Page 115 of Three Dark Kings and the Gilded Serpent

“Which is why I traveled south to consult with Miriam. She told me she would try again to find out what had happened to the man who’d forged the Dragonstone Blade. She was emphatic that I should not try to sever the additional rune, but I was certain I could destroy that rune with my starlight. Oh, my pride. And now…”

Aeliana falls silent, her cheeks pale, shadows in her eyes.

“Mother?”

“Miriam didn’t know the rune was on my arm. Riven confirmed that for me. Because of the way I was lying, unmovable, nobody could see the rune. Miriam must have sent Thyra to me today, hoping that her Oracle power might wake me. She couldn’t have known the danger Thyra would be in.” Mother straightens, head high. “What happened today is entirely my fault.”

I take hold of Mother’s trembling shoulders but carefully, fully aware of how powerful my armored grip can be. “Look around you, Mother. All is well now.”

The serpent has taken himself off to the side, his head resting on his tail. His scales have turned charcoal on his left side. He appears fully healed, but also alert, his head raised to the air, his focus swinging from the deep darkness, where vampyric shrieks are growing and coming southward.

“But all isn’t well,” Mother says urgently. “The original blood bind was intended to help the next female Oracle, not harm her.”

I give a shake of my head. Aside from how unlikely that seems, I ask, “How do you know that?”

“Because of this.” Aeliana reaches into her bodice and slips a piece of folded paper out from it. “This is the Chronicle’s blank page.”

I’m struck still by the paper’s visibly torn edge.

“Is that the missing page?” My throat is tight. “Hadrian has tortured fae to get his hands on that.”

This piece of paper is the reason Emiliana was harmed and why Victor’s heart now seethes with even greater vengeance.

Mother presses her lips together. “As soon as I realized the hammer’s runes had been altered, I asked Damian Ferocie to tear out this page for me.”

“Damian was Emiliana’s father,” I murmur.

Galla Vividari forced me to fight him to the death. Supposedly because he refused to force his daughter into Galla’s Court, but now I wonder if Galla was trying to find out where the missing page had gone.

“I feared there were forces at work that would want this page destroyed,” Mother says. “So I took it.”

“Why?” I demand to know. “What power could a blank page possibly have?”

She replies, “More than you could possibly know.”

Chapter Forty

Maxim

Of all the fucking cruelties…

“Merovians are extinct.” I snarl, unable to control my surging fury or the pain Thyra’s claim brings. “They were hunted and killed.”

As far as I’m concerned, my mother is one of the women waiting in the darkness to the south of these mountains. She’s there. She is one of them. She is not, and cannot be, a Blood Fae because that would mean⁠—

“You’re a Blood Fae.” Thyra advances on me the same way I would advance on prey.

Her silver armor ripples around her body, reforming itself into a corset, boots, and mid-thigh-length pants, the remainder of the material streaming up past her shoulders like a floating shawl.

Once again, she is like a queen, her head held high. If she’s afraid of my fire, or even of me, she doesn’t show it.

“Don’t speak such lies to me,” I growl.

“Not lies,” she says, her faded blue eyes sharp. “Hope.”

My eyes widen. “When has hope ever been brought about by a Blood Fae?”

She circles me as I circle her, extending her right arm and pointing to the dark runes running alongside the Dragonstone Blade.