Chapter Sixty-Four Antony #2
“Misdirection,” he says. “Implicate the other kings. That sort of thing.”
“You’ve been grinding iron to dust.”
“For years.”
Years.
“Then, why now?”
His forehead crinkles. “What do you mean?”
I peer at him from behind the jagged strands of my hair. “Assuming you’re doing everything that this man, Stanimir, tells you, why reveal your hand now?”
Hadrian takes a step toward me, and every hint of innocence fades from his eyes, his lips twisting and his fists closing.
I draw a sharp breath as the pools of iron dust scorching my chest respond to his gesture, forming fine lines. Razor-sharp. The granules come so close together that they’re blades cutting my skin.
“It’s always fascinated me how much pain you’re willing to take,” Hadrian muses. “Almost like you welcome it. A punishment, maybe, for all your sins.”
I grind between my teeth, “Why now?”
“Because it’s time for you to make a choice.”
As he steps toward me, the blades he created slice deep.
My hands tighten around my weapons while blood trickles down my chest, but I remind myself that pain doesn’t matter.
Hadrian’s right: I welcome pain.
It fucking keeps me alive.
“What choice?” I ask.
“Your throne or Thyra.”
Surging fury within my poisoned heart fills me with the overwhelming need to drive my axe through Hadrian’s throat. To fucking tear him apart.
“What have you done to Thyra?”
“She needs you, Antony.” Hadrian watches me with a piercing gaze as he begins a slow pace back and forth.
“If you want to save her, you’ll have to give up your place in this kingdom.
Victor can’t be king. The highborn can’t stand to look at him.
And it seems you’ve done Cassia the kindness of allowing her to fuck off. Which leaves me.”
My voice is a dangerous snarl. Low. Soft. “What. The fuck. Did you do to Thyra?”
“I told her the truth.” A gleam of anticipation grows in my brother’s eyes as his blades slice even deeper, spilling more blood. “Your worst truth.”
I drag in a breath.
A sudden, sickening horror fills my mouth, but I swallow it down. Deny it.
Hadrian can’t know what happened.
Anyone who knew is dead.
He licks his lips, trailing his hands back and forth in the air, causing the blades to slowly slice back and forth…
“Our poor father,” he says. “He had such glorious plans to rid himself of both you and Aeliana that night, but she saved you.”
Hadrian’s steps swish in the grass as he draws closer.
Dangerously close to me.
“She was actually trying to kill you, though, wasn’t she?” he says. “Your own mother. So fucking terrified of you that—”
I launch myself forward, ramming the assassin’s knife at my brother’s stomach while my axe cleaves the air toward his throat.
Perfect strikes.
He responds far faster than I thought he could, darting backward while punching both of his hands forward. The compression of iron across my chest knocks me back the scant inch it takes for my blades to miss their marks.
Within seconds, Hadrian swings at me with fists now covered in congealing iron dust, forming metal gloves.
Iron that doesn’t appear to be burning him.
“I will no longer be overlooked!” he screams as his iron-covered fists collide with the deepest wounds across my chest, one after the other in breathtaking succession, driving the air from my lungs.
I’m stunned at how fast he moves.
As fast as me.
In that split second before my reflexes kick in, a realization streaks through my mind that shakes me to my core: Hadrian is as strong as a king.
I duck and evade as he continues to hit at me, his fists now barely missing me.
He roars at me as he moves, his words nearly unintelligible, “It took only days for Thyra to burrow into your life. Mere fucking days for her to matter to you. But me? Your own fucking brother? I’m less than a smear of shit beneath your boots.
For her, you’d tear yourself apart. But for me…
You’ve never protected me. Never looked out for me. Galla hurt me, too!”
I leap back, and this time, he stops coming at me, his chest heaving, fists falling to his sides, eyes glistening with furious tears.
The corners of my mouth turn down. “Hadrian…”
He tips his chin. Drags in a breath. Snarls at my outstretched hand, rejecting it.
“There’s a part of me that understands.” He nods. “This power Thyra has. She’s nothing to look at, but the way she sees you… Right into your fucking soul. It’s so fucking enticing. Even now, I wish she’d fly back to me so I could wrap my hands around her neck, crush her ribs, cut her a little—”
Any regret I felt vanishes.
My fist cracks across his face, but he moves fast.
Too fast.
And too late, I have another realization: I am his prey.
There’s a snap. A split second later, pain tears through my chest.
Hadrian steps back from me, his fist clutched around the iron blade he wrenched from my chest, its corroded surface dripping with my blood.
My leather strap falls to the ground, snapped apart. My body goes into shock, and I drop to my knees, blood gushing from the open wound in my chest. A gaping hole that the corroded dagger filled only seconds ago.
“Hadrian…” I try to breathe past the paralyzing trauma to my heart, the removal of the blade making it seize and sputter. “What have you done?”
He looks down at me from his full height, his expression clean and blank. “You made your choice.”
