51. Thyra
Chapter Fifty-One
Thyra
What did they see?
I jolt awake, trying to rouse my heavy limbs to match the speed my mind is suddenly working, even if my thoughts are a jumbled mess.
Antony and Stellen said something before I drifted to sleep, something they saw during—
Memories of heated desire crash across me seconds before I register the strong arms pulling me closer and an aching need already growing between my legs.
“You’re awake.” Antony’s voice is muffled against the side of my neck. The slight scratch of his fangs might have alarmed me before yesterday, but not today.
“What did you see?” I ask urgently, turning in his arms before I realize that he and I are alone. “Where’s Stellen?”
“Standing watch. I took first shift. Nara doesn’t like me, but she and I managed to get along.” Antony’s voice muffles again as he plants kisses down my arm, then across my stomach, using my changed position to nudge the blanket aside and work his way up to my breasts.
The rush of air confirms how naked I am under this blanket. My armor hums innocently where it has taken the shape of a flowing gown at the base of the bed. Antony’s axe rests against the wall behind my armor.
My hands tangle in Antony’s hair and I’m ready to pull him closer because damn, I would prefer to forget why I woke up in such a panic.
With determination, I press my hands to his shoulders. “Antony?”
He raises his head where his lips were inches from closing over my breast, the promise of pleasure sending heat into my already-wet core.
I manage to maintain the stern press of my lips, but only just.
“Okay.” Antony gives me a reluctant nod. Then, just as quietly, he says, “Stellen, you need to get down here.”
Footfalls sound on the stairs a moment later. Stellen is dressed, surprisingly, in Ember Fae clothing, but I guess it makes sense that he would want to blend in, especially if seen from a distance.
He carries a cup of fresh water, bringing it to me while I untangle myself from the blanket and Antony slides out from the other side of the bed. He’s also dressed in Ember warrior clothing, a fact I should have registered before now, but his kisses were a little distracting.
“Hydration first,” Stellen murmurs, although his lips curve as the blanket falls to my waist, leaving me naked when I reach for the water.
Antony folds his arms across his chest, taking up position at the entrance nearest to the base of the steps. “I’ll keep guard.”
I gulp down the water and hand the cup back to Stellen, but I don’t have a chance to speak before he says, “Bathing room.”
Setting the cup onto the floor, he hoists me over his shoulder, carrying me into the adjoining room before I can get my head straight.
“Pee. Then dress,” he says. “Then we can talk.”
I finally catch my breath, ready to tell him I can walk on my own, when his hand wraps across the back of one of my naked thighs, his fingers slip between my legs, and—
I can’t stop my moan. Oh, the distractions.
A moment later, we pass into a third room located to the side of the bathing room.
Stellen’s wicked smile as he sets me back on my feet tells me he knows exactly the state in which he’s leaving me as he backs through the door.
“Take your time, Thyra.” His pale-as-snow eyes rake my form. “We aren’t going anywhere.”
My armor floats past him on its way to me, rearranging itself into a warrior’s suit, as if it were telling me to focus.
Message received.
I briefly consider the shelves of clothing on the left wall, noting that Antony’s armor has been pieced together and now rests on one of those shelves, and then the toilet cubicles on the right before I hurry to take care of myself.
When I return to the barracks room, I’m fully dressed, an inner layer of my armor hiding beneath an outer layer of what must be fire-resistant warrior’s clothing, judging by the unusual weave and weight of the material.
I combed my hair as best I could with my fingers but left it loose, seeking my yellow ribbon on the bathing-room floor.
Stellen waits for me at the entrance into the barracks, the ribbon laid across his palm. “May I?”
He must have cleaned the ribbon because it appears pristine.
“Please do,” I say.
Reaching for my hair, he carefully braids the ribbon into it, finishing by running his hand down the entire braid, but he doesn’t tug me closer to him.
Antony looms in the background. Both men are quiet.
“What did you see?” I ask.
“We saw a shadow,” Antony says. “Rising at your back.”
“We want to believe it was a trick of the light.” Stellen’s gaze becomes heated again. “Or a consequence of being consumed by you, Thyra.”
Antony moves closer, reaching for me. “But we’re certain the black thread appeared. Only for a second. We can’t ignore that that could mean something.”
“Mean what?” I ask, although I don’t expect an answer. There are too many unknowns in my world. A picture that, despite my Oracle power, I can’t yet see.
As I expected, they both shake their heads.
