Page 51 of Bride to the Fiend Prince
I’d been distracted. I hadn’t blocked the incoming bolt and now—now there was a fist-sized hole punched all the way through the left side of my belly.
Voiceless with shock, I blinked against the pain, against the sensation of strangeness and wrongness trickling through my body.
The Fiend Prince screamed, smashed the Dreadlord aside, and leaped over fallen bodies, his great sword raised. With one mighty blow, he cut down the bodyguard who had shot me.
My arms went loose, and the shield slid from my grip. Magic juddered from my skin in savage, unpredictable bursts, and I had barely enough voice to gasp, “Stay back,” to the Prince. He was scantily clad, with no protection against my unfocused energy. A tendril of red fire shot from me, toward him, but he blocked it easily with his sword and came nearer, his hideous rotted face peering anxiously into mine.
“No, Amarylla,” he said. “No, not you. We’ll find a healer—I’ll have someone get Onwe—”
“Behind you!” I choked, and he whirled just in time to block his father’s incoming blow.
But more people were flooding into the room now—the guard Betta, and Emlin, armed with a crossbow, and Onwe with green magical darts in each hand. Sil followed, bouncing twin knives from palm to palm. And there was a golden-haired man in dark purple armor, who gave Galanrae a cocky salute and said, “Respect, cousin. A full-on rebellion—I didn’t know you had it in you.” And then he whipped out a massive silver sword and charged the Dreadlord.
If the Dreadlord hadn’t been weary from battle, they could not have overcome him even then, despite their combined power. He was a powerful warrior in his own right, without any magic or ichor at all. But he’d been fighting for hours on some faraway field, and the combat with his son had drained him. Within minutes he was disarmed, stripped of his armor and fitted with great heavy manacles. I had a fuzzy glimpse of the Dreadlord being led away, cursing, with blood pouring down his chin—and then Onwe leaned over me, muttering and touching the wound in my stomach.
My life was seeping away, but there was a tugging from Onwe, a desperate refastening of torn things.
“Can you heal her?” The Fiend Prince’s voice trembled, pleading.
“I don’t think so, my friend.” Onwe’s tone was thick with sadness. “Too much damage. I will try, but it will take everything I have, and then some.”
“Not me,” I whispered, gurgling through my own blood. “Fix Andreas instead.”
“For stars’ sake, why, Princess?” Onwe said quietly.
“He knows—the cure—for the Prince,” I wheezed. “Don’t—let Andreas—die—please.”
Losing consciousness wasn’t something I usually did. But I sensed the shadows crawling and clustering in my brain, and I didn’t have the strength to fight them, not even with the ichor buzzing along my veins.
I had taken Death by the wrists, and while trying to hold back his scythe from my love, I had impaled myself.
44
Light glimmered rosy through my eyelids. Dappled light, shifting and quivering.
Pieces of my consciousness fluttered back into place, like fallen leaves settling on the surface of a quiet lake.
A familiar voice. One I hadn’t heard since it whispered, “Try to discover the source of their magic.”
My father.
My eyes sprang open.
And there stood my father, brightly clad in much drapery and heavy jewelry, his beringed fingers stroking his gray-flecked beard. He was speaking to someone tall and well-muscled, someone who turned his head toward me as if my newly awakened consciousness had called to him—someone whose features were dearly familiar, yet strange.
The Fiend Prince stood at my bedside, his face flawless and his skin glowing with health. No magic-rot here, and no dreadful desiccation caused by the ichor.
He was cured.
I didn’t even care how—whether they’d saved Andreas or gotten the information from the Dreadlord or found the cure some other way. I was simply glad to see him alive, and looking so wonderfully well. Hot tears leaked from the corners of my eyes, drizzling down to soak into my hair.
My voice was an unintelligible croak until the Prince hurriedly set a metal straw to my lips and let me drink some water.
“Onwe healed me?” I whispered.
“Yes,” said the Prince. “Or rather, he repaired the most important parts and left the rest to heal naturally, so he’d have some power left to mend the damage to Andreas’s skull. The healing he did on you was not complete, not perfect, but—”
My hand traveled beneath the sheets, under the loose nightdress I wore. I felt the rough prick of stitches, the bumpy edges of mending skin. “I’ll have scars.”
