Blood magic doesn’t cast a wide net. It’s specific. Targeted. Just as Stellen said.
“Which brings me to two concerns,” Stellen says, his thumb brushing across my skin again, tiny swirls that once again lift the descending heaviness in my mind. “My first concern is that a Merovian, now long dead, cast a blood bind onto that hammer, believing that one day the False Queen’s first female descendant would pick it up.”
I immediately see where he’s going with this. “You’re wondering how that Merovian could have possibly predicted these events.” I swallow hard. “The answer is: it would be impossible. My father may have carried the Dragonstone Blade with him all his life, but the hammer was hidden away in the Vividaris’ vault, far away from me. Concealed from common knowledge. The chances of me ever coming across it were incredibly slim.”
It was only because Antony’s mother, Aeliana Vividari, described parts of the hammer to his brother Victor that we even knew where the hammer was. And Aeliana only did that because she was trying to keep Victor alive while he fought the pain and horror of the Ember burns inflicted on him.
A fine sequence of events, impossible to predict.
Unless…
Stellen speaks my fear aloud. “Unless the FalseQueen foresaw the future and used her knowledge to ensure the blood bind would be cast.”
I try to breathe. “But to foresee events this far into the future? Not possible. Oracles have never dealt in prophecy. The harm we foresee is right in front of us. It’s imminent. We have only enough time to choose whether or not to change what’s about to happen.”
“Is that truly the limit of what you can do?”
Stellen’s question floors me. It’s true that the blade visions have allowed me to foresee events much further into the future than my father could. But the blade visions are unclear. Unsettling. Made up of feelings and instincts and flashes of danger.
So far, I’ve only understood a blade vision’s meaning after it’s come to pass.
Stellen’s gaze passes slowly across my face. “What intrigues me, Thyra, is that you’re applying the usual rules of Oracle power to yourself. The False Queen was the first female Oracle, and she was powerful enough to cast a curse that broke Serulia into three kingdoms.” He pauses. “Do you know what the wordSeruliaonce meant?”
“Pure.” My lips press into a line. “The Pure Kingdom.”
“A kingdom of peace.” He leans back a little. “Until the False Queen brought destruction, fueled by a thirst for power and a plan that initially spanned decades.”
Until Antony told me about the curse, I had grown up listening to the story that all the villagers believed and repeated: the Serulian King’s three generals rose up against him, killed him and his heir, and started a war with each other, each vying for power.
The truth was apparently far more complicated. The False Queen waited twenty years for her son to come of age before she convinced her husband, the king, to take his army into thebountiful east. Before they left, she gave her son the Dragonstone Blade, secretly tainted with her blood so that whoever held it would be filled with murderous intent.
In battle, the prince turned on his father, killed him, and then was himself killed when the three generals stepped in.
When the army returned home, their king dead, the heir dead, the Oracle made her move to claim power. When the generals stopped her, she cursed the blade.
“It wasn’t her Oracle power that gave strength to the curse.” I need to refute the possibility that the False Queen’s power may be stronger than I knew. “The curse was powered by the blood of both the Serulian King and the Slain Prince. Royal blood spilled onto the blade when the prince attacked his father?—”
“What?”
Stellen’s question is sharp, the sudden furrow in his brow deep.
I speak carefully. “The Slain Prince was overcome by the murderous intent in the blade and tried to kill his father.”
“No.” Stellen leans forward again. “Where did you hear that?”
I catch my breath. “In the Iron Kingdom. I was told that’s how the king died and the curse came to be.”
Stellen studies me, watching my mouth.
Quietly, he murmurs, “You aren’t lying. You believe the story you were told. But no, Thyra.”
He leans back again, a wary light in his eyes. “That isn’t what happened.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Thyra
That wasn’t how the curse began?
