Chapter 65 Stellen
Chapter Sixty-Five
Stellen
Thyra’s shaking uncontrollably.
Seconds ago, her eyes flashed open and she launched herself out of my arms to throw up what little was in her stomach. Barely anything.
Gasping for air, still facing away from me, she leans back on her heels. But now she seems to realize we’re alone.
“Where’s Antony?” Her question is urgent, her pounding heartbeats more so.
“He refused to stay.”
She twists to see me, tears spilling down her cheeks. I imagine she thought she’d come back to find us deep in battle—or one of us dead.
“You asked him to stay?”
Her disbelief is warranted.
“You did,” I reply. “I asked him to respect your wishes.”
She turns away again, her breathing erratic, and her silence…
Painful.
“He left me,” she says.
I’m wary of the strains of anger in her voice, the signs of the damage his choice is doing to her.
She drops her head into her hands, rocking forward, but she is agonizingly silent.
Her silences matter.
I slide my arms around her, holding her as she presses the heel of her palm to her mouth and muffles a scream against it.
Fuck.
Her stifled cry… Broken. Angry. Lost. Fearful. All of it shatters my hearing.
“Thyra—”
Rapid footfalls break the quiet behind us, and I quickly move to shield Thyra from view as a group of soldiers runs toward us across the snow and between the thin trees.
“Lord! Lord!”
Not one but many of them shout for me, a chorus of cries.
They reach me within seconds, bowing, but only briefly, before their eyes rise to mine.
A startling action on their part.
My soldiers have always avoided looking anywhere near my ghostly face.
“Lord, we’ve had word,” one of them says, a man whose name I don’t know, but he’s covered in soot and was one of the first I liberated from the smoke. “Lilis has been taken.”
My jaw clenches, but fear is not mine to feel.
Given Lilis’s history with Iker Silversten, the threats he’s made over time, and the whispered conversation Thyra and I overheard between Lilis and the nameless man, I draw the inevitable conclusion. “Iker Silversten has her.”
“Yes, Lord,” the soldier replies. “What would you have us do?”
A heaviness settles in my heart, the sensation of a stone sinking, the same feeling I experienced in the Alak-Teah before I collapsed.
I take a moment before I speak, listening to the heartbeats of the soldiers standing in front of me.
They aren’t exactly calm. They’ve survived battle and their general has been taken prisoner. But when they look to me, their fear doesn’t spike like it used to.
I speak carefully. “If I take an army to Iker’s door, it will invite outright war. Many of you will die.”
“We have not died yet, Lord,” another soldier says, wiping the soot from his face.
I acknowledge him with a nod. “Be that as it may, I need you here at the border. It seems the new Iron King, Hadrian, wishes to make his mark. You must fortify each tower with ice and snow. Prepare yourselves with protective clothing and masks. He may have wanted to crush us, but he made a tactical error in revealing his hand. He won’t take us by surprise again. ”
It’s more than I’ve said to any of them. Ever.
A ripple of agreement thrums through the group—a growing group as more soldiers arrive.
“What about Lilis, Lord?” another soldier asks.
Thyra’s voice sounds clearly behind me. “We will bring her home.”
She reaches my side and stands tall beside me, dressed in black, no hint of her pain. Not to them, at least. The soldiers won’t be able to hear the Lethian armor humming sorrowfully against her skin or detect the underlying tones of trauma in her voice.
But they won’t miss the determined press of her lips and the way she squares her shoulders before she says, “We will make Iker pay. As we will make Hadrian pay. They will know that if they strike us, we will strike back. Tenfold.”
She scans the group, a snarl on her lips. “Yes?”
“Yes, Oracle!” they roar back at her.
She casts a sharp eye across the men. “Now do as your king has commanded.”
The soldiers all bow deeply, and the man who first spoke addresses Thyra first, “Oracle,” and then me, “Lord,” before he steps back and begins issuing orders to the other soldiers, who quickly disperse.
Nara edges up to us, growling quietly. She was smart to stay back during my interaction with Antony, but one look in her eyes tells me she understands how fraught the new battle we’re headed into could become.
“If Iker has Lilis, we don’t have time to waste,” Thyra says, stepping toward Nara. “He will hurt her.”
There’s no easy way to say it. “Undoubtedly, he already has.”
Thyra shudders visibly. Her heart is hurting; I can feel it, bone-deep.
I want to sweep her up onto Nara’s back and take her back to the palace, instead of into battle, and pretend I live in a world where, for once, I can keep safe someone who is precious to me.
Thyra alights onto Nara’s back and reaches down to me. I don’t ignore her gesture, running my palm smoothly across the back of her hand as I leap on behind her.
I give Nara a short whistle that sends her sprinting northward, away from the jagged trees and toward Iker’s compound.
I wish it were possible to speak easily while we travel.
I need to tell Thyra about the wood-handled daggers and ask her about her blade vision, but at this speed, Thyra and I must both lean sharply forward, bracing against the wind and holding on as Nara’s powerful feet spray snow and ice into the air around us.
Thyra has respected my silences and I want to respect hers, but every ragged breath she drags into her chest tells me she’s paying a price and I don’t know if it’s because of Antony, or her blade vision, or possibly even because of me.
All I can do is raise my hand to her heart and hum at her ear. Not a magical sound to influence her mood. Just a soft song.
Some of the tension leaves her body.
She pulls my arms tighter around her.
