Page 13 of The Princesses of Ruin (The Princesses of Ruin #5)

Chapter twelve

Adrik

T he Nest is a hive of activity. I dodge bodies rushing this way and that as I hurry to the war room on Zane’s summon. The door is sealed shut and warded at every grain, so I knock.

Black magic filled with glittering gold sparks lights up the runes inscribed along the frame, and the door opens.

“Emillia,” I say, then clear my throat. “Captain Alejandra, what are you doing here?”

“Summoned,” she says. There’s no hint of the playful smirk I’ve come to associate with our interactions of the last week. Her eyes are wide, lips pressed to a thin line. She steps back from the door only enough for me to slip through. “Come.”

I slide through the crack of the door and shock hits me again at the sight at the table.

On the other side of the room is a woman I’ve never seen, but could not mistake, for her aura is powerful.

Gold-flecked black magic halos her seven-foot frame.

Her eyes burn like liquid metal, and I’m forced to avert my gaze before they burn me through.

She holds a hammer in one hand, and the other is braced on the war room table.

Her flowing white garb moves on an invisible wind, ruffling when all else in the room is still .

I tremble as her magic stretches behind me. The wards of the door reactivate, and I swallow my fear to speak.

“My goddess Zephrom, origin of Justice,” I say in Seterian as I bow deeply.

“Adrik Lemtov, the most powerful alchemist of his time,” the goddess says. Her words are so divine I’m ashamed to revel in them. “The world has need of your skill.”

“I serve the Nest and its goals,” I say, knowing that Zephrom herself is the urictsa creature that has inhabited the building for centuries.

Zane slides three sheaves of creased parchment across the table toward me. “Maarie has uncovered a spell to defeat Ashai.”

Emillia follows me to the table, sticking close behind.

Her presence is more of a comfort than I thought it could be as I approach one of the immortal creators of magic.

I spare a glance up at Zephrom as I grab the pages.

She’s smiling softly, like she knows some essential secret. If she’s here, she must.

I spread the pages out and read the first.

Armor of the Eternal Tempest.

Toxin of the Hollow Fang.

Barb of the Shadow Stalker.

Acid of the Abyssal Devourer.

Hide of the Midnight Howl.

“These are ingredients?” I ask.

“Indeed,” Zephrom says. “Storm dragon scale, giant spider venom, duskwalker antler, sea serpent bile, and dire wolf fur.”

“This can’t be,” I say. I glance at Zane. He’s stoic, as usual, so I turn to Kazimir. He too wears a serious expression. I look at Zephrom, but her presence quickly overwhelms me. I return my gaze to the pages .

The brew instructions are lengthy. It’s a delicate, time-consuming process. I feel the eyes of everyone in the room on me as I move through the instructions.

“This is the antithesis of the ritual she tried to perform on Scarlett?” I ask.

“It is,” Scarlett says. “It will make her current vessel weak and allow all her magic to flow freely.”

I scowl. “I know we are fighting a goddess, but is she not vulnerable to Reina’s magic in the way we’d thought?”

Reina crosses her arms. “Oh, she is. That’s why she’s a statue.”

I feel I’m missing some critical details.

“Statue?”

Alastair nods. “The bomb wasn’t delivered to the underground the way it was supposed to. The tunnel was a trap. It had been warded to activate only when the earth was disturbed. The wards were invisible to us and our scouts before the moment Lily tried to dig.”

“Where did the bomb go?”

“The wards were becoming unstable around the ipsain coral so we dropped it on her stupid face,” Liliana says with a grumble. “The blast nearly killed me and Alastair, even with an Eng shield projected by us both.”

“She’s encased herself in magic in such a way that she’s become immobile, but it has also made her indestructible, as far as we can tell,” Zane says.

“Unless we can splash her with this cauldron crud,” Liliana says, examining her blunted nails with disgust.

I look back at the sheet. “Some of these ingredients will need careful tempering before use. It will be a long process.”

“It must be done in two fortnights,” Zephrom says .

I scoff. “Impossible.”

The goddess’s presence surrounds me. “Your magic is perfectly suited for this.”

Emillia places her hand on my shoulder. “You can do it. You controlled the ipsain temperature at a great distance while fighting.”

Her confidence in me feels even better than the goddess’s praise.

“Perhaps.”

I push the pages around, but I’ve already concluded what I’m sure they arrived at an hour ago.

