Page 146 of Three Dark Kings and the Gilded Serpent

When I read the Chronicle, the energy rising from its pages had pushed me away, the magical protections threatening to strike me down, but now, I have no sense of any energy, good or bad, from this blank page.

The parchment is battered at the edges. Creased where it was folded. A faint sadness rises within me, but I’m not sure why.

“Okay,” I whisper, as much to myself as to Antony and Stellen.

Calming my heart, I touch my right forefinger to the page’s bottom-right corner.

A gentle shimmer of molten gold ripples from the Dragonstone Blade, across my palm and onto the page.

Writing begins to appear in a ripple. Golden ink. Small, cramped script, some of it messy.

“Thyra?” Antony prompts. “Has anything happened?”

“You can’t see this?” I ask.

“Whatever you’re looking at, the page appears blank for us,” Stellen replies.

No object has leaped from the page toward me. No images coming to life. The ripple of golden energy finishes flowing all the way to the top-left corner, revealing the first sentences.

“It’s a full page of text,” I say, and with that, I begin to read aloud.

They’re coming for us. I hear the screams at the palace gates. Merciless strikes tearing apart those who would protect me. My brave ladies have gathered outside my door, even though they know death is coming for them. My love is writing this for me, staying at my side so he can cast his blood onto this ink and ensure that you… only you… can read my final words.

I See you, Thyra.

I nearly drop the page, my hands shaking so hard that the paper rustles against the table.

Beside me, Antony and Stellen have frozen, both of them poised as if they would snatch me away from the page already.

“I’m okay.” I drag in a deep breath as I resume reading aloud.

I See you as clearly as I saw my son’s face at his death, a horror that was hidden from my Sight until it was too late. And now when I should be fleeing, I have foreseen you, reading these words aloud while at your sides stand a General of Frost and a General of Iron. Descendants of the men who come to kill me.

I stay and invite my death because I must write what you will read.

Oh, what twist of fate is this? That they whose ancestors betrayed my son would now stand at your side, ready to lay down their lives as you hold this paper in trembling hands…?

If you care for those men, warn them that they must not try to destroy this page. The blood magic within this ink will strike them down. A necessary evil, since I must make sure this page survives through the centuries to reach your hands…

Hands that will hold the darkness of the world.

There is a shadow at your back, Thyra, but I can’t See what it is.

All I can tell you is what I know.

An unfathomable truth, a fact that even my most loyal ladies do not believe. And why would they? They heard my screams when my son died and his future Sight died with him. Only my love knows this truth to be irrefutable:

I did not⁠—

I stop reading.

My hands are frozen on the page, the cramped writing swimming in my vision, my throat squeezing tightly, making it impossible to speak.

Stellen and Antony are tense beside me, both of them questioning me. “Thyra?”

I raise my eyes to theirs, the words written on the page already imprinted on my mind, impossible to unsee.

I speak aloud the False Queen’s words with disbelief in my heart. “I did not curse the blade.”