Page 5 of Taken By the Shadow Prince

Ellis. I’ll miss him. Dearly. Being without him isn’t something I’m good at doing. I would have asked him to come with me, but...he’s better off here. Where he’s happy, where he’s secretly designing a wedding dress for Mair. He wouldn’t be able to do that from the back of a horse.

I start into an easy, well-paced trot. Nothing so fast as to wear the horses down quickly, but fast enough to show that we don’t have time to fuck around—thatIdon’t fuck around. I’m sure most of my team has figured that out.

But for those who haven’t...

I resist the urge to look over my shoulder at Kal again.

He’ll learn soon enough that arrogance will earn him nothing more than humiliation.

We don’t make it to the safe haven.

But we’re close. If we set off the same time tomorrow as we did today, it’ll be just a couple hours into the day, which should leave us enough time to get to the other sanctuary, too, since we planned to make it there before sunset and stay until the morning.

We tie our horses to trees and spring our tents up. I send men to hunt for food, others to find wood to create fires, and some to prepare the horses for the night. While they do that, I think through who will take watch tonight—me, of course, but who else? I can’t pick anyone who seems to already be dragging, or they’ll only slow us down more. Kelsa could probably afford to lose a few hours of sleep; she’s so easily excitable that I almost wonder if she takes some sort of tonic to keep her energy up. And then there’s Gus, one of Auley’s men who has been cracking jokes and booming with laughter since we made it out of the capital early this morning.

I keep thinking as I set my tent up and then climb inside, unraveling my alchemy kit. I still have some of Ender’s blood, which is good, because I’ve yet to perfect the powder. I don’t have much to waste, though, so I’d better hope I finally get it working in the next few attempts.

I’m pulled away from my work only when Kelsa comes to inform me that there’s some venison for me, if I want it. I almost turn it down, but my stomach growls, and I know that refusing to eat when on the road is a foolish thing to do, especially with meals being relatively unpredictable. Instead, I leave my tent and go to eat, but I can’t stop thinking about that powder.

It’s got to work. I just need to figure out how to broaden the spell. With blood, I can easily make a potion to lead me to whoever it is whose blood I work with. But I don’t need to find Ender, I need to find other demon witches.

And using her blood is probably the only way I’ll be able to do it.

Chapter 4

Mavey

words

I took the first and last watch, which means it’s my job to get everyone up in the morning.

I make a powder for it. Most people would use their words to get everyone up. But I’ve been living with Ellis my whole life, and I know that most brutes don’t respond well to words—they can easily ignore them and roll back over with their eyes still closed.

They cannot, however, ignore the feeling of shockwaves trembling through their body. I snicker as I pull the powder together. I was actually inspired by Ellis’ magic for this. With his ability to create some form of electricity that has yet to be recreated outside of magic, I was shocked constantly as a child. Never to hurt, but always to tease.

I found a way to recreate that feeling using alchemy—but I won’t be using it to tease, to play around. I grind up leaves from a skigh, the plant that creates the reaction, so that there will be no ignoring the feeling. I don’t even plan to grant them time to hunt for breakfast—they can have some of the bread out of their packs, before it becomes overwhelmingly stale. I want to get through this sanctuary fast enough to make it to the other before nightfall, so we will have a chance to talk to them, and hopefully make up for the time we wasted yesterday.

I finish making the powder and debate for a moment if I should have brewed it into a potion instead, so that the surprise of the cold liquid would help awaken their senses. But I decide that it’s not worth wasting the supplies to do the same thing in a different form—the shock alone will be enough to wake them up.

I finish creating the powder and stick it in a metal canister. To keep it from shocking my fingers as I transfer it, I rub some dandelion flowers on my hands. This tints them a little yellow, but it nullifies the effects of the skigh plant and it’ll wash right off in that creek just a few yards into the woods.

I dip a finger in to make sure I’ve covered my skin, and when I don’t get any reaction, I smile, then step out of my tent.

I make my way around the campsite, peeking past the fabric of the tent that serves as a door and blowing a bit of the powder inside. It’s harmless, really—but it’s absolutely hilarious to see men as big as Auley, as big as Ellis, yelp as they wake up to the powder stinging at their skin.

I’m gone before anyone even knows I did it, but it won’t take the men and women long to step out from their tents and see me making my rounds with the powder.

I don’t particularly care how they feel about it. I could have drugged them, if I’d wanted, with something that makes them hyper and focused. Something that would have made it hard for them to fall asleep even tonight, when they would ordinarily be exhausted out of their mind.

I chose the option with no lasting effects, which I consider a generous thing to do, since creating those tonics would actually be an excellent idea. We’re working with a schedule, and we’vealready fallen behind on it.It’s the second day, and we’re already beginning to fail, so maybe I do need to speed everyone up.

It would have been faster if I’d gone alone. I would have even tolerated Kelsa coming along, since talking isn’t my strong suit and it really seems to be hers. That, and she’s a witch, while most of the group are fae. I am. Auley’s guard is. The only two witches in the camp are Kelsa and Kal.

Kelsa and Kal.

Oh.

It suddenly makes sense why she likes him so much. I’m ashamed it took me so long to figure it out—reading people is one of the few things that I pride myself on, and I overlooked this completely. Perhaps because of my distaste for the Iulean soldier, but... still.

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