4. Thyra
Chapter Four
Thyra
Blood sprays as Lilis slices her dagger across Stellen’s throat.
And then I’m on her.
I strike hard, fear and desperation giving me strength as I knock her away from Stellen, my body driving into hers so furiously that we gain air.
I don’t know if she completed the cut.
I don’t have time to look back.
All I can do is count heartbeats.
I close my ears to the sound of Stellen’s body crumpling to the snow, to the soft crunching of icy ground as he lands, and to Nara’s savage howl as she fights to return to him.
I listen only for his heartbeats, the rhythm to which I will now tie my choices.
One heartbeat.
Airborne, near weightless, I’m ready for Lilis to retaliate with all the speed and instinct that has kept her alive in this kingdom.
Her frost power blasts from her hands, pouring over the dagger she still grips, ice striking across the short distance to my chest while her other hand punches at my face.
Two heartbeats.
I deflect both of her hits, sending her icy power wide while every thread of my Lethian armor that is now in contact with her body streams from me to her, wrapping around her torso, shooting across her arms and legs, an impenetrable force blasting around her, but not into the form of armor.
Into shackles.
A web forms around her, tying her limbs into knots.
Three heartbeats.
We hit ground, tumbling across the snow, headed toward Brunkil, who is forced to leap to the side, away from Stellen.
As we roll, Lilis struggles to free her arms and legs, her body bumping against the ground, but the more she fights, the tighter the threads pull.
She screams with frustration as she comes to a stop, managing to make it up to her knees, only for the threads to tighten again, forcing her back to the snow, where her arms are now bound behind her and her head is forced down over her knees.
Four heartbeats. Slower now.
I drop beside Lilis, snatch the wood-handled dagger from her immobilized hand, and slap it to my thigh, where some of the remaining silver threads form a harness around it. Near simultaneously, I smack the back of her neck with my other hand, causing a final thread to sweep around her throat.
With that thread, I could tear through her neck at any moment.
She freezes where she kneels.
It all happens so fast that Brunkil has barely made it back to his feet, and the Northerners fighting Nara only now seem to realize what’s happening.
So much of my silver armor now binds Lilis that I’m left in a bodysuit that extends down only my right thigh and a small portion of my left shoulder, although my pelvis and breasts are fully covered.
The air is icy, but Stellen is all I care about.
My focus snaps to his crumpled form.
I listen…listen…listen…
A sob of relief rises to my throat as his next heartbeat registers in my hearing.
Slow. Stuttering. But there.
Now to get out of here and somehow heal him.
Wrenching on Lilis with all my might, I wrap my hands in the threads across the middle of her back, threads that respond to my needs, allowing me to grip firmly and haul her across the snow toward Stellen.
She is my bargaining piece.
When Brunkil launches himself after me, I roar. “Stay back, Brunkil! Lilis called the Winter Strife. If she dies, you have nothing.”
“Except your skin,” he growls.
It’s an empty threat. I know it. He knows it.
Whatever alliance he has with Lilis, I may not yet understand the nuances of it, but I recognize Brunkil’s craving for power. Without her, he will go back to a life of fighting Frost Fae in the Northern Wilds.
He hunches within his fur coat, his clawed fingers raking the snow, but he doesn’t make a move toward me, his lips drawing back from his sharp teeth before he shouts to his people, “Stand down.” Then he seethes, “For now.”
He doesn’t spare a glance for the shapeshifters who were killed during our initial fight, appearing unfazed about the bodies of his dead brethren littering the field.
I tumbled so far that I’ve ended up distanced from Stellen once again. As I drag Lilis toward him, I, too, give a call. “Nara, get to Stellen!”
The white wolf snaps her jaws at the nearest shapeshifter, forcing the fae back before she races to her master.
Reaching Stellen, she whines softly as she nudges his shoulder with her nose.
He lies on his side, his form hunched, his bloodied hair covering much of his face and neck. His chest rises and falls, but shallowly and other than that, he doesn’t stir.
I try to take hope because blood isn’t pooling around his body at his neck—or at his side any longer—but his stillness frightens me.
“What’s your plan, Thyra?” Lilis asks, her voice strained. “I’ve invoked the Winter Strife. By Frost Law, a battle of armies must now ensue.”
“Armies?” My lips twist. “You’re the Frost General. All Frost soldiers follow you. So do the Northerners. You planned this well.”
I don’t know exactly how the Strife is supposed to play out, but Lilis has positioned herself for victory.
It was only this morning that Stellen’s soldiers looked at him with anything other than fear and loathing. Their loyalty to Lilis was clear in their desire to see her rescued. They will follow her in a heartbeat.
