Page 36 of Heartbreak Prince

“You’ll have to ask him. Nicely.”

“I’m nice.”

Vawn snorts. “You lack charm, darling.”

“And you had to create a perpetual glyph to make yourself charming.”

“It only amplified what I already possess,” he replies.

The back of my neck prickles with awareness. I grab the top of Vawn’s head and shove him down just as a crossbow bolt zips through the trees.

“Fuck,” he gasps.

I’m already sprinting toward the place the bolt was shot from, drawing a knife as I run. I hear the ratcheting of the crossbow mechanism as another bolt is set in place, as the string is hauled back—and I crash into the clump of bushes, grappling with the archer, stabbing recklessly anywhere, everywhere. There’s a buzz and flicker of shield magic, but I keep going until it fails and the blade punches through, raking flesh.

The archer has a woman’s shape. Her nails are short and square, painted with glyphs for accuracy, shielding, and strength, along with some symbols I can’t discern because we’re struggling in a blur of limbs, rolling over and over in the undergrowth. She grabs my short hair, the tips of her nails raking my scalp, and I feel a sudden haze in my brain, a dizzying shift as vertigo throws my skills into chaos. Nausea spins in my throat and my head.

She disoriented me with one of her glyphs. Closing my eyes against the vertigo, I reach up to the hand in my hair and pinch one of her nails, pressing it against my scalp and using my own skull as leverage to break it. She shrieks as the nail cracks, but she has the presence of mind to secure me in a deadly chokehold.

I reach back, scratching at where her eyes should be but only finding the rough surface of the helmet. I kick wildly, too disoriented to figure out how to break the chokehold, vaguely realizing that this could be the moment I die.

Suddenly my attacker screams, a horrible, high-pitched keening of pure agony. She collapses, releasing me and falling back against the ground. I roll free, then look back, trying to get my eyes to focus so I can figure out what happened.

The prince stands over the archer, holding the bloody ax. My attacker’s fingers tremble helplessly above the severed stump of her left leg. Vawn must have chopped it off while she was choking me.

Her legs and mine were perilously close together. He could have easily cut off my limb instead, or at least wounded me. Whether it was luck or precision on his part, I’m glad I escaped unscathed.

“Where’s the other member of your group?” I ask the woman.

She only sobs without answering.

“He probably stayed with the carpets and the wyvern,” I theorize. “Tell us who you serve, and maybe we’ll let you live. Who is trying to destroy the royal family?”

But the woman’s body goes limp. She passed out from the pain, and unless the wyvern rider comes to her aid, she will likely bleed out while she’s unconscious.

“We won’t be getting any information from her.” I climb to my feet, wobbling a bit. Vawn steadies me.

“I’m leaving the ax here,” he says quietly, and I don’t ask for an explanation. Maybe he’s lazy and doesn’t want to carry it, but I suspect he never wants to touch it again after using it to sever a woman’s leg.

I’m comfortable with leaving the ax behind, but I search the woman for anything else we can use, taking a few coins and the long black sash she has wound several times around her waist. It’s clean, and the cloth could be useful for bandages at some point.

Vawn guides me to the spot where he left the damaged carpet, rolled up neatly on a patch of moss. “He said he’s not in pain, but he’s distressed, and he can’t fly with his corner nearly severed. We’ll have to carry him.”

“I suppose it can’t be helped. Can you—”

But Vawn is staggering into the undergrowth, retching. He doubles over and vomits his breakfast onto the roots of a tree.

I grab some fresh moss, hand it to him, and shoulder the carpet myself. “Wipe your mouth. Let’s go.”

We walk, and we walk. Vawn complains about the swarms of gnats, the spiderwebs, the clumps of smelly mushrooms, the roots that trip him up, the thorns that catch on his pants, the animal droppings, our utter lack of cigarettes and wine, the loss of his glyphs, and the inconvenience of being hunted. I suspect he’s only doing it to distract himself from the darkness that might otherwise creep into his mind, but after hours of listening to him, I start to wonder how bad it would be if I killed him myself.

Around sunset we stumble onto a damp hollow of thick grass, most of which is pressed down as if heavy bodies have lain on it for hours.

“A unicorn bedding area,” I murmur, picking up a long strand of glowing hair. “They leave their beds in the evening and roam the forest at night. We must have just missed them.”

Vawn bends down to collect a few more strands of unicorn hair. “Maybe we could use these to mend the carpet, at least temporarily.”

“That’s actually a good idea.”