Page 153 of Three Dark Kings and the Gilded Serpent

“The sun will rise in a few hours,” I say, my voice tight. “I need some air while it’s still cool.”

After that, I’ll need to get some sleep before meeting Miriam and Aeliana tonight, but for now, there’s no chance of settling my mind enough to rest.

Neither Antony nor Stellen argues with me.

Pushing back my chair, I attempt to shake off these new fears rising within my heart.

I hurry up the stairs and past Nara, who gives me a worried growl before she follows me, resolutely stalking my steps as I push open the trapdoor and exit into the fresh air.

While I take deep breaths, she nudges my back, and then her cold nose brushes my cheek, a soothing touch.

“Hey, Nara.”

The last stars are twinkling in the sky, the moonbeams soft. On the other side of the border, artificial stars gleam while across the dunes, hundreds of lights bob and sway.

My eyes widen as I home in on lanterns. Hundreds of Ember Fae have gathered across the distant dunes.

Stellen’s quiet voice sounds at my back. I wasn’t oblivious to his approaching footfalls, as subdued as they were. Or to Antony, who stops in the shadows of the tower behind us.

“At night, Ember Fae leave their underground homes and converge on the surface,” Stellen says. “Stop me if you already know this?”

I nod. “Miriam described the celebration for Maxim’s birthday as being aboveground, but I wasn’t sure what that might look like.”

“Sounds like merchants selling their wares.” Stellen peers into the distance, his statement indicating he’s accessing his sharp hearing, just as I’m now accessing mine.

“Highborn and lowborn are mingling,” I say. “I hear…games for children and…celebrations for those who are approaching adulthood.”

“From what I heard from the Ember warriors,” Stellen says, “they don’t build structures on the surface because the sand quickly covers those structures. Instead, they spend hours each night setting up just to take everything down again. This is the first night since the battle at the border that they’ve come out again. It’s a good sign.”

A hopeful sign. The first for days.

But where I would have taken comfort from this before, now a darkness looms within my heart, a sense of foreboding.

“I was going to walk, but can I take Nara?” I ask Stellen. “I’ll be back before sunrise. I won’t endanger her.”

A smile tugs at the corner of Stellen’s mouth. “Nara chooses her own path now.”

The white wolf nudges my back again before plonking herself down on the rock, making it easy for me to climb on, even though she knows full well I could leap onto her back without assistance. While she’s running at full speed, no less.

Once seated, I bend over her neck, murmuring, “Thank you, Nara.”

Before I can urge her into a run, Stellen’s whisper arrests me, his smile now vanished. “Maxim was the one you saw.”

I know exactly what Stellen’s talking about.

“When I read the Chronicle.” I bury my hands in Nara’s fur. “He pulled me clear of flying metal shards, like you pulled me away from the edge of a rooftop and back to safety.”

Not only then. When I was lying across Stellen’s chest at the gravesite in the Frost Kingdom, fighting to survive the snowstorm’s power, I saw Maxim in a blade vision then, too.

“You saw him.” Stellen’s posture is unreadable, his pale eyes betraying nothing of his true thoughts. Even his heartbeats are too steady to reveal his emotions to me. “You and Maxim are connected in ways we can’t yet know or understand. Whether by fate or by power, I pray the answer doesn’t destroy you, Thyra.”

My right hand burns. In this hand, my blade hand, I held a ribbon steeped in murdered blood that Maxim burned, and now a shadow lingers at my back.

I close my fist, attempting to put a stop to the burn as Nara breaks into a run and I welcome the slap of the night air, wishing it could erase my fears.

Chapter Fifty-Six

Stellen