Page 77 of Three Dark Kings and the Gilded Serpent

“How did you know about that?”

She closes her eyes, releasing me from her sharp gaze. “There’s someone you need to meet. And something you need to see.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Antony

Dusk is falling as we fly past the forested mountains in Iron’s east and across the charcoal cliffs at the border.

I’ve never come this far out, an omission that now feels dangerous.

Endlessly dark plains stretch past the expansive, charred mountains. Black dust streams across the farthest edge of the mountain ridge, similar to the way white steam flows across a field of snow.

Ahead of us, the flock of eagles carrying my warriors suddenly dives into the billowing dust and out of sight. I wait for them to reappear, assuming they’ve dipped to follow the wind’s currents and avoid the polluted air, but there’s no sign of them rising above the dust storm again.

Victor stopped holding on to me an hour ago once I’d regained feeling in my limbs, but now, he takes hold of my shoulders. “We’re about to take a dive, brother.”

A dive? Where?

“Prepare to hold your breath. Ready. And…now.”

We hit the dust storm and plummet into air filled with black ash, the granules as sharp and cutting as the icicles that struck me during the snowstorm.

My stomach lifts from my body and a sense of weightlessness fills me.

A second later, my center of gravity plunges.

The eagle banks sharply left, performing a complete U-turn, but the dust is too thick for me to see what we’re headed toward. Since we’ve now cleared the charcoal cliffs, we must be flying back toward the mountainside.

I flash back to the moment Thyra told me to fly into the tunnel in the bloodlands where I later found my mother. I thought we were going to crash into a wall of stone. Just like now.

For the briefest moment, the dust clears and I make out the rock wall we’re speeding toward.

A honeycomb web of caves stretches out across the cliffs, protected by a wide lip of rock above it and concealed by the dust that billows thickly across my vision again.

Seconds later, we soar into one of the caves, coming to a stop in clear air. Behind me, the dust swirls flat at the cave’s mouth, as if there were an invisible shield stopping the dirt from flying inside.

A large tunnel stretches ahead of me, curving so I can’t see what lies beyond it, but arched openings allow visibility into the tunnels on either side of us and into the tunnels beyond those.

Cassia’s eagle soars into the channel on our left, landing where I have a clear line of sight to her.

“What is this place?” I slide from the eagle’s back and wait for Victor to join me on the ground.

“Cassia has a theory,” Victor says, joining me on the smooth ground, the floor like polished stone.

My sister quickly dismounts, murmuring to Fortuna before she approaches, her eagle following at her back. The arched opening is large enough for them to easily step through.

“Dragons,” she says. “Fire dragons, to be exact. I think these caves are where they once laid their eggs. Some kind of interconnected nest.” She knocks the wall with her knuckles. “Hardened by dragon’s fire.”

“Concealed in dust storms.” I narrow my eyes at the way the dust swirls flat at the entrance. “That’s the border right there, isn’t it? Between Iron and the east. Like the border between Iron and Frost, where the snowstorms hit an invisible magical boundary and don’t cross into Iron.”

“Where they used to hit an invisible boundary,” Cassia says pointedly. “The snowstorm that buried you seems to have caused the border’s magical rules to break.”

My poisoned heart sinks. “I thought the ice hadn’t melted because it wasn’t warm enough.”

Cassia shakes her head, patting Fortuna’s feathers as the bird nudges her side. “We heard that the bloodlands have also broken past their previous magical boundaries and have now formed a channel into Ember. We haven’t been able to travel that far west to verify the stories, but we’re worried about Rohan’s brother, Riven. He was stationed at one of the towers directly south of the bloodlands.”

“The rumor’s true,” I say. “Ever since Thyra became the Oracle, the longstanding rules of our world are breaking down. The darkness of the bloodlands has spread into the south. But Riven’s safe.”