless you went far enough north first to go around the Limespring."

"I don't remember a lime-flavoured river," Tony contributes, "but I also haven't tasted every single river we've crossed, so..."

"It flows from a limestone spring," explains Bella. "Only logical. I get most of my drinking water from a stream that branches off from the river. I made the limeade with it."

"Limestone spring," she laughs. "Gotcha."

Presently they come to the river. No bridge is immediately in evidence. Bella picks a direction to look in and goes left, peering ahead for evidence of the bridge.

Sherlock takes right, for efficiency.

The snake makes a godawful noise and thrashes a coil around Sherlock, and Bella drags herself away from it. "Mulagarby-rothwick-ulfrancian-shlerastov," she gasps, and her legs recover somewhat from the teeth wounds and she can sit up and scramble a little more effectively. She's lost a moccasin down the snake's gullet.

All parts of Bella now being out of the snake, Sherlock draws her sword and cuts it in half.

"You are welcome," says Sherlock.

Tony arrives, a little out of breath.

"Rothwick-rothwick-rothwick," Bella mutters, holding her hands together until her legs stop bleeding, and then she does her cleaning spell again, and then she says, "Well, I'm down a shoe, I'm not sorting through snake guts for that thing, I'd sooner walk barefoot."

"I am sorry to report we haven't any spares," says Sherlock.

"Barefoot it is," says Bella, peeling off the other moccasin. "They only work as a pair. I'll make more when I get home, I suppose. Eugh. Bad watersnake. Okay, what do I have to get past the rest of them, what do I have... Sherlock, are you okay? Did it get a chance to squeeze you at all?"

"Not even a dent," she reports serenely.