“You’re right,” she says. “Stellen has an army of one: him alone. When he dies, it’s all over. Assuming you don’t join him. In which case, he has an army of two, and both of you must die. Is that what you want?”
What I want is for the pain to stop.
I’m barely holding on to my sanity right now, timing my footsteps to the slow beats of Stellen’s heart while Brunkil and his pack begin to prowl around us.
The only shapeshifter who doesn’t join them is Fable. I first met her on the field outside the Alak-Teah. She was with Brunkil that day and he commanded her to attack me. She only stopped when I warned her she was about to die.
She didn’t join the fight on this field before, remaining in her wolf form within the shadows of the compound’s gate, her head low, patches of her fur matted with blood. Her whimpers break through my focus. She’s injured, but not by me or Stellen.
Lilis is still speaking. “Don’t tie your life to Stellen’s, Thyra—”
“How long,” I growl into her ear before I drag her another step, “have you been allied with the Northerners?”
She winces. “Since I was sixteen years old.”
That long?
“Why did you join them?”
Opposite us, Brunkil’s ears prick up and he slows his pacing. His hearing is as sharp as Stellen’s and he will be able to perceive even a whispered conversation between Lilis and me.
He smirks. “Tell her, Lilis.”
“Because I did what you must never do in Frost,” Lilis says. “I asked for help.”
Never ask for help.
It was one of Stellen’s first warnings.
“Never ever ask for help,” I say.
“I had no choice,” she snaps. “My father had just sold me to Iker Silversten. My mother wasn’t alive to stop him.
I was allowed to take one thing with me, so I chose my white wolf.
But…” Lilis drags in a breath. “The first time Iker hit me, my wolf bit him. He killed her, dragged her body out into a snowstorm and me with her. He threw me a dagger and told me that if I could cut her open, I’d find enough warmth within her carcass to survive until morning. ”
My stomach turns. Even highborn Frost Fae can’t endure the freezing snowstorms that pound their kingdom at night—and sometimes even in the day.
I experienced those icy temperatures for myself, kept alive only because Stellen sang to me.
First, a cruel song that pinned my soul to my dying body, stopping me from sinking into death.
Then a melody that stirred my blood and filled me with physical need.
He made me cling to life until he could get me to the hot springs within the Alak-Teah.
“That’s how Brunkil found me,” Lilis says. “Shapeshifters are like white wolves. They can survive the cold. Brunkil told me he would help me. For a price.”
The alpha grins, his fingernails turning to claws beneath his sleeves as he points at Stellen. “The Winter Strife was my price.”
“A lifelong debt,” Lilis whispers. “The next morning, I waited outside that very gate, slathered in blood so Iker would think I’d stayed alive by crawling into my wolf’s belly.”
A chill creeps down my spine at her mention of being slathered in blood. “Whose blood?”
Lilis is silent, but Brunkil picks his teeth.
“Her wolf made a tasty meal,” he says.
Suddenly, I remember the aftermath of the encounter with Brunkil outside the Alak-Teah. Stellen ensured I took note that not a single white wolf except for Nara remained on that field. Lilis had ordered all of the white wolves away.
“From that moment on, I had two masters,” Lilis says. “I became Iker’s favorite courtesan while secretly training with the shapeshifters. It took five years, but eventually, I was strong enough to infiltrate Stellen’s palace and make an attempt on his life.”
“Except that she failed.” Brunkil snarls, beginning to pace again, his pack taking up formation behind him.
“I didn’t invoke the Winter Strife that day,” Lilis says, “but I saw my chance to escape Iker, so I took it.”
Stellen told me that Lilis had come to him for a quick death. Instead of ending her, he gave her the choice to join him.
He warned me that Lilis wanted him dead, and when I asked him why, he answered that she had many reasons.
She may have escaped Iker that day, but she didn’t escape Brunkil.
There is no mercy in Frost without a price.
“And now it’s come to this.” My voice grows harsh as my focus flashes to the bodies hanging from the wall.
When we arrived outside the compound, Stellen could hear only forty heartbeats within it, the same number as Lilis and the shapeshifters.
“What of the innocent fae who lived in this compound?” I demand to know. “The children, the courtesans, the lowborn who had no choice—”
“They’re alive.” Lilis gasps, her breath hissing indignantly between her teeth. “Edgar got them out.”
“Edgar?”
“Iker’s son, the illegitimate one. When Iker died, Edgar was finally able to give himself a name. Before Brunkil attacked the compound, Edgar got all of the innocent fae out. I don’t know to where they escaped, and I didn’t ask.”
