Page 26 of Embrace the Serpent

I crumpled it into a ball and shoved it in. It strained the seams.

My foot slid on a piece of paper. Rane’s card. I shoved it in my pocket, and then I grabbed his cloak, too. It was big and anonymous.

“Dwyggr?”

I spun. “Oh, Grims.” He couldn’t come with me. But he couldn’t stay. I didn’t know what Galen would do to him when he woke.“You’re too big to come with me—I mean, you’re perfect. But—”

He held himself very still. A rumble came from deep in him, a crush of rock on rock, growing louder and louder. A crack—

I flung my arms up, protecting myself from what felt like small explosion.

A dust cloud cleared. A pile of rocks stood where Grimney had been.

“Oh gods, Grimney!” My heart dropped. I’d killed him?

Movement came from the rubble. A tiny Grimney bounced out, arms spread. He was gleaming, glittering, made up of only the semiprecious stones he’d eaten, bound together with thick veins of gold. All the sturdy brown rock had been left behind. He had one amber eye and one of pale white, and his grin took up half his plum-sized head.

He tucked himself into a ball and rolled happily onto my foot.

“That was very melodramatic.” I picked him up and put him in my pocket.

I ran down the stairs, barreling through a priest who was coming up. He shrieked something at me. My feet skidded to a stop at the bottom of the steps.

A handful of people—Galen’s friends—stood before the main door. “What ho!” A jovial redheaded man blocked it. “What’s this?”

I spun on my heel and threw myself down the hallway, out the back door, and into the shadows of the alleyway.

I was at the mouth of Gem Lane when shouts came from the workshop. “Guards! Guards!”

6

My foot slid on cobblestone, and I caught myself on a stone wall, scraping my palm. The street was wet with drizzle, and now that I was paying attention, I found the damp had worked its way into my hair, droplets beading on my neck, sinking into the collar of my cloak. Rane’s cloak.

I didn’t know how long I’d been walking, or where I was. Grimney’s head poked out of my pocket, and his beseeching gaze was fixed on me.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Also, I don’t want to talk about it.”

The past went in a box that got bolted shut and shoved deep where I never had to think about it ever again. Those were the rules.

“And besides,” I said, “we need to find Rane.”

Grimney’s head disappeared, and I felt him rummaging around in my pocket. He resurfaced with a silver rectangle: Rane’s card. One corner had been gnawed on, by the looks of it, by someone with stones for teeth. But the address was legible.

Going to see Rane was something of an impulse, but the more I thought about it, the smarter it seemed. He needed a jewelsmith, and I needed to do something other than cry and wait for Galen’s workshop guards or Lady Incarnadine’s Imperial Guards to huntme down and sentence me to marriage or death.

The address took us back to the city, to a shabby little corner of the Merchant District, where a green door stood squashed in between two sprightlier buildings. The paint was peeling off in strips, and someone had long ago pried the jewel out of the large brass doorknocker that now hung crookedly.

I knocked anyway. There was no sound from within—I leaned closer, straining my hearing.

A wretchedly sewer-like stench wafted from my side, followed by a tug at my sleeve. “What’cha doin’ that for?” said a grubby-looking kid who seemed to have materialized from the gutter. Snot dripped down from his nose, leaving a streak that was clearer of dirt than the rest of his face.

“It’s not really your business, is it?”

He sniffled. “Tha’ door is my business, lady.”

I glanced at Rane’s card and then to the number painted above the door. They were the same.

“Where’d ya get tha’?” Lightning quick, he grabbed it out of my hand and danced away.

---