6. Thyra
Chapter Six
Thyra
Itell myself Juniper will know what to do.
Stellen made it clear he can’t go to a healer. Not ever. But if I can get him back to the palace, we can clean his wounds, stitch them if needed, give him clean water, replenish his fluids, keep him alive… Somehow.
He’s been wounded before and survived. Once we deal with the worst of the wounds, I’m certain he’ll just need time to rest.
Nara gives a fierce growl, her claws extending and ripping through the snow as she answers my cry and plows away from the compound.
Before the wolf can make it more than twenty paces, Stellen’s rasp breaks through the rushing wind.
“Nara… The gravesite.”
I’m startled to hear him speak. Relieved. But also, uncertain. “Stellen?”
Nara hasn’t obeyed him, although I have no doubt she heard him. The gravesite is located south of Iker’s compound and east of the Sacred Stone Temple. Most importantly, it’s the opposite direction to Juniper.
Stellen’s eyes remain closed as he draws a deeper breath than he’s taken for long minutes, repeating, sharp and cold. “Nara. Take me to the gravesite.”
The power of his Voice rushes over me.
He warned me that his Voice affects all who hear it, not just his intended target, and it doesn’t seem to matter that he addressed his command to Nara.
As she immediately changes course, I fight the compulsion that goes against every instinct to keep Stellen alive.
“No. Stellen.” I grapple with his weight as I try to see his face, bringing him closer to me. He’s so tall that the only reason I can prop his head back on my shoulder is because he’s badly slumped in my arms. “I’m not taking you there to die.”
His breathing is shallow. Painful sounds.
“Thyra… You have to know… The moment my army sees me wounded like this, they will set upon us and kill us both. You can’t take me anywhere near the palace—”
“Then I’ll take you to the Alak-Teah,” I snap, fear and hurt clouding my voice. “There’s clean water there. A place to rest. I can tend to your wounds. We can shelter there until you’ve—”
“Thyra.” He says my name slowly. Reverently. “Your heart has been my blessing.”
I can’t stifle my sob. The cracking of my heart.
With a shaking hand, he presses his palm to my chest, his pale eyes ghostly white. “I need your help now.”
Help.
I squeeze my eyes closed against my hot tears. “Anything.”
“Take me to my family.”
I want to say no. Because taking him to his family means accepting that he’s preparing to join them.
I fight this fate as his heartbeats dominate my hearing.
Painful, shattering beats.
Not unfeeling. Not heartless. Full of fear and awareness and despair.
“Please,” he whispers. “I’ll hold on until then.”
He takes a deep breath and this time, I hear what I’ve been blocking out.
A song I don’t want to acknowledge.
He might have started breathing its melody right after Lilis attempted to slit his throat—a wound that is the smallest nick trickling blood down his neck because I stopped it from being worse.
Or he might have started forming its melody when the crow screamed from the wall, that haunting shriek.
But I can’t ignore the song now.
With his quietest breaths, he’s creating pure torment.
He’s pinning his own soul to his body.
A song that can’t harm me or impact me because I’m not dying. My soul is part of me and has no need to flee.
My heart is breaking. “I can’t lose you.” I try to speak past the sorrow squeezing my throat tight. “I can’t lose another fae I love.”
He catches his breath, but I won’t take it back or diminish what I said or what I feel.
“You promised to soothe any pain I want soothed and to fight any battle I want fought,” I whisper. “That means fighting for your life. Because losing you is a pain that can never be soothed.”
I try to breathe, still clinging to a hope that’s slipping away from me. “Tell me how to help you live, Stellen. Tell me and I’ll do it, whatever it takes.”
His arm shakes as he presses his palm harder to my heart, his exhalation carrying the melody that’s keeping him alive.
His speech is more tortured, his pale eyes closing. “Take peace, Thyra…where you can find it…”
He falls silent.
Tears glide down my cheeks.
Nara is running so fast now that we could be flying across the snowy fields, her leaps and bounds near weightless, my body taking the pressure of her speed without conscious thought.
High above me, the sun is cold, as it always is above the Frost Kingdom.
Far behind me, the battering of claws and teeth continues as Fable fights for her place in her pack.
Ahead of me, snowflakes sparkle in the air, the lightest fall.
But within me, a scream pushes at my chest as I fight against a future I’m powerless to stop.
Too soon, we descend the final incline toward the gravestone at the center of the vast field.