I nearly miss her whisper, a strange thing for me, but she’s speaking barely above an exhalation. “I have too many fears.”
What can I say, except what I know to be an absolute truth? “You don’t have to carry them alone. I’m here.”
I catch her choked breath as she turns her face into mine, her cheek to my cheek.
“The best part about me being heartless,” I say, continuing to murmur at her ear so she can hear me above the wind, “is that you could cast all of your fears onto me, Thyra, and I can carry them without burden.”
She closes her eyes. “What if I am the thing you should fear?”
My eyebrows rise in disbelief. “Why would you ask me that?”
She chews her lip, dragging her teeth through the tears lingering on her lips. Lips I would kiss if the way we’re sitting didn’t make it impossible.
“One of the very first lessons my father taught me was that I’m a danger to anyone who loves me.”
“Well, then you have your answer,” I reply softly, nudging her earlobe. “I can’t love you, so you aren’t a danger to me.”
A sob-laugh bursts out of her. “Oh.” She reaches for me, but she can’t twist far enough at the speed we’re traveling. “I guess that’s true.”
Her smile fades, and I would give anything to hear her thoughts and to know why the press of her cheek to mine feels suddenly more intense.
I may not be able to love her, but I have willingly bound myself to her. I’ve tied my future, and the future of my kingdom, to her.
I haven’t told her that. I can’t.
If the time comes that I must face a reckoning, she must make her choices free of my wishes.
Antony’s admonition wasn’t lost on me.
Thyra must be what she wants to be, not what I need her to be.
A warrior, or a queen, or maybe…
A woman with a piece of my past woven into her hair.
She must be what she chooses.
“Thyra,” I say, “I’ve learned why your father didn’t foresee his death.”
She stiffens again.
I avoid mentioning Antony’s name as I continue—carefully. “The hilt of the dagger that was used against your father was made from a particular wood.”
“I remember that dagger,” she says. “A similar weapon was used in an attempt on my life.”
“It hinders your Oracle power, stopping you from foreseeing the actions of anyone carrying it.”
Her eyes fly wide. “So that’s why!”
I may not be able to hear her thoughts, but I can sense the storm in them as she continues. “That’s why I didn’t foresee the assassin who tried to end me. That’s why my Oracle power kept floundering. Does it only shield the person carrying the wood or those around them?”
An excellent question. “I believe it’s only the person because Hadrian has apparently given a medallion to each of his followers.”
She closes her eyes. “If only it could free me from my blade visions…” She shakes herself. “Where does the wood come from?”
“A tree, likely located in the far east.”
“A screaming tree,” she whispers, her eyes wide. “Splitting wood. I heard that sound when I read the Chronicle.”
I give her equally concerning news. “There are two such daggers in the Frost Kingdom, and I can’t be certain where they currently are or who has them.”
Her gaze flashes to mine. “Iker. He has to have them or I would have surely been able to foresee his actions.”
“Most likely.”
She exhales into the wind and I’m impressed at how quickly she regulates her response. “Iker is sick, which means he must be physically frail, but I assume his children are not.”
“We will need to watch out for all seven of them. Obviously, they don’t have my Lethian power, and they can’t command frost like I can, but they’re all ambitious and cunning. They know the rules of the Winter Strife and could seek to invoke it.”
As hard as that would be. First, they would have to draw my blood and spill it on the ground before the blood can coagulate. Then they would need to live long enough to speak the words invoking the Strife.
Thyra leans forward again. “We won’t underestimate them.”
Clouds cast shadows across the sun as we approach Iker’s compound.
Nara slows her pace, moving steadily but cautiously as we descend the final gentle incline toward the compound’s gate.
The landscape around the vast structure is exposed and makes it pointless to try to sneak up on the compound.
Besides, everyone within those walls will know I’ll come for Lilis.
“It looks like your palace,” Thyra whispers.
“The similarity is deliberate. Iker wanted his own throne. Icy-blue walls that he could control and shining buildings that symbolize the power of his blue frost.”
Her brow furrows as she squints across the distance. “Where are the guards? I don’t see anyone up on the wall.”
A heavy quiet lies ahead of us, the gate now three hundred paces away.
“Nara,” I call, “take it slower.”
Thyra has straightened, stretching out her back and neck before her head tilts, just as she appeared when she guessed that three of my staff members were approaching the Rose Room. “It’s too quiet.”
I narrow my eyes at the stillness of the compound. “There should be a hum of sound. Hundreds of heartbeats. Even if they’re all lying in wait.”
Thyra nods. “Like sensing an unmoving presence in the dark.”
“I’m making out maybe forty heartbeats and that’s all.”
“Could Iker have evacuated his people to minimize casualties?”
“Possibly,” I say, “but I doubt he’d be so careful.”
Up ahead, the gate opens and a gust of wind billows through it.
Nara’s head snaps up, her nose raised to the air. She gives a sharp warning growl, the snarl she makes when—
“Northerners,” Thyra gasps.
She must recognize Nara’s snarls from our encounter with the shapeshifters outside the Alak-Teah.
“Is Iker allied with them?” Thyra asks. “Or—?”
At that moment, there’s finally movement on top of the wall.
Nara pulls to an abrupt halt and Thyra smothers a cry as bodies drop over the wall, each one hanging from a rope.
Eight bodies with nooses around their necks.
None struggling. All clearly dead.
Thyra won’t recognize them, but I do.
Iker and his seven children.
Gritting my teeth, I reply, “Or.”