“I don’t want to spoil it,” Adrian whispered back, sounding enormously pleased with himself. “Just stall for a few more minutes, and try to get him over the vine if you can.”
Bex was about to ask “What vine?” when she saw it. There, growing along the bottom of the white step the prince was standing on, was a tiny green tendril. It was no bigger than an electrical wire, but it’d somehow managed to grow all the way over the palace wall, across the empty plaza, and up the stairs without Bex—or seemingly anyone else—noticing. The vine got even longer as she watched, working its way along the inside corner of the step like water flowing down a crack, and suddenly, Bex was having a hard time keeping the smile off her face.
“The Eternal King must be pretty scared if he wants to have a civil discussion with the likes of me,” she said, striking a confident pose as she plunged Drox’s point into the stone at her feet. “I don’t mind listening to what you have to say, but I’m not doing it in there. If you want to talk, you’ll have to come down to me.”
“But the banquet table is all set,” the prince argued, waving at the lavish spread behind him. “And the light is strong in the plaza. This could take quite a while. Surely you’d rather sit in the shade?”
“I don’t need shade,” Bex said, crossing her arms stubbornly over her chest. “And I don’t want your fancy food either. I won’t draw arms if you don’t, but I’m not discussing adamn thing unless you’re man enough to come stand out here under the arrows with me.”
For the first time since the doors had opened, the prince’s dazzling smile slipped. He snatched it back into place a second later, reaching down to fill two golden cups with wine from the cut glass carafe before taking both in his hands.
“As you wish, honored queen,” he said as he carried the cups of wine down the steps where the vine was hidden. “Let it never be said that Gilgamesh’s household was inhospitable. Even the enemies of Heaven deserve respect and dignity, so if you will not come to me, I am glad to go to you if it lets us speak.”
“You’re speaking right now,” Bex pointed out, uncrossing her arms again in case she needed to grab her sword quickly. “But I suppose you can’t help it. Being a font of endless words seems to run in your family.”
Once again, the prince’s smile sagged a fraction, but he kept his composure as he strode down the final step into the main courtyard to offer Bex her wine cup.
She took it from him like she’d take a hissing viper. But while Bex had zero intention of actually drinking, the wine didn’t smell poisoned, which meant it wasn’t the threat.Thatwould be the prince, who was radiating malice like a furnace despite his sunny smile. Bex really hoped Adrian finished his plan soon, because whatever Gilgamesh was playing at with this fake peace offer, his son’s hatred for her was real and bone-deep.
Bex felt exactly the same way about him, except she didn’t bother with the fake smile. She held up her golden cup with an honest scowl and tossed it on the ground at the prince’s feet, splattering red wine all the way up his white silk trousers.
“That was uncalled-for,” the Prince of Fear said in a low, dangerous voice. “I know better than to expect grace from a demon, but I thought you’d at least respect the dignity of a gift offered in hospitality.”
“That’s just it,” Bex growled. “It’s not hospitality, because this isn’t Gilgamesh’s house. It’s ours.OurParadise thatyourfather stole. If you actually want peace, acknowledge that and leave, or we will throw you out.”
“I’d like to see you try,” the prince replied coldly, finally dropping the fake smile as he reached for his sword.
The moment his fingers touched it, terror like nothing Bex had ever felt seized her body. She’d seen no attack, but suddenly none of her muscles would obey her, and she wasn’t the only one. Bex couldn’t turn her head to look, but she knew from the instant deafening silence behind her that her army had also been struck. She could practically hear her demons holding their breath as the now-scowling prince stepped back.
“Open fire,” he ordered, giving Bex one last hateful look before a wave of scales—the same snakelike overlapping scales that fear demons used to cover their bodies, only in white instead of black—appeared to cover his face. They covered the rest of his body as well, protecting the Prince of Fear from head to toe as the ranks of golden constructs that had been standing motionless on the battlements this entire time finally loosed their bows.
The wave of arrows was so thick it blotted out even the ever-present light of Heaven. Bex could hear the lions roaring on the roof above, but she couldn’t see the white balls of fire through the wall of black-pointed sin-iron projectiles falling toward her head. The sight was even more terrifying than the prince. Him she could fight, but pinned by fear like she was right now, there was nothing Bex could do to block the avalanche of arrows before it landed on the demons behind her. Most of her army didn’t have armor, and the prince’s fear had frozen them so they couldn’t dodge. They were just standing in the middle of the street like target dummies. But before Bex could think ofsomething—anything—she could do to stop what was about to happen, a peal of thunder crashed through the empty sky.
