Page 5 of Three Dark Kings and the Gilded Serpent

“Well done, Sorley!” Father cries, a jubilant shout across the crowd. “You’ve cut the weakness from our kingdom and proven yourself worthy. The throne will be yours.”

Sorley’s body kicks up snow as I drag him across the arena to the spot beneath our father’s dais, my head bowed and shoulders hunched.

Painful breaths claw through my chest and throat.

Weakness.

That’s how he saw my mother and sister.

That’s how he sees me.

Love, to him, is weakness.

I tip my head back, watching for the faint crease in his brow, the uncertain purse of his lips, the moment of recognition in his eyes followed by horror and then…a satisfying fear.

“I don’t want your throne,” I say.

His lips twist with hatred. “You. You-You… It can’t be! You’re a weakling⁠—”

I’m already inhaling. A black pit of rage has opened within my mind, and now I’m dragged down into it, tipped into depths from which I can’t come back.

The arena fills with death and blood.

Dying and living and dying again.

Maybe there’s a part of me that can still feel. A part of me that remains aware of every cut of my ice and every snapping bone and how far my Voice carries throughout the arena and beyond it, and how many times I force life back into broken bodies only to break them again.

All I know is that my father’s screams can’t fill the void.

His garbled pleas for mercy can’t bring back what he took from me.

My ears buzz when my voice is too hoarse to form another song and a heavy silence falls.

I slip on the blood at my feet, stumbling backward, finding myself suddenly supported by a strong, furry body.

Nara gives a soft whimper, her head hanging low, her ears flat and tail tucked, but she nudges close to my side, her back laden with the supplies Mother and Safra will never use.

My Voice has no impact on her or on any white wolf. The soft howls of the wolves outside the arena register in my hearing and only now am I aware of how far the silence stretches.

How far my Voice must have traveled…

I stumble. Catch hold of Nara’s side. Right myself. Focus through the emptiness.

“I need to bury them.”

Not my father. Not the highborn.

My mother and sister.

Somehow, I make it back to the Rose Room, where I wrap them in sheets, tucking their hair and arms and legs safely inside the material and securing them to Nara’s back.

When I reach the palace gate, the portcullis is already open, the wall abandoned. The second circle, where the army trains, their number depleted because of my father’s games, is deserted. Frantically-beating hearts tell me soldiers are huddled in the farthest barracks near the next wall. This city is made of concentric circles with a high wall between them. The palace is in the inner circle and the soldiers’ barracks are in the middle circle while the main population lives in the outer circle.

The city also appears deserted, but again, a thousand frantic heartbeats and the soft whimpers of children speak of the fae huddled out of sight.

I walk on, Nara plodding at my back, her head held low.

For hours, I walk, trudging through the snow to the Sacred Stone Temple, where I retrieve ropes to wrap around the heavy stone from which the temple takes its name.