Chapter 30 #2
Prince Edmund let go of his grip on Pip and stumbled toward the crown prince, all but falling the last few feet into their prisoner. Prince Edmund held up the manacles that had been on his wrists. “I wouldn’t advise attempting to resist. You’ve seen what she can do.”
The crown prince glared from Prince Edmund to Pip and back. But he didn’t resist as Prince Edmund grabbed his arms and shackled his hands behind his back, assisted by Pip re-forming the shackles into their proper shape.
As soon as he finished, Prince Edmund’s knees buckled, and he caught himself by his grip on the crown prince.
Pip hauled Prince Edmund’s arm across her shoulders again, propping herself beneath him. Her back and shoulders ached from his weight, but she forced herself forward.
The crown prince whirled, his shoulders tensing as if he was contemplating trying to lash out at them in some way, even with his hands behind his back.
Pip shoved a shield into place between them, turning her single shield into two domes once again, although she kept them attached this time.
Cursing, the crown prince stumbled back, calling Pip—and women in general—a number of unflattering things.
“That’s what you get for taking one look at a tiny woman like me and assuming she couldn’t be a threat.” Pip was rather done with this crown prince, his family, and his castle. She’d had more than enough of their hospitality.
“Rather hypocritical of them.” Prince Edmund sounded far too cheerful for a man who couldn’t walk on his own right now. “Considering they are ruled by a woman. The Mongavarian soldiers who captured us really should have realized that you are a far greater threat than I am.”
“Hardly.” Pip staggered forward a few steps, already breathing hard. Between carrying most of Prince Edmund’s weight and holding two shields in place with her magic, she had to grit her teeth and dig into the depths of her dwarven strength and elven endurance.
This escape was turning out to be rather disagreeable. Especially since she was literally carrying the bulk of it solely on her shoulders. Still, she muscled through it. Fieran was here, and she was going to get to him no matter what it took.
Ahead, soldiers packed the courtyard, their rifles aimed in her direction. Several of the large guns on the castle wall top were now trained down at them while soldiers manned three machine guns in a line stretching across the castle gates.
Prince Edmund’s arm tightened around her shoulders, sending a fresh stab of pain through the bullet wound in her upper arm. At her flinch, he released his grip, as if remembering the wound. “I’m sorry. Will you be all right, facing all of this?”
Drawing in a deep breath, her knees wobbling, Pip tightened her grip on the back of Prince Edmund’s shirt and straightened her shoulders as much as she could beneath his weight.
“I’ve held off bombings. This shouldn’t be anything too difficult.
Besides, are they really going to open fire when we have him? ”
She nudged the shield with the crown prince over a few feet so that the man stood more squarely in the path of all those guns.
“True. If they open fire, hoping to break your shield, then they’ll be giving up their crown prince as lost.” Prince Edmund lowered his voice, and she wasn’t fully sure he was still talking to her when he added, “We can only hope his mother actually has a scrap of feeling in her body and doesn’t sacrifice him.
She has plenty more heirs, after all. Far younger, more promising heirs. ”
Pip grimaced and shoved both shields forward. Capturing the heir to the Mongavarian throne wouldn’t do much to force a surrender if the empress was willing to simply sacrifice him to the cause.
Ahead of her, the crown prince’s face had washed nearly as pale as the strands of white in his gray hair.
Despite the fact that he could likely hear the discussion they were having in Escarlish, he didn’t comment.
Perhaps he, too, had no idea how disposable he was to the Mongavarian throne when it came down to it.
There was no way out of this but through.
Step by step, Pip crossed the courtyard, hauling Prince Edmund, the crown prince, and her two shields with her.
For the first few yards, the soldiers held their fire, as if everyone, even their commanders, weren’t sure what to do.
Then there was a shouted order, and the soldiers hurriedly affixed their bayonets to the ends of their rifles.
With another order, the horde of them rushed forward.
They swung their rifles downward, stabbing at Pip’s shield with their bayonets.
Pip gritted her teeth and shoved more magic into the shields. The bayonets bent when they came into contact with her magic and bounced off.
She forged onward, pushing and shoving the soldiers aside with her shields as if they were a herd of cattle and she was the cattle catcher on the front of a train.
The crackling sense of Fieran’s magic grew closer, even as more explosions tore through the air and vibrated into the ground beneath her feet. The men manning the guns on the wall top were peering outward now, hurrying to swing their guns back over the wall once again instead of at her.
Fieran was right there. She could sense it. She just had to get to him.
A blaze of blue magic swept over the wall and washed over the men assembled around her. Soldiers yelped and howled, dropping their guns and shaking their hands as if burned. The guns on the wall tops exploded.
But where the magic touched her shields, it danced and twined through her magic with the same alacrity it always had, bolstering her power.
Grinning, her heart lifting, Pip lurched the last few yards. The men at the machine guns threw themselves out of her way, even as the machine guns ahead of her exploded, clearing her path.
Only the massive gates of the castle barred her from Fieran.
Large wooden locking bars had been set into their brackets on either side, three of them in total, holding the gates shut.
She would never be able to lift those by herself, and doing it individually with her magic would take longer than she had the patience for at the moment.
She shifted the shields so that they covered her back. Since she was going to need both hands for this, she lifted Prince Edmund’s arm from her shoulder and propped him against the remains of one of the machine guns.
“Sorry, I need both hands free. Watch him.” She jabbed a hand at the crown prince, who had pressed a hand against the stone wall beside the gate, his legs shaking so badly that he looked about as unsteady as Prince Edmund.
Prince Edmund hugged the machine gun wreckage, a hint of a smirk playing across his bruised and battered face. “Gladly.”
With that done, Pip faced the massive wood and iron gates rising before her and dug deep within her magic, letting it build within her chest. While she had always wielded her iron magic like an elf, it was time to think like a dwarf.
Closing her eyes, she stomped her feet, setting up a rhythm even as she grounded herself with the solidness of the stones beneath her boots. She hummed along with the rhythm, even as she pictured what she wanted to do with her magic.
Inside her, the magic built and grew, shaping and forming, until her chest ached with it, her mouth tasting of iron.
With a shout, she shoved both hands forward even as she thrust her magic in its purest form at those blasted gates that were the only thing standing between her and Fieran.
Ripped from their hinges, the gates blew outward under the force of her magical shield, tumbling and toppling onto the causeway.
The stone arch over the gates exploded with the force of her shield and a whole portion of the walls on either side of the gates tumbled outward and collapsed under the sheer power she’d unleashed.
Oops. She hadn’t meant to be quite so destructive. All she’d wanted to do was break the locking bars and shove the gates open. Instead, she’d absolutely destroyed them.
In the haze of the slowly settling dust and debris, two warriors of the magic of the ancient kings stood in the maelstrom of their combined magic, bloody blades in their hands.
Magic dripped down their swords and poured from their bodies onto the cobblestones below, as if they were more magic than man.
Yet the magic only highlighted the red of Fieran’s hair and the wild grin on his face as his gaze met hers over the distance between them.
“Go on.” Prince Edmund had struggled to his feet and was using a gun barrel as a cane. He limped over to where the Mongavarian crown prince was cowering against the wall and pulled out a knife. When he’d gotten a knife, she didn’t know. “I’ve got him.”
Taking one more moment to make sure she had Prince Edmund and the crown prince securely ensconced in a shield, Pip turned and ran toward Fieran.