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He flexed his fingers as he walked toward us. He didn’t seem at all concerned that we might fight back. I wished I could be certain that was overconfidence. I’d seen a little of what he could do. Our only hope was to delay him until midnight.

Yudit drew the dagger out of her boot and whipped it at his neck.

The emperor’s arm snapped up and caught it by the hilt midair. The blade stopped an inch away from his throat.

“Thanks. That’ll make things easier,” the emperor said. “I’m impressed you kept it hidden all this time. Dr. Pipt, incinerate the squire, please, then help me with these two.”

Ilyana stepped up next to me and held out her hand. “Jules, take the r—”

The emperor charged at her, dagger raised. She shrieked and leapt away.

That brought him far enough from Yudit at last. One thing about temporary buildings, even fancy ones, is that no one takes pains to ensure the floor is tightly laid.

Rosebush canes, heavy with flowers, shot up through the gaps in the floorboards and wrapped around his limbs. White Centifolias, pink Damasks, dark purple Indigos. He grimaced as the thorns pierced his flesh. I laced the boughs with twists of poison ivy, three-leafed and yellow-blossomed. Just to be a dick.

He became a blur of motion, slicing through the canes with the dagger and tearing them away with his free hand. His fingers bled as he plucked them off. I grew new branches as he got rid of them, but it took all my concentration just to keep up.

“Well. This is a surprise.” The emperor didn’t sound quite as nonchalant as he had a moment before. “Dr. Pipt, if you’d hurry it up? I could use a hand here.”

Ilyana tried to sidle over to me. The emperor paused his rosebush-chopping long enough to snatch up a side table and throw it at her head. It smacked into her skull with a loud crack and sent her reeling back. Shit, shit, shit. Even just keeping ourselves alive until midnight, whenever it might come, was looking less and less likely with each passing moment.

I risked breaking my concentration to take a quick look at Dr. Pipt. He was much too close to Yudit for me to send any plants his way. But while he’d drawn his wand, he hadn’t done anything with it yet.

“Nikidik,” Yudit said.

That was…odd. Since when was my sister on a first-name basis with the grand vizier?

“Nikidik, please,” she begged him.

The emperor had freed both his arms and was sawing at the thorns around his ankles. He was rapidly outpacing me, no matter how hard I tried. “Dr. Pipt,” he said. “You have your orders.”

The grand vizier continued to hesitate. His face twisted with conflicting thoughts. I’d lost track of where Ilyana was. I hoped she wasn’t lying unconscious behind a divan somewhere.

“Doubt thou the stars are tiny bits of light!” my sister cried out. “Doubt that ‘love’ rhymes with ‘move’! / Doubt that this poem is wrote quite right—”

“But never doubt my luve,” Dr. Pipt finished in a voice choked with emotion. He incanted a mystical phrase and shot a bolt of blood-red lightning from his wand. Straight at the emperor.

Yudit’s shitty poetry had come through for us in our hour of need.

The emperor broke free of his restraints and sprang out of the way just in time. The lightning turned the remains of my roses to cinders.

“Twenty-five years of peace! Twenty-five years of prosperity!” Dr. Pipt shouted. He sent another lightning bolt arcing toward the emperor, who nimbly dodged. “You’re going to throw it all away on a senseless war of conquest! I should never have told you about that ring!”

The emperor weaved his way closer to Dr. Pipt, clearly judging the wizard to be the greatest threat. I sent a spray of grapevines slithering across the floor, but the emperor had moved back into Yudit’s range. They withered and dissolved into muck before they could grab him.

“I made you grand vizier, you ungrateful wretch,” the emperor snarled.

“I resign!” Another of Dr. Pipt’s lightning bolts sizzled through the air. The reputed heartless coward had apparently found both his heart and his courage. “I’m no longer your wizard, Osvald. You tried to make me an assassin! You made me turn our troops into radishes!” His voice rose to a shriek. “ALL I EVER WANTED WAS TO RESEARCH SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE!”

Was it midnight yet? Even if it was, my flowers were being blocked. There wasn’t much else I could do without a weapon.

Although that didn’t have to stop me, not now. I had another power. One I had far more skill with than I used to. I dipped into the pool of knowledge the ring had given me.

Begin with a single seed of corundum, garnished with titanium and iron for color, then layer on more in a lattice formation until a polycrystal forms…

Dr. Pipt’s next incantation was interrupted when he ducked out of the way of a dagger slash. It was a feint, though; the emperor kicked him in the stomach, plucked the wand away, and broke it over his knee. The glowing ruby at the tip flickered out as the emperor tossed the pieces aside.

“Die, you folding bustard!” Ilyana shouted as she popped out from behind a divan, blood dripping down her face. She clubbed the emperor over the head with a chair.