Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Thyra
The sun’s final rays disappear, the sky taking on the hue of dusk, a deepening blue that should be calming.
Yet I can’t shake the awful dread building to an unbearable level within my body.
Can’t ignore the sudden, heavy silence. Far more intense than any silence I’ve ever experienced. So heavy it seems even the fleeing animals have stopped moving. Stopped still. Stopped breathing.
Nothing stirs.
A flash of dark light in the distance makes me jolt.
An instant later, darkness rushes across the sky, pouring toward us from the west, filling the atmosphere so completely it could be black liquid streaming through the air.
Within seconds, a dark canopy stretches out above us, seemingly endless, originating from the west and extending north, south, and east as far as I can see.
Speech strangles in my throat as I grapple with what this means.
Suddenly, horrifyingly, bloodthirsty screeches echo in my memory.
“Vampyrs,” I whisper.
Only light keeps them at bay.
Antony said the curse had cast the Iron Kingdom into darkness. I assumed it was a euphemism for dark times, but now it seems he meant it literally.
“Vampyrs,” he confirms.
My heart pounds as I wonder if he brought me further east because the bloodlands lie in the west, and we’re currently located much further from it than the Starlit City. We’re safer right now than his family is.
I try to turn to him, but he grips me too tightly for me to move, his commands continuing to sound in my ear. “Wait, Thyra. Watch.”
I do, holding my breath, but the darkness only thickens, and my dread builds. Far, far in the distance, I imagine the shrieking vampyrs screaming to feast.
“Fuck.” Antony’s soft curse thrums through me. “She’s fucking punishing me—”
Just then, bright-white light bursts across the sky. It explodes from a spot that could be the Starlit City, streaming upward in a breathtaking pillar and spreading outward as quickly as the darkness did.
Within the bright light, intense sparkles form, the light drawing together in near-countless patches until they resemble stars.
“A constellation,” I whisper, trying to calm my breathing. “How?”
“That,” Antony replies, his voice wry, “is my mother’s power.”
His arms fall away from me, finally allowing me to turn and face him.
“Your mother creates this light?”
“Starlight,” he says. “Every night. Without her, we would be overrun by vampyrs, fighting for our lives against the swarms.”
I consider the interaction Antony had with Lady Delphina and how he spoke of his mother, the tension that was clear in his tone and choice of words. And even just now, he’d said, she’s punishing me.
I also consider what he said about his mother controlling the Constellation and the Starlit Court.
“Is she the only one with this power?”
I imagine his jaw clenching beneath his armor. The grit of his teeth.
“She came from a mountain tribe that called themselves the Vividari.” He points to his face. “They all had these green eyes.”
It doesn’t escape me that he described the tribe in the past tense.
“What happened to them?”
“My father happened.” He begins at a slow pace to the side, only a few steps before the chain pulls tight and he turns back, a prowling action.
“The Iron Kingdom’s only defense against the darkness was to make an alliance with the Vividari, which the original general did, marrying a woman from that tribe.
“He thought his children would inherit the power of light, and all would be well. Not so. Only full-blooded Vividari control the level of power needed to push back the darkness across the kingdom. So each Iron King married a Vividari woman, and with each marriage, the Vividari became more demanding.” Antony stops pacing. “My father didn’t take kindly to that.”
“What did he do?”
“He slaughtered them. Every last one except Mother.”
“But that’s—”
Antony gives a harsh laugh as he draws to a stop in front of me. “My father was a tyrant. He lived for violence. He wasn’t known for thinking things through.”
I exhale slowly as I consider the pain bleeding into Antony’s voice, remembering the way he’d asked me if my father was a good man. If my father were kind to me or if he had beaten me.
I’m quiet, wishing I could acknowledge what all of this must have meant for Antony, but I don’t know how. Not when there is such a large gap between him and me, the connection between us literally formed by a shackle and a chain.
“The Vividari power,” I say. “You used it in the bloodlands.”
“Tried to.” He scoffs. “To the extent that I can.”
He had swung his weapon back and forth, the ringing iron humming in the air while a glow had built around the edges of his blade. Then he’d struck his axe upward, sending the magic he gathered around himself into the darkness, an explosion of light.
“I thought it had something to do with your axe.”
He rolls his shoulders, a hint of discomfort. “It helps if I channel the power through iron.”
I thought, at the time, that the light he created had something to do with his weapon, but it sounds like the blade was only a conduit.
“What about your siblings?”
He gives a heavy exhale. “Cassia inherited the power more strongly than we, her brothers, did. But it’s still only a tenth of Mother’s power.”
I chew my lip. “So your mother holds your kingdom’s safety in her hands.”
“She knows it,” Antony replies.
I gesture to the sky now filled with stars. “If your mother has this immense power over light, why doesn’t she destroy the bloodlands? Stop the vampyrs once and for all?”
