CHAPTER 15 #3
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 bodies seemed 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 at that conclusion.
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 was not good 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?”
The former void demon didn’t reply. Adrian wasn’t sure if that was because she hadn’t heard him over the life-or-death struggle she was locked in with the Princess of Sorrow or if she was just being her usual taciturn self. He was wondering if he should ask again when a reply came over the speaker.
“Five seconds.”
Again, Adrian wasn’t sure what that meant, but he got the trap ready, lifting the heavy weight over his head with both hands as he watched Nemini and the carved copy of the Queen of Sorrow careen around the room.
Mara must have been getting desperate by this point, because her eyes were open again, and she was begging her sister to kill her.
It was heartbreaking to listen to, but Nemini bore it with the same stoic blankness as she bore everything, dodging the princess’s lethal swings with careful steps as she led her back around to the opposite side of the circular throne room from where Bex was fighting.
The moment they reached the far wall, Nemini changed tactics.
Instead of dodging the princess’s punches, she got in close and grabbed her arms. Snakes erupted out of the floor as she did so, passing through the gold like ghosts only to become solid again when they wrapped around Mara’s thrashing body.
No single snake seemed strong enough to stop her on its own, but together with their queen, they held the princess in place, forcing her to be still for a critical second as Nemini said, “Now.”
The second her voice spoke over the comm, Adrian threw the trap.
It wasn’t a particularly good throw. The ball of wood and fir sap was heavy and unwieldy, and while Adrian was in decent shape thanks to all the yardwork his craft required, he’d never been good at sports.
Fortunately for all of them, this spell didn’t require accuracy.
All he had to do was break the ball somewhere close to the princess, and the trap did the rest, exploding on impact to cover the white weapon of Gilgamesh from head to gilded toe in thick, dark, inescapably sticky fir sap.
The blast caught Nemini too, but in the time it took Adrian to realize that, she’d already used her movement power to get free, reappearing behind him before he’d even noticed she’d vanished.
She was still covered in sap, though, so much that it immediately stuck her feet to the ground again.
Adrian was digging through his pockets for a solvent when Leander rushed toward Mara.
“It’s okay,” he said, stopping just before he got stuck in the explosion of sap as well. “It’s all right, Mara, it’s over. You’re safe.”
He leaned as close as he could get, but Mara’s gold eyes were still wild.
“It’s not over,” she insisted as her doll-like body fought the sap with superhuman strength. “It will never be over. Even if you kill the Crown Prince, that order was given with the Blade of Ishtar.”
“Then we’ll take the sword from him and cancel it,” Leander promised. “I’m going to save you!”
The princess’s frantic expression grew soft. “If you truly mean that, then kill me.”
“What?” he said as his face grew desperate. “No! You said we’d run away. That we could be together for—”
“There is no forever for us,” she said, her voice quiet and calm even as her hands strained against the sap toward his throat.
“I wanted to believe in it, but after having my mind erased and then returned, I know exactly how much this life doesn’t belong to me.
Even if you revoke the order of Ishtar’s Blade, I’ll always be a puppet.
Gilgamesh’s voice will never leave my head, and I… I…”
She dropped her golden eyes with a sob. “I’m tired of being someone else’s weapon,” she whispered. “Even if you’re with me, this body will never be my own. I want to be myself again. I want to be free, Leander, and we both know there’s only one way for that.”
The prince took a shuddering breath. “I know,” he said, dropping his mirrored gaze to the floor. “I’ll always fight for whatever makes you happy, but if the Queen of Sorrow’s hand is returned, what happens to you? Will you forget everything that happened? Everything we…”
His voice trailed off, and Mara’s golden eyes softened. “I hope I forget,” she said. “I hope we can both forget these centuries of suffering and humiliation, but just because this cursed existence will finally stop doesn’t mean my love for you will end.”
“I don’t see how it could do anything else,” Leander replied bitterly, placing a hand over his bandaged chest. “I’ll always be the son of your most hated enemy, while you’ll go back to being Ishtar’s weapon. There’s no way we can—”