There was nothing Drox could say to that. Even if he’d had something, Bex didn’t have time to listen. She’d already launched into her next attack, ignoring the sword flying at her stomach as she leaped into the air to bring Drox’s enormous blade down on the Crown Prince like a guillotine.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Adrian had never been so scared in his life, which was saying something, considering the past six months. He thought he’d become hardened to fear by this point, but there was something uniquely terrifying about seeing Bex—the fastest, strongest, most unbeatable person he’d ever met—being forced back by a prince who moved faster than lightning and cut through anything he touched without breaking a sweat.
Even thinking about it felt like a betrayal, but Adrian was pretty sure the Crown Prince was better than Bex. Add in his unbeatable sword that could cut through Drox’s bladeandslice her fire out of the air, and it was no wonder that there was now a pit where Adrian’s stomach used to be. The only good thing he could say about the situation was that at least the horrific damage she was taking seemed to be instantly repairing itself.
He wasn’t sure how she was doing that, actually. Adrian was used to Bex’s amazing regeneration by this point, but he’d never seen Drox heal before. He would’ve called it a miracle if it hadn’t been so clearly taking a huge toll. He’d seen Bex go entire fights without getting winded, but this battle had lasted less than a minute, and she was already gasping like a landed fish.
Hehadto go help her before she ran out of whatever she was using to power her miraculous recovery, but Alexander wasmoving too fast for Adrian’s once-again-mortal eyes to follow. He’d get cut to ribbons if he tried to stick his nose into their fight. Also, as much as Adrian wanted to focus on Bex, he had his own problems to worry about.
“Would youstop moving?” Boston snarled, sinking his teeth in Leander, who hadn’t stopped thrashing in Adrian’s arms despite the enormous amount of white blood he’d already dumped on the floor.
“I can’t!” Leander cried, lurching against the bandage Adrian was attempting to tie around the hole in his chest. “I have to help her!”
“You can’t help anyone if youbleed to death,” Boston pointed out, smacking the frantic prince on the head with his paw before turning to Adrian. “You should knock him out.”
“I’d love to,” Adrian replied through gritted teeth as he wrestled with his bloody brother. “But princes are immune to most common poisons, and I didn’t think to grab any uncommon ones from my cabin before we ran off.”
“Who said anything about poison?” Boston huffed. “Just hit him over the head. I know blunt trauma is risky, but you can’t possibly do more damage than he’s already doing to himself.”
Adrian didn’t know about that. Even for a Witch of the Flesh, the brain wasn’t something that should be damaged on purpose. Leander really was going to bleed out if he didn’t stop thrashing, though, so Adrian decided to try a different tactic.
“Calm down and listen,” he said, pressing the ball of his palm into Leander’s wound until the prince collapsed on the ground with a gasp. “Your princess is not in danger. Look and see for yourself.”
He grabbed his brother’s chin with the hand he wasn’t using to grind into his wound and yanked his head around to face the battle happening on the opposite end of the throne room from Bex’s. Adrian hadn’t had time to glance in that directionyet, so he wasn’t actually sure if what he’d said was accurate, but he’d overheard Bex telling Nemini not to hurt Mara, and despite being revealed as a queen herself, Neminialwaysdid what Bex said. That fact held true yet again when Adrian turned to see Leander’s princess swinging wildly at Nemini, who was not swinging back.
It was a shocking sight to see. Despite working with Bex’s team for almost half a year now, Adrian had never gotten the chance to watch Nemini fight for real. She normally just knocked her opponents out with a touch. That trick must not have worked on princesses, though, because while Mara’s wild attacks were leaving openings so big that even Adrian could spot them, Nemini never tried to touch her. She was just keeping Mara busy, exactly as Bex had ordered.
That would’ve been great if Bex’s fight with the Crown Prince had been going better. The way things were looking on the other side of the room, though, Adrian decided he’d better do something before they all died tragically on Gilgamesh’s threshold.
