Chapter 54
Chapter Fifty-Four
Thyra
My heart feels raw. Stripped of all shields. Vulnerable and exposed.
I lost control of my grief. I lashed out with a ferocity I didn’t think I was capable of.
Stellen baited me into it, taunting me, only to take every scream and strike I aimed at him without defending himself.
I can’t regret the brutality of my sorrow. For the first time since I picked up the Dragonstone Blade, the hollow in my heart is gone.
Completely gone.
As if the more I had held on to my grief, the more my sadness had emptied me out.
Now I can accept that losing my father, and losing Antony, has changed me. It hurts, but it’s okay to feel this hurt because this grief has not broken me.
Stellen works quietly in the other room while I make my way to the bookshelf on the far side of this library and contemplate all of the scrolls.
I have no idea where to start until I spy labels along each shelf, each one etched into a silver plate surrounded by the protective ice Stellen warned me about.
The set of shelves I’m currently standing in front of appears to deal with the kingdom’s flora, including frost-resistant varieties of plants, while the next set of shelves deals with other wildlife.
I reach the maps. A small section, which will make choosing easy. Taking note of their location, I move on, seeking anything to do with the curse or the Dragonstone Blade, not that I expect the shelves to be labeled as such, but I find sections dealing with historical accounts.
The final bookshelf sits behind a wooden desk that has cracks in its surface.
There are no labels on the shelves of this final bookcase. Rather, they house multiple ornate chests, each one flat and rectangular, their contents fully concealed.
Stellen appears in the adjoining doorway. For a second, I discern tension in his shoulders and jaw before it vanishes.
“Are you ready to choose?” he asks.
“All of the historical maps,” I say, pointing to them. “Everything in the historical section about the curse, the False Queen, or the Dragonstone Blade.” I pause. “Likewise for the contents of these boxes.”
Stellen retrieves a large satchel from the bottom shelf of the bookshelf I’m standing in front of and within minutes, he’s deposited into it three of the maps and ten scrolls he chooses from the other bookshelves, including one he retrieves from the papers scattered across the floor.
Finally, he reaches for one of the ornate chests, placing it within the satchel.
“What about the rest of these?” I ask, pointing to the other boxes, curious about their contents.
“You don’t want those.”
I tilt my head slightly. “Why not?”
His jaw clenches. “Because they contain the spoils of death.”
My forehead crinkles more deeply. “I don’t understand.”
“Trophies.” His face is blank and his voice is tight. “Mementos taken from every royal sibling killed across generations.”
I back away from the shelves, my stomach turning, and gesture at the satchel he’s holding, which now contains one of the ornate chests. “Then I don’t want that box, either.”
He closes his hand over mine before I can get too far. “This box belongs to me. It doesn’t contain trophies. In fact, the scroll within it is one of the most important documents in the entire collection. I want you to see it.”
“Okay, then.” But I don’t miss the surprising tremble in his hand before he lets me go and hands me the satchel.
“When we get back up top, we can attach this bag to the straps of the satchel Nara’s already carrying,” he says. “For now, get to the stairs. I need to use my power to create a smooth path for the coffin to travel through this room and up the staircase.”
I take his warning seriously. I felt the immense cold when I was in the other room, the kind of ice that would strip the flesh off my bones if I touched it. Even if I were to pull on my Alak-Teahan cloak with its thick mittens, I wouldn’t be safe.
Reaching the top of the stairs, I only have minutes to wait before Stellen reappears, pulling the coffin behind him, a web of ropes secured around his shoulders and, as if it were effortless, proceeding up the steps behind me.
Nara waits for us outside and allows Stellen to attach the second satchel and then the web of ropes to her torso, forming an additional harness so she can pull the coffin.
“Is the gravesite near enough for us to walk there?” I ask. “I don’t want to burden Nara by riding her.”
Instantly, the white wolf gives me a sharp growl, and Stellen chuckles. “Easy, Nara.”
I take a quick breath. “Did I offend her?”
He inclines his head. “Nara was born in the wild. She’s stronger even than most white wolves.”
I’m suddenly reminded of the moments when I first flew from the coastal village with Antony. Nara had sped up a steep mountainside and leaped so high into the air that she’d carried Stellen close enough that he could have cleaved Antony’s head from his shoulders.
“Well, in that case…” I alight onto her back and she rumbles happily.
Stellen slips on behind me.
Our journey is quiet, filled only with the soft swishing of the coffin dragging through the powder behind us and the quietly whispering breeze.
I haven’t eaten for hours, but my stomach hasn’t protested. I’ve quickly adapted to consuming food only in the morning and at night.
The midday sun sits high in the sky by the time we pass over a final ridge and down onto a vast plain covered in snow.
For a few moments before we descend down the incline, I make out the colossal mountain range far ahead of us, the boundary between Frost and the lands that lie in the east.
When I flew in that direction with Antony, my view had been filled with forest-covered mountains, but now the bare, stark ridges send a shiver down my spine.
According to Antony, and confirmed by what I saw in both the Chronicle and my blade visions, the far east is nothing more than an expanse of charcoal-colored dust, a land where nothing survived the False Queen’s curse.
As we descend toward the snowy plain, the faraway darkness is hidden by the slope on the other side of this vast field.
I’m unable to rationalize a new prickling at the back of my neck because I’m certain I’ve seen this field before…
Stellen’s arms slip around my waist. At the same moment that he pulls me closer, a single object in the distance becomes clear to me.