I had an Oracle vision about Edgar. It was the way he looked at Lilis in the vision that stayed with me. He was protective, worried about her. Maybe worried about what she was in the middle of and the part he had to play in it. He grew up in Iker’s compound with Lilis. A hellish life.
I don’t see him here.
“Is Edgar the one who carved that wolf for you?”
When I trained in Lilis’s quarters, there was an intricately carved wolf set in pride of place in a cavity in the wall outside her training room.
Lilis catches her breath. “Yes.”
“Why a wolf?”
“A white wolf,” she corrects me. “Because they’re loyal. It was Edgar’s way of saying he would never abandon me.” She leans against the thread around her throat, her purple eyes suddenly on mine. “No matter what I’ve done.”
We’re nearly to Stellen now. Only another few paces and we’ll reach him. And then I’ll have to make a decision.
To kill Lilis or let her live.
“What happens if I end you, Lilis?” I ask quietly.
“My army is supposed to stop you.”
I study Brunkil and the Northerners. “If they can’t?”
“If I die, the Winter Strife dissolves.”
It won’t be that simple. The Strife may be ended, but I will have killed the Frost General. The Frost army, loyal to Lilis, will come after me to avenge her.
That isn’t the only reason I hesitate.
A weight settles in my chest. Up on the wall of the compound, a white crow caws, a haunting scream on the wind that brings a chill to my spine.
I should be moving already. Every second I delay is costing Stellen.
But he had multiple chances to end Lilis and he didn’t, and now that her life is in my hands…
It matters.
His choices matter.
“You know what you have to do.” Her expression is blank as she stares up at me. “Do it.”
Stellen told me a minute can be a lifetime. He told me to take peace in the quiet moments. This isn’t a quiet moment. Far from it. All around me, shapeshifters snarl. Bodies swish in the wind. My fear is chaotic. But part of what he meant was that the details matter, and I can’t ignore them.
Lilis’s silver hair is tangled in my armor’s threads. Her face is bloodied, but I’m not responsible for those wounds. Neither is Stellen.
Blood is clotting at Lilis’s temple, one of her cheekbones is busted, and her other eye is bloodshot. I saw clearly the claw marks in her armor when I leaped at her. The rents in the metal are real. The wounds beneath them are seeping blood.
She had these injuries when we arrived.
Her white wolf is nowhere to be seen. Neither is Edgar, the only fae she might care about.
Back to the shadows beneath the gate, my attention returns to Fable, to the blood matting her fur. Then up to the bodies, which have been dead for days.
Lilis’s wounds are fresh. So are Fable’s. They didn’t get them in a fight with the Silverstens.
My focus flickers to the wood-handled dagger strapped to my thigh. Like the knife Lilis drove into Stellen’s chest, this one’s handle is made of ashen-brown wood with unusual whorls in it.
Any number of pieces of this wood, have been used against me. I have no way of knowing how many times I’ve been prevented from foreseeing events that have harmed me or others.
I don’t know exactly how long Lilis carried these daggers, or if she knows what they do, but as long as she had them on her person, I couldn’t foresee any harm she might cause.
Or any harm that might come to her.
Finally, I consider Brunkil. The spittle in his braided beard. The fresh blood on his neck, glistening and tacky in the cold midday sun.
Damn.
“Lilis,” I whisper, “why did Stellen speak to you of justice?”
Shadows form in her purple eyes, but she doesn’t answer my question.
Turning her face away, she focuses on the snow. “I remember the first time we met. You and I. You had no weapons, and yet you faced me as if you would fight me with every inch of your very soul.”
I never surrendered. Not to her.
“You called me ‘a wretched, ugly creature’ and ‘a pathetic lowborn.’”
“Yeah.” She gives a soft snort. “I said that.” She’s quiet before she continues. “Imagine a different world, Thyra. One where I could be queen. You could be Oracle. Imagine the world we could create, where no woman ever had to kneel to a man.”
Icy air rushes across my bare skin, brushing across my fingers that would have once turned blue in this cold, that did once turn blue.
Up on the wall, the crow caws again, but softly this time, a wail on the wind.
Lilis sighs into the snow. “Stellen’s running out of time, Thyra. If you want to save him, you must not hesitate.” And then she adds, as cold as ever, “If our positions had been reversed, I would have killed you already.”
I know it.
But I am not her.
I certainly don’t owe Brunkil a fucking life debt.
Quietly, I recall a moment that feels like hours ago but is more like minutes when Stellen caught my eye during the fight with the shapeshifters and murmured…
“Warrior and queen,” I say.
Oh, but chaos will control me.