16. Thyra
Chapter Sixteen
Thyra
Iam ice and darkness.
For hours, I wait, kneeling on the ashen ground at the center of the blackened field I’ve seen in my blade visions.
I’m wearing a black dress, short sleeves, the Dragonstone Blade fully visible on my right arm.
The blood bind is caught in the image of flames and it hasn’t moved on. A strange stopping of the blood bind’s power.
New is the blood-soaked band wrapped around my hand and wrist, a crimson shackle around which my fist remains clenched.
A dusty wind tugs at me, but I’m aware that, far away, my body is freezing and this lazy breeze is really a wild maelstrom.
Hours pass before the False Queen appears, gliding toward me across the ashen ground, her hair as always, a curtain over her face.
She lowers herself to the dark earth opposite me, kneeling for a long, quiet moment, and even though I can’t see her eyes, I feel the weight of her gaze.
I return her stare, my back stiff, my hands folded in my lap, my long braid falling across my left shoulder.
“What choice will you make now, Thyra?” she asks.
I respond with silence, my lips frozen, my throat hoarse from screaming into the wind.
What choices do I have? A bitter question.
“You hold destruction in the palm of your hand,” she whispers and for a moment, her hair parts, revealing an arched eyebrow and one side of her curved lips. “Will you claim Stellen’s pain for your own and use it? Or will you hand it over to those who don’t deserve its power?”
“I don’t want it,” I say.
Her smile fades. “Yet you didn’t warn him.” She leans forward. “You could have told the Frost King what the blood bind was doing, weakening him. I gave you the chance to tell him. You didn’t.”
Her accusation cuts hard.
I didn’t choose to be afflicted with the blood bind, but I allowed fear to stop me from telling Stellen the truth.
“I think you understand how hard you need to fight, Thyra.” The False Queen nods to herself. “Just today, you’ve taken lives. I think, in your heart of hearts, you hate what you have to do, but you do understand that without sacrifices, you won’t survive.”
She dares to reach for me, her pale hand extending toward mine, the color of her skin flushing tan, then quickly bleaching to porcelain, then darkening again, as if she can’t settle on any given hue.
“Now you hold a terrifying power in the palm of your hand.” Her fingertips are the barest inch from mine. “With this power, you could wipe the world clean. Will you seize your chance? Or will you throw it away?”
My brow furrows. “There’s no controlling this storm.”
“Oh, but you can,” she whispers. “Your body is already assimilating the blood on that ribbon.”
I tear my focus away from the queen to glance at the material bound around my hand. So much blood.
Dark liquid pools in my fist and now a droplet appears between my fingers, threatening to fall to my lap.
This was the liquid I felt gathering in my fist before the blade vision struck.
The Dragonstone Blade was forged by a Blood Fae. The blood bind was cast by a Blood Fae. Now the False Queen speaks of the blood that’s pressed up against both the hilt of the blade and one end of the black runes.
“Can you smell it?” she asks, the curtain of her hair parting again to reveal one bright eye, as black as an inky sky. “Blood spilled by murder. The most potent kind.”
From far away, a scream sounds. Fragile and frightened. Floating on the breeze.
I jolt toward the sound, but there’s nothing there.
When I turn back, dark light flickers across the blood bind, mingling with the increasingly crimson energy, and now the blood bind begins to turn away from the shape of flames and into the shape of blood, dripping down my arm, a cascading ripple beginning at the crease inside my elbow and ending at my hand.
The False Queen is suddenly right in front of me.
“Whoomph-whoomph,” she whispers, her voice mimicking the thumping power that threatened to crush me. “Remind you of something?”
Her lips, on the side that I can see, tug up at the corner. “Your heart, perhaps?” she suggests. “Every beat pumping tainted blood through your body. Every thud harnessing a power like no other.”
I shudder at the golden energy pulsing slowly back and forth along the inside of my forearm and the way that energy is turning from gilded yellow to blood red.
Timed to the slow beat of my heart.
As I try to comprehend what the blood could be doing to me, the False Queen leans away.
She rises to her feet while I’m forced to remain where I am, unable to fight back.
“Stay right there, Thyra,” she calls to me as she glides away. “Don’t fight. Don’t fret. Soon enough, the blood will own you, and then all will be as it should be.”