24. Thyra
Chapter Twenty-Four
Thyra
All my life, I’ve wondered about my mother. Who she really was. What life she had. And then, when my father died, I discovered there was so much more he could have told me, and I don’t know why he didn’t.
“Please,” I say to Miriam, not caring if I have to beg. “Tell me.”
“I will.” She nods, a simple motion. “I will tell you everything I know.”
I try to breathe, unable to miss the hesitation in her voice despite her promise. “But?”
“But I need you to understand that I won’t lie to you, Thyra,” she says. “I won’t honey-coat anything, even if it might be hard to hear. I will also make clear what I believe to be fact versus what is supposition or guesswork on my part so you aren’t misled. Can you accept that?”
“I can.” How could I not?
But still she pauses. “Can you offer the same?”
I try to still myself, to focus past my desperate need for answers. “To tell the truth?”
She inclines her head.
With determination, I stop myself from glancing at the black runes along my arm, which they won’t be able to see. It must seem strange to these women that my armor covers my left arm but not my right, a lopsided garment with no visible explanation.
Until the False Queen revealed that the blood bind is draining the kings’ powers, I had no reason to keep secrets. But now…
My momentary silence must speak volumes.
“It’s okay,” Miriam says. “I just wanted to know where I stand.”
Clearing my throat, I manage, “If I can’t speak of something, I will say so. Or if I need to avoid the truth of a thing, I will say that, too.”
She gives me a quiet smile. “That’s more than I could have hoped for. Thank you, Thyra.”
Reaching for the teapot, she pours steaming liquid into each of the cups and adds a splash from the carafe, murmuring, “For fortification, yes?”
After pushing the cup across to me, she gestures to the little cakes. “You may not feel able to eat anything yet, but please, when you wish, you’ll find these cakes are very nourishing.” In the same breath, she utters, “Oh, but where to start?”
Again, she chomps her lip. Closes her eyes. Opens them again. “You were a baby when I first met you.”
I slide my hands around the warm teacup, suddenly needing something to hold on to.
“Your father carried you in a papoose strapped to the front of his chest. A blessing against his heart, while at his back, he bore the burden of the Dragonstone Blade, wrapped tightly in Lethian silk, a heavy weight to bear.
“He sought me out on the eastern edge of the Ember Kingdom, on the ridges of the charcoal cliffs. I was not supposed to be there.” Her cheeks are pale as she grimaces.
“It was, and is, forbidden for Ember women to ride a serpent, yet I strapped my chest tightly and covered my face with a mask and hood so I would look like an Ember warrior. I called to the serpent who had bonded with me in secret to carry me into that dusty wilderness because our new king had just been born and his mother…”
Miriam stops speaking for a moment, her lips trembling.
“Maxim’s mother was injured by the birth.
I needed to find a rare healing herb that only grows on those cliffs.
I searched desperately and was on the verge of giving up, panicked at that stage, when your father appeared, his face covered in soot.
He handed me, without a word, the amethyst herb I needed. He had foreseen that I needed it.
“You were covered in a muslin wrap to keep you from breathing the charcoal dust into your little chest, but the material had slipped to the side and oh, the way you looked up at me, Thyra. It was as if you’d reached into my heart and crushed it.
“Your father said something then that I will never forget.” Miriam shivers and the women sitting behind her lean forward once again, rubbing her back. She gives them quiet nods.
“What did he say?” I ask, my throat tight.
Miriam’s tawny gaze is unyielding. “He said, and I quote: ‘This is my daughter. She will be the Oracle we have waited for. One day, she will hold the darkness of our world in her right hand and you must help her wield it.’”
I draw back, trying to quell the shiver running the length of my spine. “Wield it?”
“Yes.”
“Not destroy the darkness? Not overcome it?”
Miriam’s tea is untouched. “He was clear. You must wield that darkness, Thyra.”
I can hardly breathe. “Did he say more? Some explanation, at least?”
“As he turned away, he said only one other thing. ‘One day, her mother will come to Ember looking for her.’”
I lean forward so fast that I spill my tea. “And?”
“I was to turn her away.”
No. I squeeze my eyes closed. “Why would he say that?”
But I already know the answer and I’m speaking the truth even as Miriam mirrors my words.
“I’m a danger to anyone who loves me.”
“You’re a danger to anyone who loves you.”
My shoulders slump, heavy. Hurting. “Did you? Turn her away?”
“I did.”
I try to breathe through my sense of loss, my hands closing hard around my teacup again, trying to grasp whatever I can. “Please… What was she like?”
Miriam reaches for her cup. Gulps the entire contents. She fills it again, this time purely from the carafe. She downs that too.
Her voice is now a rasp. “Your mother was pure fury.”
A glance at the other women’s suddenly pale faces tells me that fury might not come close.
“She came in shadows,” Miriam says. “Dressed in black. Mourner’s garb. Alone but unstoppable. A grieving mother who had found out her baby girl was alive, after all.
“Somehow, she got past our warriors in the east and reached the edge of the celebration that was being held for Maxim’s third birthday.
Everyone was there, up on the sand dunes, under the light of the moon.
Your mother was about to take out another legion of warriors, when the Mothers and I stepped between her and them, crying for her to stop. ”
I can barely speak. “What happened?”
