Thyra isn’t moving. Not running. Not throwing herself out of the path of danger.
She’s kneeling in the snow, her cloak spread around her, her hair cascading across one shoulder, her hands folded in her lap.
Her heartbeat is impossibly calm, her expression serene, and her pale-blue gaze…
Far away.
All this, I register in a split second.
A moment of pure, soul-crushing panic as I realize what’s happening.
Thyra’s having an Oracle vision.
She can’t move.
And I won’t reach her in time.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Thyra
The shapeshifter woman’s claws slash at my throat, and I can’t do anything to avert my death.
Buttime…
Time is spinning around me. Through me. My mind is splitting into countless pieces, each shard a possible, glinting future.
My mind moves so fast that every heartbeat of real time becomes an age.
A slowing down of everything around me into a near-suspension of movement while I stand in the center of a thousand possibilities.
Countless potential futures.
Each begins from the moment Stellen and I stepped out from the Alak-Teah. Each reveals a dizzying series of attacks and counterattacks, Stellen’s swords flashing, his icy power cascading, his path keeping him at my side, or leading him toward Brunkil, or taking him to Fable.
A myriad of moves and seemingly limitless defenses, but nomatter what he does, every variation leads back to the moment in front of me.
Fable, slashing at my throat.
My death.
Nothing stops her from reaching me.
Within the whirling visions, her form grows brighter and brighter until all the shattered futures finally pull together into a single moment in time and then, a vision within a vision?—
I’m kneeling beside a fireplace on a tattered rug, the warmth of firelight keeping the chill from my bones. A little girl, maybe only four years old, kneels beside me, her face smudged with soot, her ashen-black hair matted like a bird’s nest.
She’s holding out her arm, resting it on the lap of…
But I can’t make out the other person. Beyond the little girl’s own form, and beyond the fireplace and the rug, everything else is hazy and unformed.
Droplets of white ink appear, dripping from a point above the girl’s arm and landing on her upturned wrist. At first, I think the droplets must be startling to her, as they are to me, but she leans forward, as if in anticipation, and asks, “Mama, what will it be?”
“A feather,” a woman’s soft voice says.
As each slow droplet gathers on the little girl’s wrist, the strange white ink takes shape, forming a feather, just as the woman promised.
“With this feather, you will have wings, my darling,” comes the whisper. “You are a wolf who can fly.”
