Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Thyra
“How did the blood bind happen?” Stellen asks, his question reaching me through a thick mire of fear.
My jaw is tight, a chilling dread seizing up my vocal cords, making it impossible to answer.
“Thyra.” Stellen’s voice is bare of power as he catches hold of my hands and pulls me toward him. “Focus past the fear. Focus on the details.”
We’re still kneeling side by side, and his action urges me to turn fully to face him. He slides one hand along my blade arm, wrapping his fingers around my upper forearm and, in doing so, covering most of the runes. Along with the scratches I made.
Obscuring them all from my view.
Moments ago, he told me not to trust him. Now, it seems he’s trying to soothe me.
I shake my head at him. “You’ve given me so many warnings.”
“And I’ll give you more,” he says, meeting my eyes. “You’re right to question everything I do. I play by my own strategy. I plan. I’m patient. I rarely act on impulse, and I’m not afraid to wait for the perfect strike. It’s how I’ve kept hold of my power. Likewise, you must choose your path.”
He told me I wouldn’t be subservient to him. He made it clear I had the choice to leave—and then pointed out how life-endangering that would be.
“You’re free to tell me whatever you will,” he says. “Just know that I can tell when someone’s lying.”
His hand slips away from my arm as he leans back a little.
Wordlessly, I catch him before he can move away, pressing his arm back to mine, an awkward pose, but I need the anchor. I need the living shield that his arm provides against the uncertainty of the dark runes while I try to decide what choice to make. To tell him everything or keep secrets.
As the water bubbles softly nearby, I close my eyes.
Secrets inevitably become lies.
I take deep breaths for long moments until my heart calms.
As I breathe, his arm relaxes against mine, his fingers curling around my forearm again, his thumb brushing the sensitive skin near my elbow. Slow swirls urging me closer to him, distracting me from the heaviness of the past.
With a final calm inhalation, I begin.
I start by telling him about reading the Chronicle in the Iron Kingdom’s royal library. I describe what the book showed me: first, an ashen field, and then what appeared to be the forging of the blade, which turned into the blade’s breaking.
I explain my theory that to break the curse, we need to bring together all of the pieces that were used to create the blade and use those pieces to shatter the blade instead.
Then I explain how I found the hammer, pulling it from the vault in the Vividari temple, and how it spilled darkness across the sky. Finally, how the runes transferred to me and the hammer crumbled.
I suppress my shudder as I remember the blade vision I had when the runes transferred to me.
I was standing in a bed of white rose petals, beneath the shade of a tree whose branches I couldn’t see.
A breeze of oncoming winter had brushed across my cheeks, just as Stellen’s fingers now play along my forearm.
But the calm was split by the same horrible splintering of screaming wood I heard when I read the Chronicle.
The False Queen had appeared to me in that vision. She told me to accept the gifts she was giving me and to take the darkness. She said I would need it.
She told me to prepare to fight for my life.
As I finish speaking, Stellen’s hand tightens around my arm, a firm grip as I fail to stop my shiver.
He slips his arm beneath mine, his hand beneath my elbow. A support.
I expect him to ask about breaking the curse, to have a hundred questions, but instead, he says, “From what you’ve described, the blood bind must have been infused into the hammer, turning the hammer into a vessel. Merely a vehicle for the bind to find its intended target: you.”
His pale gaze pins me to the spot as he continues. “The ancient Merovians—that is, the Blood Fae—honed their magic until it could be used against a specific person. Or to the advantage of a specific person. Even bloodlines across time. I’m certain you already know this.”
I nod. I saw blood magic in action in the Iron Kingdom, where it was used to guard the catacombs beneath the Starlit Court. The same magic bound the ruby circlet that chained me to Antony. The ruby circlet is bound to the current Iron King. Now that Antony has died…
I accepted the ruby circlet as a mechanism to keep me safe. I can never accept such a thing again.
Stellen’s eyes narrow to unearthly slits.
“Only the original Blood Fae who conjured this bind can know the bind’s true intent and full purpose.
Even if a fae commissioned a blood bind, they could never really trust that the Merovian did what they’d asked.