The scale-covered prince looked up in surprise. Bex didn’t know if that weakened the fear he’d used to grab her or if the noise had simply shocked her out of its grip, but she was suddenly able to look up as well, watching with wide, terrified eyes as a sheet of blindingly bright blue-white lightning engulfed the entire wave of arrows flying at her head.
The torrent of electricity vaporized the wooden shafts in an instant. It couldn’t touch the sin-iron arrowheads, but without the shafts and fletching to make them fly true, they’d become little more than dangerous hail. Now that the prince’s paralyzing fear had broken, the demons were able to dodge the falling metal easily, freeing them to stare up in new horror at the giant shape that had appeared behind the lightning in the sky.
It was a skeletal hand. Not a human hand, but a huge reptilian claw the size of a minivan. It slashed through the air above Bex like a scythe, cutting the golden battlements off the towers and sending the war constructs that had been standing on them crashing to the ground. The clockwork archers were still falling when the lightning flashed again, lighting up the now midnight-dark sky to reveal the giant skeleton of a dragon.
It was almost as tall as the towers, a fleshless creation of bleached bones held together with ropes of flashing lightning. And standing on its back with her white hair flying behind her like a banshee’s was Adrian’s aunt Lydia, the Old Wife of the Bones.
“The ancient oaths have been invoked!” the old witch cried, her raspy voice ringing with so much magic, it made Bex’s ears bleed. “In return for eons of safe rest within the shelter of the Blackwood, I call upon the bones that slumber within the roots! Rise up, rage of the past! Rise and hunt again until all who threaten our coven are destroyed!”
The undead dragon roared beneath her feet and opened its skeletal jaw to shoot out a wave of crackling blue lightning that eclipsed and consumed the lion cannons’ barrage. It wasn’t until the deafening thunder shook the ground again, though, that Bex realized the bone dragon wasn’t the only thing in the sky. Through its empty wings, she could see hundreds, maybethousandsof smaller skeletal dragons diving at the castle like kamikaze fighters.
Each one was only about a tenth the size of the giant dragon Lydia was riding, but the blue lightning that held their bones together exploded when they hit, turning the falling dragons into bombs. They crashed into Gilgamesh’s towers like a barrage, shattering the elegant windows and blasting the war constructs into the air. The explosions weren’t strong enough to crack the towers themselves, but the golden battlements bolted to the outer walls were blown away in a cascade of deafening thunder and shattering bones.
The silence that followed was so deep, Bex worried her eardrums had shattered. Fortunately, that turned out not to be the case. Her hearing was perfectly fine. The suicide rain of falling dragons had simply stopped, giving way to the soft patter of raindrops as the black clouds—the only clouds she’d ever seen in Heaven’s sky—opened above the enormous circle of witches that was now floating above the palace courtyard on their brooms with Agatha in the center, standing on her broomstick like a conductor as she added her voice to her sister’s.
“The ancient oaths have been invoked,” she said, her calm, rich voice sweeping over the battlefield like a weather front. “In return for the life-pledge of every witch who serves the Cycles, I call upon our pact with the Great Blackwood. Rise up, sorrow of the present. Rise and wash away the enemy who hunts your children and burns your land.”
The rain pounded harder with every word, filling Gilgamesh’s formerly desert-dry Heaven with a flash flood of churning water that scoured the towers clean. It tore the battlements that had managed to survive the dragons’ attack straight out of the stone and washed the war constructs clean off their feet, sweeping them off into the empty city like golden trash caught in a flooding river.
Bex was still watching them float away in wonder when the scaled Prince of Fear suddenly lunged at her. A wave of paralyzing terror came with him, grabbing her body just like before, except this time it didn’t stick. This time was different, because this time, a witch was waiting right above her.
“The ancient oaths have been invoked,” Muriel said from where she was floating above Bex’s head on her broom like a petal in the pounding rain. “In return for heroism yet to be rendered, I call upon the best of all fates yet to be. Rise up, defenders of a brighter future. Rise and know that no malice of the enemy can touch you so long as the forest’s rain falls.”
The Old Wife of the Future’s words were softer than her sisters’, but Bex felt them to her bones, because they’d been spoken straight to her. As soon as the witch’s voice touched her ears, the prince’s paralyzing fear vanished. It must’ve been washed off her demons as well, because Bex’s army was suddenly roaring behind her, charging through the rain to tear apart the war constructs that were still trying to stand in the raging river the plaza had become.
