Page 143 of Three Dark Kings and the Gilded Serpent

Antony moves closer, reaching for me. “But we’re certain the black thread appeared. Only for a second. We can’t ignore that that could mean something.”

“Mean what?” I ask, although I don’t expect an answer. There are too many unknowns in my world. A picture that, despite my Oracle power, I can’t yet see.

As I expected, they both shake their heads.

I close my eyes, my fingertips pressing to my temples. “I need… We need…”

Stellen’s calming voice washes over me. “Remember to take peace where you find it.”

Immediately, I reach for his hand. And Antony’s. Holding firm. This is my peace.

“I need to know everything you both know,” I say. “Everything you haven’t told me. Even the things you have told me but that you haven’t told each other. We need to talk.”

“Agreed,” they both say.

“After that, you need to read the page,” Antony adds.

“The piece of paper you brought with you?” I ask.

He nods. “The Chronicle’s missing page. Apparently, it contains a message from the False Queen herself.”

At this news, I can’t suppress my shudder. “I’m supposed to read it?” I nearly drop their hands, not liking this suggestion. “Every interaction I’ve had with the False Queen has threatened to destroy a part of me. My heart, my hope, my soul. Her spirit is so…fucking…evil. What if this is a trap she set all those years ago? Like the hammer? And like this blood bind?”

Antony squeezes my hand before I can back away.

“I don’t think the page is a trap. My mother said—” He pauses, his hold on me easing. “No, you’re right. We have to treat everything with suspicion. We can’t take anything at face value. Even if we trust the person giving us the information, they themselves could have been deceived.”

I’m a little caught on the mention of his mother.

“That was your mother?” I ask, a flood of hope suddenly swamping me. “Back there in the darkness?”

“Yeah.” His chest rises and falls with a deep breath. “I want to tell you all about it. Let’s talk, Thyra. Then you can make decisions.”

We pull up a table and chairs from the far side of the barracks. Antony brings fresh water and fiber cakes he finds in the storage cupboard, also at the back of the barracks. Stellen places the satchel containing scrolls and maps onto the table, telling us that the page is in there too.

Antony talks first, telling us everything that happened to him since the fight with Stellen in the bloodlands. How he woke up, fought Maxim, and found his mother. He doesn’t hold back describing what that was like, especially the pain of having to hand her over to Maxim and trust that she’d be safe with him.

He skips forward to what she told him last night about the blood bind, that it had been meant to help me but had been altered during her lifetime.

And then he tells me about the impact of the blood bind on him, how it struck each night.

Jabbing at his chest, he says, “The only way I could break through the force keeping me away from you in the vision was to rip open my own heart.”

I’m shaken by his description of what he saw each time the blood bind struck: me, unconscious, dressed in white, floating beneath the enormous boughs of a blackened tree. Shadows moved all around that tree, the wood shrieking as the shadows cut the tree apart. One of those boughs was about to fall on me.

“Every night, that’s what I saw,” Antony says, his fangs appearing. “I never once reached you in time to save you.”

Hot tears burn my eyes at the way he grips my hand, the unrestrained fear in his face.

“I wish I’d known that was happening,” I whisper. “The blood bind struck while I was sleeping. I wasn’t aware of what it was doing.”

“Neither was I,” Stellen says. “But that seems to match with how your blade visions work. If we’re with you, we aren’t incapacitated by your visions. Or pulled to where you are. Or, in Antony’s case, pulled into some version of a vision.” He leans back in his seat. “Let’s come back to this. Antony, what happened next?”

“Once my mother was safe, I hunted Hadrian’s followers, killing them and collecting as many pieces of that wood as I could find. I needed a purpose and that was my mission.”

Antony continues with his story, filling us in about freeing Victor and hearing about Hadrian’s determination to copy the Chronicle. Then Antony describes how, after he saw me in person in Frost, he was swept up in the snowstorm and rescued by Cassia and Victor.

“Victor made sure every weapon he designed for Hadrian has a weakness,” Antony says. “But it’s the sheer fucking mountain of that wood I’m concerned about. It blocks your Oracle power.”