Page 104 of Three Dark Kings and the Gilded Serpent

I only have her word for it.

The word of my enemy’s mother.

But I can’t deny my own senses. The darkness in this rune is as tainted as the blood I burned. An evil, venomous intent. I can’t let it reach Thyra.

“Thyra—” I start again, but I stop before I ask her to forgive me.

There is no forgiveness in my world.

I focus with all my might to control the release of my flames, to pinpoint the fire on the rune, to destroy nothing more, but my fucking power…

Like a hungry beast, my flames burst out of my control.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Thyra

I’m in mortal danger, but I can’t do a thing about it.

Deadly flames rush toward my body.

I’m about to be burned, but my mind is caught in a spark of time and my body is a prisoner of a new vision.

Not a blade vision.

A heartbeat ago, I regained consciousness to find myself standing upright but unable to move, my hair fallen across my face, a woman’s glowing figure opposite me and Maxim on my right. Far closer than he has allowed himself to come to me.

The serpent’s golden body is a flicker of movement in the air.

Three glowing threads extend from my heart into the darkness around me, one of them directly to Maxim.

That amber thread is rapidly consumed in a plume of flame blossoming across his torso.

Then I’m paralyzed.

My heart fills with the fluttering of wings, the power of an Oracle vision rendering me frozen.

The space of a heartbeat stretches out to the length of a lifetime…

I’m standing in what could be a room, but every part of it is blacked out except for a baby’s crib, frozen in a swaying position.

Other parts of the image appear, also frozen in time, each one illuminated in turn, as if a light is being shined on them one by one.

A woman stands beside the crib, her dark hair falling forward as she leans over it, her left hand gripping the crib’s wooden edge.

Then the image spins to the right, but slowly, so that I’m now watching from the other side where I can see she’s holding a dagger in her right hand, its tip aloft, the blade at a strange angle, horizontal with the crib.

The blade drips with blood.

Yet I can’t tear my focus from the sleeping baby lying peacefully in the crib, flames frozen mid-flicker across the child’s torso.

The baby doesn’t have even a scratch that would explain the blood on the blade.

A golden substance, some kind of thick paste, has been smeared down each of the child’s arms, a single line down each.

The woman, where she leans over the baby, is pale and drawn. Her forehead is creased and her lips are pressed together. She’s flinching. Caught in a moment of pain.

The angle of the vision turns again, everything in it remaining frozen, but now I’m at the base of the crib.