“She can’t. Even the strongest Vividari light can’t illuminate the bloodlands. They remain forever dark. A constant threat. Until the curse is broken, we won’t be free of them.”
A curse he wants me to break.
We’re actually talking. He’s answering my questions freely, without doubt or suspicion. I don’t want to return to the subject of the curse, but there’s no way around it.
“Why do you think I can break this curse?”
“Because only another female Oracle can do it,” he says. “You’re the first female Oracle since the False Queen.”
I hold my arm upright, turning the inked image of the blade into the starlight.
I can only pray he’ll hear me out.
“You have no reason to believe me,” I begin.
“Just as I have no guarantee that you’ll tell me the truth.
But before this morning, I had never touched this blade.
My father forbade it. What’s more, he refused to tell me anything about it.
I knew nothing of its history or where it came from.
I had no knowledge of any curse. And worse, I don’t… ”
Antony hasn’t interrupted me. It looks as if he’s listening, but a cold light enters his eyes that warns me he won’t believe me. When it comes to the curse, he seems to think I’ll lie and cheat, and trick him.
Still, I’m determined to speak the truth. “I don’t know—”
“Do not tell me you don’t know how to break the curse, because I don’t believe you.”
I try to breathe in the face of his anger. His certainty that I’m lying.
“Do you truly think me to be so hateful that I would rather leave the three kingdoms at war? That I would leave the Iron Kingdom to face vampyrs every night, than put a stop to it?” I jab my upturned hand toward the sky.
“How does that benefit me? I’m a prisoner because of it!
I’m in danger because of it. If I knew how to break this curse, I’d do it. ”
His response is savage, and at first, I don’t follow his meaning.
“We call her the False Queen,” he snaps, “not because she wasn’t the Serulian King’s rightful wife, but because her heart was false. If your heart is also false—”
“Then cruelty is my only aim,” I finish for him, quickly understanding his point, closing my eyes against the bitterness that rises within me. “No matter the pain I might cause myself in the process.”
I wonder what cruelty he experienced that made him see the world this way. That he could believe I’d gladly hurt myself as long as it causes pain to others.
I wonder if this is the damage his father caused him.
Or even, given how he speaks about his mother, what she might have done to him.
Either way, I don’t know how to move forward.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.
Unwrap the blade, and your path will be clear. That’s what Father told me before he died.
Well, my path isn’t clear. Nothing is fucking clear.
My voice rises with frustration. “This damn blade is part of me!” I tug on the chain, pulling hard, but all it does is force my arm to extend, outstretched between me and the Iron King. “I didn’t choose this. I didn’t ask for it. I don’t want it.”
My skin pinches as the chain bites into my wrist, and the pain should alarm me, but a scream is building within my chest.
I have nowhere to put my frustration. Nowhere to put my anger.
I jerk backward, the chain only yanking more harshly against my wrist, and I’m barely aware of Antony’s response when the blade’s image flashes, blinding golden light spears up my arm and across my vision, consuming everything around me, including Antony’s form.
No.
Not again.
Please. Not another vision.
I have no control, and my surroundings vanish.
I brace for the scorching pain of iron dust and chains. Brace to find myself nearly naked and circled in flames or doused in ice.
Instead—
I land on my knees, ash floating up around me while charred earth stretches in every direction as far as I can see.
Before me stands a tall, willowy woman, dressed in black, her dark hair blowing across her face, the wind plucking at her dress just as it tugs at the thin, white dress covering my body.
White ribbons twine around me, pressing the dress to my curves, but this time, they’re scattered with rose petals.
Delicate ivory petals fall about me as the ribbons slither across my body, tightening around my waist and chest and reaching up toward my throat.
I try to stand, pulling against the ribbons, trying to stop them from closing around my neck, but the moment I touch them, the edges of the rose petals become sharp, cutting my fingers, forcing me to freeze.
Forcing me to remain kneeling in the black dust, my hands at my throat, the ribbon tightening and tightening…
My name sounds on the breeze.
“Thyra.”
The woman, until now frozen like the statue of the False Queen herself, sinks to the ash in front of me, kneeling opposite me, her black dress spreading across the dark powder.
The dark material nudges the folds of my white dress while a single ivory petal floats to her black dress between us.
She reaches out to press the tip of her forefinger beneath my chin.
“Do not fight me, for you will not win.”
Her words are soft. Alluring. Cunning.
I try to speak, but I have no voice. No breath in this place. All I have is a determined thought: I won’t be your pawn.
It seems that my thoughts alone are enough, because the tip of her forefinger twitches.
“Oh, Thyra. Of course not.”
Her hair billows again in the wind, and this time the strands lift away from her mouth, revealing her crimson lips as she whispers, “You will be my revenge.”