“Leander,” he whispered, keeping his voice as low as possible, even though none of the combatants were paying attention to them. “Do you have a spell that can restrain a princess?”
“Nothing that will work on her,” the prince whispered back, his frighteningly gray face pinched as he stared at his beloved. “Mara’s not as physically powerful as War or Wrath, but she knows all my spells’ limitations. She can easily break out of any of my nonlethal restraints, and I’d never use a lethal one.”
“I know you wouldn’t,” Adrian said, using his brother’s distraction to finally finish wrapping the bandage around Leander’s perforated chest. He just hoped he’d stemmed the bleeding in time. A chest wound like that would have killed a normal human in seconds, but the princes’ quintessence bodiesseemed as sturdy as the queens’, so Adrian had hope. He was checking his pockets to see if he had anything that might help with Leander’s pain when his brother began pushing to his feet.
“What are you doing?” Adrian hissed, grabbing his arm. “Don’t move yet! We just tied you back together!”
“I have to move,” Leander wheezed. “I have to stop them. This fight is killing her!”
Adrian didn’t see how he’d arrived atthatconclusion. If anything, Nemini looked like the one who was having a hard time. Adrian had known for a while now that she had some sort of instant-movement power, but he’d never seen her use it like this before. The Queen of Pride was blinking all over the throne room like an afterimage, her normally emotionless face scrunched up in concentration as she fought to stay ahead of Mara’s wild jabs.
She must not have been able to dodge them all, because there were splashes of black blood on the golden floor beneath their feet. The Princess of Sorrow, on the other hand, looked completely uninjured. Adrian would even go so far as to say she was winning. Then he caught a glimpse of Mara’s face, and he understood what Leander had meant.
Gilgamesh’s princesses had never had the biology necessary to produce real tears, but the Princess of Sorrow was certainly trying. Her carved white face was twisted in anguish, and her golden eyes were squeezed shut as she tried in vain to stop herself from attacking her sister. She looked like a puppet fighting against its strings, but no matter how hard she tried to throw the battle in Nemini’s favor, her body kept attacking with the ferocity of the weapon Gilgamesh had carved it to be. It was a heartbreaking sight, but then, everything about what Gilgamesh had done to Ishtar’s people was a tragedy, and Adrian was sick of seeing it.
With that, he let go of his still-bleeding brother and started digging through his pockets. He’d filled his coat from his cabin before they’d marched on the palace, but most of what he’d grabbed was raw materials. He hadn’t had time to craft anything useful out of them yet, but Adrian had an idea for how to cheat on that. He might not have Gilgamesh’s quintessence blood in his own veins anymore, but Leander had spilled a ton of his, and while Adrian had sworn never to touch sorcery again, picky witches were dead witches.
Someone was almost certainly going to die in the next few minutes if he didn’t do something, so Adrian grabbed a handful of leaves, sticks, and sticky sap out of his supplies pocket and dropped them on the golden floor. He got down on his knees next, using his bare hands to scoop his brother’s white blood over the materials. It was a total hack job, but improvisation was a Witch of the Present’s greatest strength, and Adrian had gotten pretty good at speeding up witchcraft with sorcery. It helped that he’d done this spell a thousand times before. All he had to do was mash the appropriate ingredients together with the power of the living forest that once again thrived inside his heart, use quintessence to replace the normal twenty-eight-day curing period, and when he pulled his bloody hands aside, what he wanted was sitting right in front of him.
“Is that a sap trap?” Boston asked, leaping onto his shoulder. “How’d you get it so big?”
“It’s easy to make a big one when you don’t have to bury it for an entire lunar cycle,” Adrian replied as he hefted the round, sticky, piney-smelling enchantment—which was roughly the size and weight of a bowling ball—off the ground. “Instant results mean no cracking or moisture loss.”
His familiar looked disgusted by that, as well he should. Adrian would be the first to admit that sorcery wasnotgood witchcraft. It was, however, what they had.
“Nemini,” he said, reaching up to touch the comm that was still in his ear despite everything. “Can you hold her still for a moment?”