Nara slows her pace, coming to a stop beside the circle of warm soil covered in vines. At one end rests the gravestone bearing the names of Stellen’s mother and little sister.
My father is buried here, too.
As soon as Nara stops and lowers herself to the ground, Stellen’s hand presses against my chest.
“Thyra, will you help me down?”
My arms and legs feel numb, not part of me, as I ease Stellen off Nara’s back and to the edge of the warm soil.
He sinks to the vine-covered earth, his legs collapsing slowly, one knee, then the other before he slides fully to the earth, lying on his back, his eyes closed, his breathing labored, his Voice carrying that quiet song of torment.
When I reach for the blade in his chest, still uncertain if removing it will be worse than leaving it in place, his hand catches mine.
“Leave it,” he whispers.
I curl up beside him while Nara sets herself down on his other side, licking at the wound across his ribs and then the cut at his neck, her whimpers soft, as if she feels as powerless as I do.
The sunlight is too bright for my sorrow.
“Thyra.” Stellen’s whisper is faint. Like an echo coming at me from far away. Far beyond the veil between life and death. “I need to tell you something important.”
I turn my face up to his. “You had a brother.”
“We were supposed to fight to the death. While I waited for him in the arena, he killed Mother and Safra.” Stellen’s whisper hardens. “So I tore him apart. My father, too. Along with every other fae in that arena.”
I asked Stellen once if he killed his family, as was the practice in the Frost Kingdom’s royal family. He sidestepped the question. An omission instead of an outright lie.
How could I not know?
The fourth room, the empty one, back at the Rose Room suddenly means something.
But I was isolated there, just as Stellen lived in isolation.
I barely spoke with anyone except Lilis and she never mentioned his brother at the time.
Juniper could have told me…maybe would have told me…
but she chose to speak of Stellen’s heart instead.
Like cracking glass, Stellen’s unearthly eyes open and the corners of his mouth turn down, his exhale carrying deep pain and another painful note. “I was too angry. Too broken. I lost myself to grief and I hurt innocent fae. At least there were no children there. No children…”
I catch my breath. “Stellen, you don’t have to—”
“Juniper’s husband.” Icy tears glide down Stellen’s cheeks. “He was there for me. He had no time to run. I repaid his kindness with horrifying pain.”
Stellen warned me he was capable of unforgiveable cruelty and now Lilis’s admonition takes on a heavy implication.
Ask him whom else he killed that day.
I close my eyes. “Lilis’s mother.”
Stellen’s countenance is gray. “Lilis’s father was drunk on thistleberry wine.
Someone from her family had to attend the fight or risk offending my father.
So her mother went instead. Without her mother, Lilis was no longer protected.
I’m responsible for what happened to her after that. She waited a long time for justice.”
He utters a deep exhale, as if he’s expelling the awfulness of these truths. “I need to tell you one more thing—”
“No.” I lurch upward, reaching for his face. “You need to tell me many more things. You need to tell me all the things. Everything.”
He needs to keep talking. As long as he’s talking, he’s staying alive.
“One more truth.” His hand shakes as he reaches for my heart again, pressing his palm to my chest. “I chose heartlessness, not so that I could be cruel, but because my rage had become dangerous. I had to put it somewhere where it wouldn’t hurt another innocent fae.
I wouldn’t go back if I could and choose a different way. ”
He pauses. “But now… I’d give anything to feel love again.”
Tears slide down my cheeks as his fingertips feather my skin.
“You could shatter me and send me into darkness, Thyra, and I wouldn’t care as long as you were with me.
” His gaze runs from my lips to my bare arm where the Dragonstone Blade is emblazoned and the ivory ribbon is marred with dark runes, then across the silver threads bound to my body and back to my face.
His smile is quiet and gentle. “No evil will break down your door and crush your throat.”
I thought my heart was already broken, but this pain is too much for me to bear.
Tears streaming down my cheeks, I press my forehead to his forehead as he continues speaking slowly, every word more aching than the last.
“When I die…I ask that you carve my name on the gravestone. But do not put it beneath my sister’s name. Tip the stone over and carve it into the side now touching the earth. That way…my family’s names will face the sky and mine will face the fields of snow.”
He falls silent and I wait for him to say more. “Stellen?”
I draw back, my fingers cold on his cheeks.
His eyes are blank and his chest is still.
No.
“Stellen!”
On his other side, Nara whimpers, her head hanging low.
A cry leaves my lips, but nothing can fill the void where Stellen’s song has fallen silent.