A jagged, dark-gray stone.
I remember this rock.
I saw it during the blade vision I experienced in the bloodlands, right after Antony sank his fangs into my neck. I welcomed the vision, grateful that it took my mind away from what was happening to my body.
But now, I fight against the sudden chill within my heart.
In that vision, I stood alone in this field, shivering, my feet bare.
The dark-gray stone rested in the snow ahead of me, closer to me in the vision than it is right now.
I couldn’t see what was inscribed on the rock, but I made out a yellow ribbon fluttering on top of it, as if the material had been caught in the stone’s rough surface.
Whatever the vision means, I’m nearly certain it isn’t happening now. My feet aren’t bare and there’s no yellow ribbon in sight.
When Stellen moves to slide his arms away from me, I quickly catch hold and pull them back around me, conscious of the tension in his chest and his increasingly ragged breathing.
“It can’t be easy,” I say, “coming back here.”
“It isn’t.”
He’s hurting. I don’t need his powerful hearing to understand the impact of this place on his heart. “You don’t have to do this. We can turn back.”
“No.”
Nara’s ears are pricked and to her, I say, “Nara, go slowly.”
She reduces her pace.
As we draw closer to the gravestone, I finally make out the vines Stellen described.
Vibrant and green, but far more delicate than I pictured, they spring up across the ground in a large, circular patch encompassing the gravestone. At least twenty paces in diameter, the earth visible between them is rich and brown.
Yet the circular edge is abrupt. The snow piled up around the warm space is inches deep, and it’s hard to reconcile the existence of these vines in this otherwise-barren field.
Nara draws to a stop, and I’m now close enough to read the two names etched into the gravestone.
Two lone names and nothing more.
Sineria Nas’Lethian.
Safra Nas’Lethian.
I don’t know which is his mother and which is his sister, but this single gravestone is clearly for both of them.
“I buried them together. The way they died.” Stellen’s voice is unbearably strained, and it worries me.
Before I can twist to him, he slides to the ground, his next steps heavy, his focus on the coffin.
While he works to remove the ropes, I slip off Nara’s back but remain at her side.
Stellen pushes the coffin forward and stops near me, his muscles bunched where they press to the end of the icy case.
“Where?” he asks without looking at me, his focus forward, his shoulders tense.
I point to a spot a few paces to the left of the gravestone, parallel to where his family must lie. “If that’s okay with you.”
Without a word, he slides the coffin forward over the edge of the ice and along the surface of the vines.
His movements are overly focused. Wooden. Severe in how tightly he’s controlling himself. Brutal in the way he never once looks at his family’s gravestone.
As soon as my father’s casket is in position, Stellen sinks to his knees, his back to me and his voice still tight. “I can coax the vines to move. They will create a grave and welcome your father into the earth. You should deliver his last rites now.”
Carefully, I step across the greenery, edging my way between the vibrant strands so I don’t crush them too much.
I reach Stellen’s side.
One look at his face tells me he’s barely here.
“Stellen?”
He flinches when my hand brushes his shoulder.
I won’t be deterred.
He gave me the chance to let go of my sadness. I need to give him the same.
I lower myself beside him, slip my arms around his waist, and angle myself forward so I can rest my chin to his chest. “You’re doing this for me, even though it’s hurting you.”
His gaze lowers to mine and I’m reminded of that fearful moment when he pulled me away from the dark cliff in the bloodlands. He drew me to safety, and his frozen whisper brought with it a harmony so calming, he might have reached into my soul as he told me…
“I’ve got you,” I repeat to him now, my voice a bare whisper in the heavy silence of this field.
His forehead puckers and the corners of his mouth turn down as he returns my gaze with much the same ferocity he expressed when I was facing death that night, his beautiful features razor-sharp and icy and so wraithlike that I’m certain he can’t possibly belong in this world.
For a fraught second, I expect he’s going to push me away. Maybe even snarl something defensive.
Instead…
Tears fills his eyes.
His shoulders hunch and his body becomes heavy in my arms.
“I’ve got you,” I say again, more determined than before to keep hold of him as he slumps and closes his eyes.
With a deep breath, I leverage myself upward and press my lips to his throat, letting my mouth move against his skin as I hum, a soft vibration.
I accept the weight of his body as he leans into me, and then I begin to speak, whispering the last rites for my father, but I extend them to his family, knowing my father would approve.
“For they shall see no more,” I say. “For they shall embrace the future as we are left in the past. Their songs. His visions. All of their hopes, spoken and unspoken, will now rest in silence. They are not dust, nor darkness, but a dream of what could be. It is not the end. For one day, we will See and Sing together again.”
Stellen opens his eyes and then he begins to harmonize the words I whispered, his voice sending shivers to my toes and warmth through my chest, the power of his melody, broken but mending, wrapping around my heart and anchoring me to him.
As Stellen’s singing fills the air, the earth moves beneath my father’s coffin, the vines separate, and slowly, my father begins to sink into the ground.
Gradually. Reverently. Until the vines close over the top of the coffin, binding him to this place of rest.
Silence falls after the last note fades.
Stellen and I stay like that for a long time as the chill air plucks at us, but no matter how hard the wind tugs, it can’t tear this moment of peace away from us.
I cling to the quiet because I know that when we leave this place, I will once again have to face what fate has dealt me.
A future fraught with blood and death.