I close my eyes, my fingertips pressing to my temples. “I need… We need…”
Stellen’s calming voice washes over me. “Remember to take peace where you find it.”
Immediately, I reach for his hand. And Antony’s. Holding firm. This is my peace.
“I need to know everything you both know,” I say. “Everything you haven’t told me. Even the things you have told me but that you haven’t told each other. We need to talk.”
“Agreed,” they both say.
“After that, you need to read the page,” Antony adds.
“The piece of paper you brought with you?” I ask.
He nods. “The Chronicle’s missing page. Apparently, it contains a message from the False Queen herself.”
At this news, I can’t suppress my shudder.
“I’m supposed to read it?” I nearly drop their hands, not liking this suggestion.
“Every interaction I’ve had with the False Queen has threatened to destroy a part of me.
My heart, my hope, my soul. Her spirit is so…
fucking…evil. What if this is a trap she set all those years ago?
Like the hammer? And like this blood bind? ”
Antony squeezes my hand before I can back away.
“I don’t think the page is a trap. My mother said—” He pauses, his hold on me easing. “No, you’re right. We have to treat everything with suspicion. We can’t take anything at face value. Even if we trust the person giving us the information, they themselves could have been deceived.”
I’m a little caught on the mention of his mother.
“That was your mother?” I ask, a flood of hope suddenly swamping me. “Back there in the darkness?”
“Yeah.” His chest rises and falls with a deep breath. “I want to tell you all about it. Let’s talk, Thyra. Then you can make decisions.”
We pull up a table and chairs from the far side of the barracks. Antony brings fresh water and fiber cakes he finds in the storage cupboard, also at the back of the barracks. Stellen places the satchel containing scrolls and maps onto the table, telling us that the page is in there too.
Antony talks first, telling us everything that happened to him since the fight with Stellen in the bloodlands.
How he woke up, fought Maxim, and found his mother.
He doesn’t hold back describing what that was like, especially the pain of having to hand her over to Maxim and trust that she’d be safe with him.
He skips forward to what she told him last night about the blood bind, that it had been meant to help me but had been altered during her lifetime.
And then he tells me about the impact of the blood bind on him, how it struck each night.
Jabbing at his chest, he says, “The only way I could break through the force keeping me away from you in the vision was to rip open my own heart.”
I’m shaken by his description of what he saw each time the blood bind struck: me, unconscious, dressed in white, floating beneath the enormous boughs of a blackened tree.
Shadows moved all around that tree, the wood shrieking as the shadows cut the tree apart.
One of those boughs was about to fall on me.
“Every night, that’s what I saw,” Antony says, his fangs appearing. “I never once reached you in time to save you.”
Hot tears burn my eyes at the way he grips my hand, the unrestrained fear in his face.
“I wish I’d known that was happening,” I whisper. “The blood bind struck while I was sleeping. I wasn’t aware of what it was doing.”
“Neither was I,” Stellen says. “But that seems to match with how your blade visions work. If we’re with you, we aren’t incapacitated by your visions.
Or pulled to where you are. Or, in Antony’s case, pulled into some version of a vision.
” He leans back in his seat. “Let’s come back to this. Antony, what happened next?”
“Once my mother was safe, I hunted Hadrian’s followers, killing them and collecting as many pieces of that wood as I could find. I needed a purpose and that was my mission.”
Antony continues with his story, filling us in about freeing Victor and hearing about Hadrian’s determination to copy the Chronicle. Then Antony describes how, after he saw me in person in Frost, he was swept up in the snowstorm and rescued by Cassia and Victor.
“Victor made sure every weapon he designed for Hadrian has a weakness,” Antony says. “But it’s the sheer fucking mountain of that wood I’m concerned about. It blocks your Oracle power.”
“But sadly not my blade visions,” I add.
He nods. “Well, the tree I saw in the vision is enormous. The pieces I took from Hadrian’s followers are nothing compared to it. I’ve been stashing those pieces in the bloodlands, but my mission feels hopeless now.”
“The tree is in the east,” I say. “I heard its screams when I opened the Chronicle to a page showing the wasteland in the east.” Even now, I shudder at the memory of that painful creaking, the wrongness of breaking wood. “Hadrian needs to transport the wood here somehow, right?”
Antony gives me a suddenly vicious smile. “We can destroy his supply route.” He arches his eyebrows at me. “You’ll have to come with us, Thyra, since we need to stay at your side.”