Chapter Fourteen Thyra
Chapter Fourteen
Thyra
Come back.
My mind snaps back to a world covered in a white haze and filled with danger.
A dizzying whirl of strikes, all blurred, glint and spark in the air around me as the Frost King fights the seemingly formless enemy that has come for us.
Resolutely, he holds me to his chest as his swords skillfully slice and cleave, shrieking and flashing through the haze.
My arms have fallen to my sides, my head threatens to tip back, and my weight drags me down, my pelvis to his upraised knee and my feet on the ground.
The warm water is painfully near and at the same time, treacherously far, a glistening mass lapping at the rock near my left foot. Each time it comes closer, the Lethian threads draw farther back from my toes, as if they’re preparing for me to immerse into the liquid.
I thought my toes might be blue, but they’ve progressed to a deeply dark shade of purple, much like the web of thick threads rapidly weaving around us.
I can only see the web building from the sides; my range of view is limited, but the lattice grows, located cleverly outside the reach of the Frost King’s sword.
If he let go of me, he’d prevail, but he seems determined to hold me tight.
I should panic, but I have no energy for it.
The web begins to close in around his back and then—
A gentle flutter fills my chest. The sensation of a bird opening its wings grows within my heart, its feathers beating against my ribcage.
An Oracle vision. My first clear vision in days.
As much as I welcome it, the timing couldn’t be worse.
There’s nothing I can do to prepare for the way my body will freeze during the vision. Even though I’ll remain aware of my surroundings, I won’t be able to move for as long as the vision lasts.
Well. It’s not as though free and voluntary movement is within my control right now, anyway.
My body stiffens as the vision takes hold and I watch, as if I were an observer standing outside myself—
I’m walking through white mist, my footsteps calm, my right hand outstretched and trailing through the fog.
A narrow path is clear at my feet, black rock sparkling and smooth. On either side of me, shapes move within the mist, making the fog gently swirl, streaks of flowing amethyst dancing in time to my steps.
In my left hand, I hold an ovoid object. Small, the size of an egg, lightly cradled in my palm.
Except that, on looking down, I discover that my limbs aren’t my own. I am not fae.
I am not…me.
I’m part of a whole, a hive of branches and roots that weave webs as they swirl across the ground. As I move, the others moving within the mist reach out to me, rough limbs brushing mine.
At their touch, the shape of the object cradled in my left limb transforms, its shell peeling back and folding outward.
The seed grows into a flower, its stem part of my hand.
My gaze is drawn upward into the mist, where tree branches sway and dance, and I am no more than a sapling among them.
Just as my first flower blooms, a blade glints through the mist in front of me.
Steel slices neatly through the fog, cutting across my throat and spilling my amethyst blood—
I come back to myself with a garbled cry. “Icy sword slicing.”
At my scream, the Frost King’s focus flashes to me.
For a split second, my entire field of view fills with his chilling countenance. His ghostly eyes and high cheekbones. The splatter of amethyst liquid cut across his face and white hair. His unearthly presence gleams against the shadow of the cocoon that has built around us.
I struggle to make sense of what I saw in my vision, but I know one thing for certain: these beings fear blades and will attack anyone carrying steel.
Stellen incurred their anger the moment he forcefully sliced open the web to gain access to this forest.
I press my hand to his heart, my voice suddenly and unnervingly strong. “Stellen. Stop.”
His pale eyes widen at my command—or perhaps it’s my use of his name—but his features remain drawn, a fierce tension growing around his eyes and mouth while his sword stays upraised.
Conscious of how still the air has become around us, a pause in the frenzied weaving of the cocoon, I quietly urge, “Put down your blades.”
His responding snarl is equally soft, but it carries an edge of determination. “Do you wish to die?”
A sudden, uncontrollable sob rips up from my chest. “I’m already…”
I’m forced to acknowledge the warning in the memory of my father’s final moments—a memory that came so sharply back to me when I woke up immersed in snow and clutched to the Frost King’s chest.
I’m experiencing the final surges of my Oracle power.
It’s the only reason I’m still alive and how I’m able to speak right now.
As hard as I try to suppress the memory, my father’s voice echoes back to me. I’m already dead.
He was stabbed, his heart irreversibly damaged. There was no hope for him.