That was what made Merovian magic so dangerous.
In this case, the fact that the bind attached to you tells me it was intended for you. ”
I shake my head, wanting to clutch at possibilities I know are unlikely. I want to believe that the blood bind could have transferred to anyone, but the Vividari must have handled the hammer, and the bind remained unmoved.
Blood magic doesn’t cast a wide net. It’s specific. Targeted. Just as Stellen said.
“Which brings me to two concerns,” Stellen says, his thumb brushing across my skin again, tiny swirls that once again lift the descending heaviness in my mind.
“My first concern is that a Merovian, now long dead, cast a blood bind onto that hammer, believing that one day the False Queen’s first female descendant would pick it up. ”
I immediately see where he’s going with this.
“You’re wondering how that Merovian could have possibly predicted these events.
” I swallow hard. “The answer is: it would be impossible. My father may have carried the Dragonstone Blade with him all his life, but the hammer was hidden away in the Vividaris’ vault, far away from me.
Concealed from common knowledge. The chances of me ever coming across it were incredibly slim. ”
It was only because Antony’s mother, Aeliana Vividari, described parts of the hammer to his brother Victor that we even knew where the hammer was. And Aeliana only did that because she was trying to keep Victor alive while he fought the pain and horror of the Ember burns inflicted on him.
A fine sequence of events, impossible to predict.
Unless…
Stellen speaks my fear aloud. “Unless the False Queen foresaw the future and used her knowledge to ensure the blood bind would be cast.”
I try to breathe. “But to foresee events this far into the future? Not possible. Oracles have never dealt in prophecy. The harm we foresee is right in front of us. It’s imminent. We have only enough time to choose whether or not to change what’s about to happen.”
“Is that truly the limit of what you can do?”
Stellen’s question floors me. It’s true that the blade visions have allowed me to foresee events much further into the future than my father could. But the blade visions are unclear. Unsettling. Made up of feelings and instincts and flashes of danger.
So far, I’ve only understood a blade vision’s meaning after it’s come to pass.
Stellen’s gaze passes slowly across my face.
“What intrigues me, Thyra, is that you’re applying the usual rules of Oracle power to yourself.
The False Queen was the first female Oracle, and she was powerful enough to cast a curse that broke Serulia into three kingdoms.” He pauses.
“Do you know what the word Serulia once meant?”
“Pure.” My lips press into a line. “The Pure Kingdom.”
“A kingdom of peace.” He leans back a little. “Until the False Queen brought destruction, fueled by a thirst for power and a plan that initially spanned decades.”
Until Antony told me about the curse, I had grown up listening to the story that all the villagers believed and repeated: the Serulian King’s three generals rose up against him, killed him and his heir, and started a war with each other, each vying for power.
The truth was apparently far more complicated.
The False Queen waited twenty years for her son to come of age before she convinced her husband, the king, to take his army into the bountiful east. Before they left, she gave her son the Dragonstone Blade, secretly tainted with her blood so that whoever held it would be filled with murderous intent.
In battle, the prince turned on his father, killed him, and then was himself killed when the three generals stepped in.
When the army returned home, their king dead, the heir dead, the Oracle made her move to claim power. When the generals stopped her, she cursed the blade.
“It wasn’t her Oracle power that gave strength to the curse.
” I need to refute the possibility that the False Queen’s power may be stronger than I knew.
“The curse was powered by the blood of both the Serulian King and the Slain Prince. Royal blood spilled onto the blade when the prince attacked his father—”
“What?”
Stellen’s question is sharp, the sudden furrow in his brow deep.
I speak carefully. “The Slain Prince was overcome by the murderous intent in the blade and tried to kill his father.”
“No.” Stellen leans forward again. “Where did you hear that?”
I catch my breath. “In the Iron Kingdom. I was told that’s how the king died and the curse came to be.”
Stellen studies me, watching my mouth.
Quietly, he murmurs, “You aren’t lying. You believe the story you were told. But no, Thyra.”
He leans back again, a wary light in his eyes. “That isn’t what happened.”