Page 26 of Crown of Darkness
“You let me walk into a political nightmare where my stepbrother sneered down his nose about a secret the pair of you were keeping—”
“Don’t make it sound as though we were conspiring together,” Thiago’s voice grows a little harder. “I wasn’t aware that he knew. I wasn’t aware that anyone knew. Your mother must have told him—”
“Told himwhat?”
For a second I don’t think he’s going to answer. He paces back and forth like a caged wolf, violence coiled like a lash within him. “I couldn’t kill her.”
“What?” It’s not what I expected.
“When I went after your mother at the Queensmoot, I intended to kill her. I tried, Vi. I threw everything I had at her—everything I could afford to throw—and she managed to brush me aside.”
“Your mother escaped” is all he said after he returned from the Queensmoot.
“I’m not entirely surprised.” When I had a choice between killing myself, killing my mother, or finding someone with the power to break the curse she’d cast on me, there was a reason I chose the latter and sold my soul to the Mother of Night, so to speak.
My mother didn’t become Queen of Asturia through chance. And she hasn’t held onto that position for over a thousand years out of kindness. Or weakness.
I’m not strong enough to overthrow her, but there was a part of me that hopedhewas.
“She cursed me,” Thiago growls, his voice roughening as he lowers his fingers to his sleeve and starts unbuttoning it. Smooth skin reveals itself. Tugging the linen up his arm, he bears his forearm. “At first I thought nothing of it. I thought she’dmissed. But this started appearing a week or two after we returned.”
Dark ink starts to penetrate through his skin as if it’s rising from deep within. Or no, not ink, but a shadow. A curse written deep within his veins. It starts at the pulse point of his inner wrist and curls its way up his forearm, like a twining bramble aiming for his heart.
And he hid it.
Everything within me turns to ice and I grab his shirt, tearing his sleeve open over the heavy bulge of his biceps. “How far does it go?”
There’s no emotion in his voice. “Shoulder. It’s been working its way slowly up my arm for weeks.”
If it hits his heart, I’ll lose him.
“And you didn’ttellme?”
“I didn’t want you to worry.”
A growl echoes in my throat. “Stop. Trying. To. Protect. Me. Do I look like some poor innocent maid who needs you to make her life all sunshine and roses? I’m not afraid of the truth.”
“It had nothing to do with shielding you from the truth.” Shadows darken his green eyes. “You need to focus on finding the crown.”
“We need to focus on stoppingthis! My mother’s spells kill, curse you!”
“It’s not meant to kill me.”
“Oh no, it’s just a nice, friendly little kiss she slapped you with. Maybe you’ll start growing daisies in your hair. Or fur. Maybe I’ll wake up one day with a bane in my bed.”
“I’m not going to grow fur. It will hit my wards. It’s meant to fracture them and unleash the Darkness within me.”
Dark shapes whirl across the skin that’s exposed. Savage, lethal shapes that bite and snarl. I can never see them in their entirety and that’s probably a good thing.
Thiago sighs, and then golden runes stamp their way up his skin, glowing from within as if he’s stripping his illusions away, inch by inch. “These are my wards. They were inked into my skin with an old magic in order to contain the Darkness within me.”
The curse writhes its way between them, and though I can see hints of golden-red where it seems to be eating its way through some of those runes, the rest of them trace stoic patterns over his olive skin. They’re like a supernova of light painted over his skin, a tangled web streaming between each point as if to capture something and contain it within him.
I don’t recognize any of the markings.
They’re nothing like the runes marked into the Hallow stones.
Nor are they anything seelie, and I’ve spent months searching through books about old lore, so I should know.