But there’s hope for me. I can still save my limbs. I can save my body.
Stellen can save my body.
A possibility he seems determined to make true.
His lips lower to my mouth as if he could force his will on me simply by capturing my exhalations.
“You will die when I decide,” he declares, his voice once more a toneless whisper.
My sigh fills the air between us, and my palm softens against his chest.
Blinking hard against the burn of tears I can’t shed because I’m beyond dehydrated, I say again, “Put down your blades.”
He gives a stern shake of his head, the tension in his body only growing.
How can I explain the inexplicable?
Then I remember his earlier words to me.
Your voice is small. Your hands are weak. But even a whisper from you right now will carry the power we need to survive.
I’m certain that, before I passed out in the bloodlands, my armor had struck outward. I didn’t stay conscious long enough to see what happened after that, but I’m sure the Lethian threads became a terrible weapon protecting me.
The problem is that I don’t know how to control them.
When I first put on the armor, it was shaped like a dress that conformed to my size, becoming what I needed: the robes of a queen.
Then it reshaped itself into a protective suit and, when I wanted to reveal parts of myself to Antony…
the threads parted for him. I don’t know exactly how those things happened, but they must be connected to my voice, since Voice is the heart and soul of the Lethian power with which the threads were spun.
Now another breath builds within my chest, a quiet need tearing up through my heart and into my throat, compressing into the quietest sound.
A whisper demanding my survival. “Let me be warm.”
Stellen’s forehead creases, but I’m certain he will quickly realize my request was not aimed at him.
Silver threads pour from my body, starting with my left arm, unwinding from my armor and flowing to the rocky ground beside us.
Soundlessly, they slip from between my body and Stellen’s, becoming a stream of glistening silver as they flow toward the gap in the cocoon. An opening, barely wide enough for a fae to pass through, sits at the edge of the pond.
Only some of the threads remain wrapped around my body, covering my breasts and pelvis and keeping my hair coiled at the back of my head.
As the silver threads flow onto the water, they gather together, winding into the shapes of flowers. Roses. The shape of the blossoms, I imagine, my mother once created with her power.
She was highborn. She didn’t know that the man she loved was the Oracle at that time, or that when I was born, she had given birth to a future Oracle.
“Look,” I whisper to the Frost King, although I didn’t need to tell him.
He’s frozen, his sword arm still upraised, his weapons glinting in the air, but his wary gaze is already passing across the now quiet and still cocoon and toward the pond.
Several of the flowers the Lethian threads formed glide up around the open edge of the cocoon while others float peacefully across the water, where, impossibly, they don’t sink. Simply swirling with the waterfall’s flow.
Stellen’s pale gaze flashes back to me, his lips parted, as if he would ask the thousand questions I read in his eyes.
To which I can only give one answer. “A blade is death to living wood.”
The pucker in his forehead clears. “They are one and the same.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about, and his unearthly smile is so sudden, it makes my head spin.
“The Alak-Teah are trees,” he whispers.
It’s probably the closest description. “Of a kind.”
His gaze suddenly rakes over me.
I’m nearly completely naked now. A band of silver threads has remained across my breasts, and another conceals my pelvis. But I can no longer feel most of my body, leading me to a sense of near detachment from the bare skin beneath his hands.
“Will you take me into the water?” I ask.
A cold light enters his eyes, and a moment later, he leans to the side and smacks his fist on the rocks within the small confines of the cocoon.
The ice around his hand shatters, freeing his blades, which he abandons, leaving them lying on those rocks.
He isn’t weaponless. He can call his frost power at will.
But if he leaves his blades within the cocoon, the Alak-Teah will feel safe.
My stomach swirls, a sliver of sensation returning to me as Stellen scoops his hand across my backside, securing his grip while my stomach and breasts graze the silky material of his torn tunic.
He rises to his feet, and now I can better understand the scale of the cocoon the Alak-Teah built around us—only slightly taller than Stellen but wide enough that he can take two steps in either direction before touching its inner sides.
As he draws me upright against his chest, he slowly…very slowly…guides my legs up and around his hips.
How gradually he moves feels excruciating now that the water’s warmth is so nearly mine, but the stiffness of my legs tells me he isn’t delaying to be cruel.
He’s being careful.
All of my limbs are too stiff. Too breakable.