Page 9 of Taken By the Shadow Prince

“There was no compassion in the years they exterminated us. I won’t bother to have any for the people that set those deaths into motion.”

I hate that I understand him, his reasoning—and I hate even more that he refuses to understand mine.

I allow myself an hour of arguing with him, trying to convince them to fight for themselves. But, in the end, they aren’t swayed, and I can’t stay longer if I plan to make it in time to try to convince the next safe haven to fight today.

So I stand. I thank them for their time, though I do so bitterly. I pull the maps from the satchel at my side, hand each one of them a copy, and tell them they can make their way to the castle by following that protected path, should they change their mind. They take them, but I’m fairly convinced those maps will be thrown in the flames burning in the fireplace along the far wall after Kelsa, Kal, and I leave the room.

The woman I met first gives me a small nod, a contemplative look, and I wonder if she might have been more swayed than the rest of them. If perhaps she might be able to do something here that I could not.

Only time will tell, I suppose.

I give her a jerk of my chin before turning on my heel and walking back out. I don’t look back to make sure Kelsa and Kal follow. The failure sinks into my bones, even as I refuse to let my shoulders sag with the weight of it.

Clearly, this little job of ours is not going well. Two days in, and we’re already behind schedule, and we’ve failed to convince our first group of witches to fight for themselves. It’s not looking like this journey is going to have a very positive outcome.

Our greatest hope, I suppose, lies in me. In finding the demon witches.

It is a lot of pressure, of responsibility.

I will bear it with honor.

Chapter 6

Mavey

impossible elixir

I am almost out of Ender’s blood.

I’m not used to working with limited supply—and it certainly shows. I’ve got enough for one more potion, one more attempt, before I have to resort to... less than desirable methods of finding these demon witches.

I should have asked her for more. But I hadn’t realized just how concentrated I’d have to keep the blood, after isolating it.

It’s a process.

One that I’m failing at.

Maybe I’ve been approaching it the wrong way—but there’s more than one method for any given spell, and considering I don’t have blood to spare, I don’t think changing my approach now would be the right thing to do.

I’ve just done nothing like this before. I’ve never had to isolate specific components of blood in order to track a wholespecies. And to do it with arationed supply—

Perhaps it is pessimistic to call it impossible. Or maybe it isn’t, and I’m simply wasting time trying to get this to work.

Which is unfortunate, because I have no time at all to spend on failure.Am I going to fail? It’s creeping up on me, the fear that I’ll let Mair down, that I’ll be the cause for this country’s downfall.

That I’ll get us all killed—and even worse, no one would blame me. Mair would think that it was too much responsibility for me to bear. Ellis would simply say that nobody could have done it. Leven would simply shrug and say that I tried my best...

All of this would happen in the afterlife, of course. Because I’ll have done such a spectacularly shitty job none of us will be alive anymore.

Everyone else is already fast asleep, but I have far more important things to do. I have half a mind to find whoever is snoring so loud that I can hear it all the way from inside my tent and use milkweed and maple combined with a few cloves of garlic to magically glue their mouth shut. They keep distracting me, and the last thing I need right now is that—distraction.

Instead, I do something far simpler and far faster. It’s a simple combination—the root from wild garlic dipped in honey, crushed together with a mortar and pestle. When the roots are ground up finely, I stick some of the mixture just on the inside of my ears, and it dulls all sound—or mutes it, depending on how much root you add to the honey. I added just enough to drown out any background noise, but to keep me aware in casesomethinghappens. Anything is possible.

Besides creating this damned demon-witch tracking elixir, it seems.

The pressure of getting it right weighs heavily on my shoulders.Especiallybecause of how important this is, how life-changing this brew could be, if I could just get it right. So far, with each one I’ve made, they’ve done nothing. Nothing at all. They don’t lead me anywhere, not even to Ender. Which means I’m isolating the wrong components in her blood.

So which ones are the right ones?

---