“I will need to be the one to retrieve the dire wolf fur,” I say. “It will turn to ash in temperatures above freezing—or so is the myth.”

“A truth,” Zephrom says. “The dire wolf was never meant to inhabit the land where gentler creatures roam.”

My finger slides along the list. “The storm dragon scale…this will be difficult.”

“We can get it,” Alyse says, grasping Kazimir’s hand.

Of course—the incident at her wedding. The dragon sacrifice was lightning attuned.

“But was it not burned by the elder green dragon?” I ask.

Alyse shakes her head. “He escaped.”

I hum and return my attention to the list.

“The serpent bile?”

“That’s us,” Jasper says. “A ga’hanoi clan captured an egg over a century ago and have trained the creature to protect their territory in the deep sea. Getting a sample will be difficult but doable, based on the representative’s reaction to Reina.”

“Then the giant spider is you?” I ask, looking at Zane.

He dips his head in acknowledgement.

Scarlett sucks her teeth in frustration. “Poetic, innit? ”

That leaves the duskwalker to Liliana and Alastair. The other ingredients are basic or don’t require my attention. All things that a common Spider could retrieve from our greenhouse or the wilds.

“How certain are we that this will work?” I ask. “We’ve put our hope on a single solution before and, I assume given this development, it was folly.”

“Not folly ,” Zephrom says in a kind, mothering voice. “Incomplete. We need this potion to make her vulnerable to your creation. Without it, she will shield herself again, perhaps for longer, but she will not be defeated.”

It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask the goddess why she can’t be the one to retrieve the items when suddenly I feel Alyse’s presence in my mind.

“Ashai is our reckoning. If we cannot do this, we don’t deserve to dominate Gaien any longer. So says the other nine of the Divine Ten.”

“The other gods have forsaken us,” Emillia murmurs.

Kazimir pulls Alyse against his side as his collar glows. “It’s a game to them. We’re entertainment.”

“Why does Ashai want to destroy us?” I ask. “There must be some…impetus. A reason .”

The others look to Zephrom.

The goddess closes her eyes and, though I don’t believe she needs to breathe, takes a long inhale. “She was banished to the underworld for her beliefs. She blames your kind for that.”

As if the goddess couldn’t stand to be a little less vague…

“You won’t tell us, will you?” Kazimir asks, his face contorted in a grimace.

The aura in the room shifts. Where once there was docile but powerful benevolence radiating from the goddess, now there is angry authority. She glides through the room, her feet not moving as the air carries her to Kazimir.

She’s taller now, her black essence whipping around her like a torrent. He doesn’t back down or avert his gaze. My heart thunders in my ears. Am I about to watch my brother slain by an immortal origin?

Zephrom’s magic calms, and she lowers to the ground. “You question my motives as if my sight is as limited as yours. As if I experience this existence like you. I do not. What I share, and the way I guide, is exactly as it must be.”

“You’re asking us to put our faith in you,” Scarlett says. “After the kind of justice I’ve been dealt—we’ve all been dealt—why can’t you understand that’s difficult?”

Zephrom turns to Scarlett. “You live when you should’ve died many times over. You killed the man who violated you, and destroyed his empire. You dominated the Underbelly and now reign as a queen.

“You have been reunited with your sisters. You have found your life mate. And you are one task away from defeating the queen you’ve so yearned to kill for twelve years…but my justice is lacking?”

Scarlett scoffs and my stomach drops.

“You’d have me believe that every time I got on my knees to pay for bread that you were watching? Guiding? Whispering in my ear to cup the balls and suck harder because one day—”

Zephrom’s magic lashes out, wrapping Scarlett’s throat in darkness and stifling her speech. I reach for a grenade on my belt as Zane’s spindles rip free from his back. Kazimir’s scythe shinks from its sheath, and Liliana roars her sister’s name.

Scarlett holds up her hand to stop us.

“Careful,” she says, her voice warped by the magic .

She touches the strings of power holding her, and the runes along her forearms glow with gold-glittering blackness.

She’s absorbing Zephrom’s magic…

The skin on her arm singes around the runes, seeming to burn from the inside out. Zips of black lightning connect from her hand to her shoulder, then across her chest. Each point where it strikes, her skin is stained black and gold.

She smiles. “You don’t want to kill your chosen ones, do you?”

The goddess retreats, her magic oozing back into the halo around her body. They share a long, quiet standoff, their eyes glowing the same golden black.