Miriam looks me in the eye as she says, “I have never feared for my life so much as I did in that moment. Your mother’s hands were dripping with these…”
Miriam lifts her own hands from the table, staring at them as if she can see it clearly still. “Black rose petals that turned to ash when they hit the sand, sizzling like acid. Sharp vines wound around her arms and waist. Thorny vines, drawing her blood. And her face was covered in a black veil.
“She told me that your trail led through the Ember Kingdom and she asked me who I was to dare stand between her and her child. I told her I was naught more than another mother, but that I would not help her find you.
“I was certain she was about to strike me down, but Maxim must have slipped free of his guard’s arms. He was only three years old. Fearless. A light in the darkness. Full of joy. Sucking his little thumb, even though it kept lighting on fire.
“He ran up to her even as we screamed. She looked down at him and all her fury…drained away.” Miriam reaches for the carafe again but sets it down without refilling her cup. “Somehow, that was harder to witness.”
I tug the carafe from Miriam’s frozen fingertips, filling my cup to the brim as far as it will allow. Swallowing the sweet liquid, I accept the burn down my throat and the syrupy calm that comes with it.
“She, too, had one last thing to say,” Miriam continues. “She said she would wait for you. You would come to her.”
“Too late,” I whisper. “My father foresaw her death when I was fifteen.”
“Ah.” Miriam falls silent. “I’m so sorry, Thyra.”
Resting my elbows on the table, I rub my temples, trying to ease the pressure in my mind. Trying to breathe through the recounting of my mother’s pain. A pain I share.
“My father told me she made the most beautiful white roses,” I say. “Not black like the ones she must have made later. I wish I could have seen them together. When they were happy. I wish I could have met her… Even at her most furious… There’s a hole in my heart that can never be filled.”
I raise my eyes to find the Mothers resting their chins in their hands, their lips set in firm lines, their expressions indecipherable. Pensive and tense.
Other pieces of information that Miriam gave me are suddenly registering, namely that Ember women aren’t allowed into battle.
“Wait… Were you punished?”
“For placing ourselves between Ember warriors and your mother?” Miriam asks. “Yes, the Mothers were punished.”
Each of the women pushes up the sleeve of her silks to reveal an Ember burn across the upper-right skin of her arm.
I gasp. Dear Goddess, but those scars look like…
Urgently, I hum to my armor so that the silver retracts from my right shoulder, exposing the scar of my long-ago Ember burn.
The woman I believe is named Charis jolts toward me, the first of the Mothers to speak directly with me and the nearest to me on my right. “How did you get that burn?”
The other women gasp. “Charis! You must not speak with her!”
I’m surprised by their exclamations but don’t have time to ask them for an explanation.
“How, please?” Charis insists.
Speaking carefully, I say, “I stepped between an elderly villager and an Ember Fae who came to buy ripplefish pearls. The Ember man wanted pink pearls and the villager had none. Ripplefish pearls are never pink.”
“Dear Goddess.” Charis leans back, her hand to her mouth. “But how?”
Miriam’s eyes are wide. “I don’t know.”
“He was erratic toward the end,” another woman says. “Remember how he disappeared for days. We never knew where he went.”
I have no idea what they’re talking about. “Whom are you speaking of?”
Miriam’s expression is dark. “We speak of our Former King. Maxim’s father.” She points at my scar. “That burn is his signature mark.”
I try to process this as I consider the scar I’ve instinctively kept covered all my life.
It was only when I found out about Victor’s burns that I revealed this scar to Antony.
Stellen never asked me about it, but that was his way of avoiding the painful past. Maxim won’t have seen it because I was wearing sleeves at the coastal village and my armor would have covered my shoulder during any interaction I had with him since.
Still, it seems impossible. “You’re telling me I survived an encounter with the former Ember King.”
“How old were you when this happened, Thyra?”
“Thirteen. It was twelve years ago.”
Miriam purses her lips. “Maxim was born a week after you, so that puts him at thirteen years of age at the time, too.” She turns to Charis. “What of the Iron King?”
“Well, I believe he’s twenty-eight now,” Charis says, a finger to her lips. “So he would have been sixteen at the time.”
“Four years after his brother was burned.” Miriam gives a grim nod. “Four years during which my brother’s mind rotted to the point where he was demanding nonexistent pink pearls from coast-dwellers…”
“Pink pearls!” Charis suddenly gasps. “He promised her pink pearls. Do you remember? He wanted to give her the impossible.”
“Oh, that’s right,” another woman says. “I heard him one night near the end. He was mumbling, saying she was whispering blood into his ears—”
“Pink droplets.” Another woman nods hurriedly. “He wanted to pluck them from his mind and give them back to her.”
The women clearly know what they’re talking about, but I’m very confused now. “I don’t understand…”
Miriam holds up her hand. “Thyra is missing some critical pieces of information.” She gives a soft sigh. “One of which is extremely dangerous.”
She reaches across the little table, carefully sweeping aside the cups to take my hands firmly into hers. “I haven’t told you who these women are. And…perhaps more critically…who they are not.”
She looks to each of the women. One by one, they give her a nod, but their faces are pale and many of them are worrying at their lips.
“What I’m about to say could get all of these women killed,” Miriam says. “So, Thyra, I need to know, can we trust you?”
They don’t know me.
I don’t know them.
But I find myself saying, “Yes.”