Page 100 of Embrace the Serpent

He nodded. “How long would it take?”

My mouth was dry. “Rane...”

He cupped my face, his thumb tracing my cheekbone. He didn’t want this any more than I did.

If everything could stay the same, if Rane’s heart was the exact same size as his grandfather’s and came precut, the work would be somewhat simple, a matter of hours. But Rane’s heart would not come out of his chest cut and faceted. Cutting even the simplest jewel was nerve-racking work. There’s no way to fix a mistake. A cut is forever.

And I didn’t exactly have a perfect workspace. In the village at least I’d had a blacksmith to help me. Here, if they knew what I was doing to their king, I was sure they’d hand me over to Incarnadinethemselves. Or just murder me. I might even have deserved it.

My chest tightened, and I forced myself to breathe.

Once cut, the next problem would be the setting.

To do it right—to fully understand the heartstone’s setting and make sure there were no traps to removing it, to take time to measure each facet of the old stone and research every cut that would be made to the new heartstone, to find or make the same mix of metals of the same purity and composition—a responsible jewelsmith would take months. A responsible jewelsmith would takeat leasta month to just be sure of every possible effect of removing the old heartstone, before even starting to consider how best to implement Rane’s.

I thought of that pressure on Rane’s heart. I would have liked to figure out a way to mitigate it, to ease him slowly into it. The thought of Rane’s heartstone shattering made a cold hollowness open in my chest.

But that wasn’t what he was asking. He was asking for me to save his people, not save him.

I thought of the most difficult jewels I’d worked on. There was a trancelike state I could get to, where things flowed from me. It would take a week, maybe. I couldn’t ask him for that, for his people to fight that long, to spill that much blood.

My voice wouldn’t rise above a whisper. “Three days.”

It was a gathering of the heads of each branch of divine peoples, each fantastical and noble, some wise and others fierce, of every possible size and clad in a magnificent array of styles. And then there was me.

I felt myself shrinking into my skin, and somehow Rane couldread my mind, because every time I thought of running out the door, his hand brushed my back.

We had gathered in the dining hall, around the long table, though there were many that preferred to stand or, more accurately, loom.

There were peris, two of them, tiny and charming, and I wished I could just talk to them about their craft.

From there, it got considerably less friendly. There were frog- and toad-like folks who swelled up every time someone said something they didn’t agree with. There were sylphs and naiads, who sighed and giggled behind their hands in an oddly malicious way. The rakshasa leader, who seemed to be picking his teeth with a human thigh bone. I avoided eye contact with the tiger folk and, really, every divine person much larger than I was.

The loudest were the eagle folk, huge and feathered, winged and with piercing eyes. Power radiated from them, the kind that made me think they could be a pain in Rane’s side if they so chose.

Rane was calling for order. “Yes. The Imperial Army is at our border. They have found a weakness in the enchantments. But I have a plan. I will be able to reinforce the enchantments soon. I need three days.” He paused. “However, they have given us till dawn to surrender.”

“So war has come to us at last,” said the head of the eagle folk.

Someone said, “If we surrender... no blood will be spilled.”

“But we will never be free again. They’ll trap us all. You want to be slave to a ring?”

“Let us fight. If the twilight of the divine is upon us, let us not go meekly.”

“The Serpent King has a plan. If we just hold out—”

“Plans, plans. All plans fail.”

“Just because your plans fail—the plans of an imbecile might fail, but that does not mean all plans will.”

It descended into arguments. Some were directed at Rane.

Rane bore it without flinching. I took a step forward, and Rane’s hand touched mine, holding me back. He shot me a glance, and I read a small bit of delight in it.You would fight for me?

A clear divide emerged. On one side were the kind of divine people who had lived quietly in the wild and were content to follow Rane’s lead. And then there were the fiercer sorts who had left kingdoms of their own to take refuge here. The kind whose pride was all the more precious because they had already given so much of it up.

After a minute, Rane crossed his arms, and a person that looked like a tree banged their arm—or branch—on the table for silence.

---