My hand trembles on the grenade and someone grabs me. Emillia wraps her fingers around my fist and lowers my arm. She doesn’t let go, and I sense it’s more for her comfort than mine.

“You may question me, but it will not change my answers. I will give you the knowledge you need, when you need it.”

Zephrom glances around the room. Whatever silent exchange happened between her and Scarlett has set her resolve. The magic flowing around her is gentle once more, and she’s calm.

But Scarlett’s body is still stained black, like someone dropped blots of ink on her skin.

Gold glimmers between her collarbones, over the marks left from Ashai, and the color doesn’t dissipate.

Though the runes on her arms have burned off whatever she absorbed, her good eye remains black.

There’s an oily sheen of gold over it, like a cataract, and her empty eye socket plumes with glittering darkness.

“Go forth and collect the ingredients, or don’t. If you choose the latter, my aid ends here.” Zephrom’s visage fades, her magic seeming to pull her into the walls .

“There is no other choice but to continue on this path,” Reina says. “I trust you, my goddess.”

Zephrom disappears completely, but I can still feel her in the room, watching us. Zane wraps his arms and spindles around Scarlett, caging her in. He whispers something in her ear, and Emillia clears her throat, turning to me.

“Well, that was something,” she says as she releases my hand.

I can’t believe I was about to attack an immortal one. I snap the grenade back on my belt.

“Scarlett was never one for bowing to authority,” I say.

Emillia smiles. “One of the necessary qualities in a queen, I suppose.”

“Are we really doing this?” Liliana asks. “Just throwing ourselves out into the wild to collect these ingredients without knowing whether we’ll survive or if we can brew the potion in time, or if it’ll even work?”

Scarlett nods. “It’ll work.”

“How do you know?” Jasper asks.

The crimson queen grins. “Well, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t really matter, right?”

“Our final hope is an ancient ritual with ingredients so deadly to collect that no one would dare risk it,” Alastair says.

“Except for us idiots,” Liliana says.

“It means Ashai will not expect it,” Alyse says. “She knew we would come for her with Reina’s magic, but she wouldn’t dream of this.”

She places her hand on Kazimir’s shoulder. “We should pack light, my love. We’ll need to fly.”

He folds up his scythe and holsters it, then takes her hand. “We’ll return with a dragon scale. ”

The group shifts, pairing off.

Emillia glances at me.

“You’re going to need a tracker if you’re going to hunt down a dire wolf.” Her tone is back to casual. Playful, even. She’s smiling softly, and it makes my heart race.

“Would that be you?” I ask, hoping I’ve read between the lines appropriately.

She tugs on her earlobe, then leans closer to me as she whispers, “I heard you mumble my name in your sleep last night.”

My face burns and I swallow hard. I was most certainly not sleeping when her name tumbled from my lips on heavy breath. “Your magus ability?”

Her soft smile grows into something hungrier. “It’s very useful.”

Liliana clears her throat right behind me. “We’ll be partners for a good bit of the way. Headed to the north together and all. I’ll carry you, Adrik. You’re skinny.”

The heat in my face intensifies and I’m about to offer a rebuttal when Emillia says, “I like ’em lean.”

Liliana giggles in a very salacious way and I feel like I might throw up. There’s nowhere for me to hide and I can’t escape.

Alastair’s hand comes down on my shoulder. “Breathe, my friend.”

“We’re going to be great friends, I think,” Liliana says as she takes Emillia’s arm. “Tell me, do you know any good jokes?”

“You’re asking a sea captain if she knows any good jokes? What do you think we do all day, watch the horizon silently?”

They laugh as they walk away from us and I finally take a breath.

Alastair smiles in a very paternal way, despite my three years on him. “The affection of a woman is something to be cherished, not shied from. ”

“Is that what it is?” I ask.

“Captain Alejandra is rakish, but not disingenuous. Her interest in you appears sincere.”

We turn and watch the women saunter away as the others in the room collect themselves.

“Whether that interest is to wed or bed you, I couldn’t say. But isolation in the frigid north allowed Lily and I to…well…plenty of time to get to know one another.”

I huff. “Stop playing matchmaker. We have a life-or-death situation to attend to.”

“Yes, but as my wife would say, appreciating the sun at night makes the dark easier to bear.”

I raise an eyebrow at him.

“Or you can stay in the dark. Whatever you prefer, my friend.” Alastair shrugs and trudges away. “As long as we save the world.”