Page 148 of Three Dark Kings and the Gilded Serpent

I heard the curse. Those dark words cleaved my heart at the moment I witnessed my son’s death. I saw the gleam of a heart thread extending from his chest, a powerful connection, but to whom, I don’t know.

As he fell, I heard a scream, not his and not my own.

A woman’s voice was screaming in the ancient dragon tongue, the language of shadows wrenched up from the darkest of pits and even now, I am deathly cold to recall it.

I cannot… I cannot think on it or those dark words will consume me… The consequences consume me…

I have no other children. I have no male relatives. I am the last of my line. Now that my son is dead, at the moment of my end, the Oracle power will leap to life in a new bloodline. I know not whom, only that it must have happened because there you are, Thyra. Proof that our power will not die with me.

The weight on your shoulders must be unbearable.

I don’t know how to break the curse. But I can offer you hope.

The Dragonstone Blade was forged in love and kindness. My love forged it for me with honor and loyalty in his heart. A drop of my blood and a drop of my son’s blood are contained within its hilt and within that blood is power.

The blade was created to be both a weapon and a conduit. A way for my son to speak with me and me with him, as though we were not separated by thousands of miles, both of us subject to my husband’s warmongering ways.

Now I fear I did not foresee all that the blade could become: a vessel for a curse that has cast sunlit country into snow and fertile land into desert and verdant mountains into dark land where bloodthirsty beings scream with hunger.

I have done what I can, in the time that I have.

My love has already cast runes onto the hammer, which he keeps close to his side. If you reunite the blade with the hammer, these runes will transfer to the blade.

My love had already done this even before I began to See you, in case anything happened to him. He has drawn a record of these runes on the other side of this page for the Vividari to protect. They are loyal to me and will hide the hammer should anything happen to us.

The hammer’s runes are filled with love and courage, the only possible antidotes to the darkness of the curse. I fear they won’t break the curse, for dragon magic is the most powerful of all magics, but I pray these runes will enable you to See through the blade’s darkness.

I can’t See your arm right now to know if you have done this, but…

I stop reading. The whole time I’ve held this page, my forearm has faced down. If she’s foreseeing me from my right, the runes won’t be visible to her.

With a pounding heart and still gripping the page, I turn my arm over, forearm up, exposing the black runes, and then I continue to read aloud the final sentences on the page.

No. I don’t understand. Those aren’t the runes! Oh, no. I don’t know what has happened⁠—

They’re here. They want the blade and think I have it, but I don’t. I don’t know where it is. Gone like my son’s body. Gone like shadows.

There’s nothing more to read on that page. Turning it over, I discover the golden energy has already illuminated the runes and the message on the other side for the Vividari.

Very different runes to the ones I now bear.

My hands tremble as I finally let go of the page. The parchment settles back onto the table with a quiet rustle, becoming blank again.

“I don’t know how to comprehend this.” I turn my forearm over again, the Dragonstone Blade and runes facing up as Antony and Stellen sink back into their chairs on either side of me. “I don’t know what to think.”

“Then let’s unravel it,” Stellen says, his logic and strategy seeming to prevail. “Before the blade was cursed, the queen used the blade to communicate with her son. That matches with the blade visions pulling us to you, even if the curse and the blood bind have messed up how that works.”

Antony nods. “She also said she saw what she called a heart thread and it sounded like that was unexpected. We’ve experienced those threads.”

“Her son’s heart was connected with someone,” Stellen says. “A woman who screamed the curse when he died.”

My throat constricts. “Who?”

Stellen taps the table, the most unsettled action he’s shown so far. “Someone who knew the ancient dragon tongue.”

“Fucking dangerous magic,” Antony rumbles. “Only a powerful being could control dragon magic.”

Suddenly, he and Stellen are exchanging intensely silent looks, broken when Stellen murmurs, “The prince died in the east. The Serulian army was invading that land.”