His grip loosens around the rusty dagger he pulled from my chest, dangling it in his fingertips, as if he wants me to see every detail of it.
This blade has kept me alive for years.
Its once-smooth surface is tarnished and pockmarked from all its years resting within my poisoned heart.
This dagger, whose protruding end was concealed behind my leather strap and which I would thump…
thump to drive it back into place, making sure it never worked its way free of my body, because the pain of iron rammed into my chest was far less than the agony of losing my mind to the dark poison that was inflicted on me.
This dagger…that my mother tried to kill me with. Because it was my life or hers.
Somehow, the iron saved me. As it burned and scorched, it saved me.
She saved me…
I slump forward onto the grass, my hands landing in a pool of blood, the puddle into which the corroded blade now drips.
Even if I thought I could prevail over Hadrian to seize the blade and drive it back into my heart, its surface is too degraded, a harsh revelation that I was living on borrowed time already.
As for other sources of iron, I left my other iron daggers behind. The blade of my axe is too wide to do the same work. Every grain of iron that was gathered across my chest now flies back to its master, too small for me to control. Even if I could, Hadrian would rip them out again.
With each drip of blood to the ground, my life as I know it…shatters.
Everything I’ve clung to rips apart, tearing into pieces. Hope, faith, even lies. All of it, fading.
My breathing is increasingly shallow.
My heart begins to beat again, and now it’s slower. Insidiously slow.
A darkness fills my mind that I’ve fought since I was a child.
An innocent child. Destroyed by the cruel ambitions of others.
Not innocent anymore.
Hadrian crouches opposite me, pulling my axe away from me where it rested beneath my hand, sliding it toward himself across the grass. “You won’t need this anymore.”
As he leans forward, I catch sight of a dark object, partially hidden by his lapel, attached to a chain around his neck.
I force my body to obey my will, my hand snapping out, yanking the amulet forward, pulling hard on the chain it’s attached to. “What is this?”
“Oh, this.” Appearing unperturbed, Hadrian peels my fingers away from the object, holding it up for me to see.
A small, rectangular piece of wood. Smooth. Ashen-brown. Distinctive whorls circling around and around on its surface.
Just like the hilt of the assassin’s knife resting beneath my hand on the grass.
“Stanimir gave this amulet to me,” Hadrian says. “It was cut from a tree in the east. A very special tree. Its wood protects me from an Oracle’s power.” A smile plucks at the corners of his mouth. “Any Oracle. Even Thyra.”
“What do you mean protects you?”
“It disrupts her Oracle power. She can’t foresee my actions.
Or the actions of anyone carrying a piece of this wood.
Friend or foe.” Hadrian leans forward again, a conspiratorial whisper on his lips.
“Stanimir has gone to great lengths to ensure that everyone who is part of his plan carries a piece of this wood in some form or another. His followers are so devoted to him, they’ve sacrificed their lives to deliver this wood to those who need it. ”
The assassin’s knife. Her father’s death. The knife I’m now holding…
How much has Thyra not foreseen?
How much danger is she in because I carried this fucking knife around with me?
And then I ask myself another question: Does this wood somehow impact her blade visions? But I don’t think so. She had her first blade vision while she guarded her father’s body. The blade vision clearly wasn’t restricted by her nearness to this wood.
No, her blade visions are connected with the curse on the Dragonstone Blade, and the curse is another power altogether.
I shove the assassin’s knife away from myself while Hadrian draws himself slowly upward.
He steps back and back, watching me closely, putting distance between himself and me. “You have another choice to make now, brother.”
I raise my head, ready to tell him where to put his fucking choices, but a guttural snarl is the only sound I make.
My poisoned heart has begun defying me.
Soon, I will no longer be myself.
“I prepared a cage,” Hadrian says, sweeping his hand toward the temple as he continues to increase the distance between us.
“You can choose to cage yourself. Shackle yourself. Eventually die. Or you can go to Thyra. Follow her into the bloodlands, where you will…well, let’s be honest…
you’ll perish there, too. Which will it be? ”
Clawing my hands in the grass, I vent my fury, pushing it into a roar of rage. A useless fucking sound as I try to drown out the memory of Thyra’s kindness. Her voice, telling me I’m not such a monster as I claim to be. Telling me I won’t hurt her.
But I could.
I will.
If it weren’t for this fucking assassin’s knife, I’m certain she would have seen it.
Even as I know this, fear this, I calculate how long I have before the poison does its work. Maybe minutes. Maybe an hour.
She’ll die in the bloodlands if I don’t get to her.
I convince myself I have time.
Time to get her out of the bloodlands and to safety and then get myself the fuck away from her, and maybe… Time to tell her the most important truth of my life.
I love her.
As deeply as someone like me can love.
Covered in blood, I rise to my feet, accepting what will certainly be one of my last conscious decisions, answering the final desire of a heart filling with the dark poison that an iron dagger kept at bay all these years.
“I choose Thyra.”