Page 48 of Three Dark Kings and the Gilded Serpent

“I think you understand how hard you need to fight, Thyra.” The False Queen nods to herself. “Just today, you’ve taken lives. I think, in your heart of hearts, you hate what you have to do, but you do understand that without sacrifices, you won’t survive.”

She dares to reach for me, her pale hand extending toward mine, the color of her skin flushing tan, then quickly bleaching to porcelain, then darkening again, as if she can’t settle on any given hue.

“Now you hold a terrifying power in the palm of your hand.” Her fingertips are the barest inch from mine. “With this power, you could wipe the world clean. Will you seize your chance? Or will you throw it away?”

My brow furrows. “There’s no controlling this storm.”

“Oh, but you can,” she whispers. “Your body is already assimilating the blood on that ribbon.”

I tear my focus away from the queen to glance at the material bound around my hand. So much blood.

Dark liquid pools in my fist and now a droplet appears between my fingers, threatening to fall to my lap.

This was the liquid I felt gathering in my fist before the blade vision struck.

The Dragonstone Blade was forged by a Blood Fae. The blood bind was cast by a Blood Fae. Now the False Queen speaks of the blood that’s pressed up against both the hilt of the blade and one end of the black runes.

“Can you smell it?” she asks, the curtain of her hair parting again to reveal one bright eye, as black as an inky sky. “Blood spilled by murder. The most potent kind.”

From far away, a scream sounds. Fragile and frightened. Floating on the breeze.

I jolt toward the sound, but there’s nothing there.

When I turn back, dark light flickers across the blood bind, mingling with the increasingly crimson energy, and now the blood bind begins to turn away from the shape of flames and into the shape of blood, dripping down my arm, a cascading ripple beginning at the crease inside my elbow and ending at my hand.

The False Queen is suddenly right in front of me.

“Whoomph-whoomph,” she whispers, her voice mimicking the thumping power that threatened to crush me. “Remind you of something?”

Her lips, on the side that I can see, tug up at the corner. “Your heart, perhaps?” she suggests. “Every beat pumping tainted blood through your body. Every thud harnessing a power like no other.”

I shudder at the golden energy pulsing slowly back and forth along the inside of my forearm and the way that energy is turning from gilded yellow to blood red.

Timed to the slow beat of my heart.

As I try to comprehend what the blood could be doing to me, the False Queen leans away.

She rises to her feet while I’m forced to remain where I am, unable to fight back.

“Stay right there, Thyra,” she calls to me as she glides away. “Don’t fight. Don’t fret. Soon enough, the blood will own you, and then all will be as it should be.”

Chapter Seventeen

Maxim

The burned-out mountain range stretches out below me, a cascade of protrusions like enormous black bones as my serpent races north toward the Frost Kingdom.

To my left, the snowstorm continues to beat across the Iron Kingdom and, if anything, it’s getting worse. To the point where I could believe the center of the storm was heading right for me.

A gust of freezing air buffets my serpent, blowing him off course while the sky suddenly fills with sleet.

Damn. I thought I might dodge the worst of the storm flying along these burned-out cliffs. At the very least, I’d evade any fiery calamities since these mountains have already turned to ash, but now the air is growing icy and snow coats my skin.

A tornado appears ahead of me on the wide mountain ridge, ringed in icy-blue energy, the same sizzling power that swung like a scythe across my land, except that this time, it’s spiraling up through the air in a wide, circular motion, at least fifty feet in diameter.

I can’t risk my serpent’s life.

“Down!” I shout, leaning right.