Page 69 of Embrace the Serpent

He smiled, his eyes going molten soft, and I jumped like I’d been stuck with a dagger. I shut my eyes and pretended to sleep.

A soft laugh came from his direction.

I tugged the hood of his cloak down over my head and tucked my face into my knees. It was maddening, frustrating, my skin all aflutter. There was no reason in it. Rane and I—there was no “Rane and I.” For one, I was technically married to his king. Two, I’d never done this, whatever this was.

Admitting it out loud, this roiling thing in me, seemed like insanity. I might as well carve out my heart and liver and whatever else was important in me and give them to him on a platter.

This was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

The wagon’s rumbling slowed, and we came to a stop.

A hand brushed my shoulder. “Saphira?”

I opened my eyes and met his legs. Even his legs made something in me feel strange—I met his eyes—that was also a bad idea—and glanced to the side. Pale pink dawn light poured into the wagon through the parted curtains.

“I need to stretch my legs,” I mumbled, and scrambled out.

I picked up a few rocks for Grimney as an offering and an apology for having him stay hidden since yesterday. If I felt trapped, how much worse would he be feeling?

Pink light moved over the landscape, slowly, dreamily, a gauzy blanket being drawn across the craggy steppes and over woods nestled in low valleys.

The fort was a dollhouse atop a distant hill. I squinted. Something was moving along the road, raising a dust cloud in its wake.

Barad stepped up beside me, peering through a spyglass. “Imperial riders,” he said.

When he offered the spyglass to me, I took it. There was dust trapped between the lenses making the view fuzzy, but there was no mistaking the Imperial outriders, escorting a dark carriage that looked awfully like the one that carried Mirandel in Copperton.

She was like a dog nipping at my heels. But was she chasing me, or was she herding us to the Serpent Kingdom? We would’ve led her right there, if I hadn’t discovered the jeweldust.

She was like that. Tricky, conniving. I hadn’t seen it when we were small. For months, she wouldn’t leave me alone. She’d find me, no matter what corner of the Rose Palace I ran to. After a while, I let her in. I showed her my secret routes, the tiny door at the back of the dry goods pantry that led to the wine cellars and out into the Palace Quarter gardens, the dusty stairwell behind a tapestry that spanned the height of the palace, the secret balcony that you could get to by climbing the trellis to the fourth floor. I shared them all with her. I thought we were friends, united, carving out a little freedom in a world ruled by Lady Incarnadine.

One day, I opened the little door and found the way sealed. On the balcony, I had kept little mementoes—daisy chains, rocks I’d liked—and those were gone.

They were waiting for me. Instead, I ran. I had kept one secret from Mirandel, a path that led out of the Palace Quarter entirely. That day, I took it and never looked back.

My heart still ached with an echo of that pain. It wasn’t just that she’d betrayed my secrets. It was that she proved that she’d never cared for me. She was applauded for discovering those passageways. And the next time Incarnadine came, Mirandel was chosen.

Rane wasn’t Mirandel. But also, these feelings felt bigger, more dangerous. If Rane turned on me, it would hurt far, far worse.

But he wasn’t her. He wasn’t anything like her. He’d been honest with me.

I was suddenly aware of someone beside me. My body tingled, and I didn’t have to look to know it was Rane.

I offered him the spyglass, but instead, his fingers encircled my wrist. He drew my sleeve up and held my arm up to the light. His eyelashes were dark, his gaze intent on my skin.

I sucked in a breath. Pinpricks of light caught on my skin. Far fewer than before, but the jeweldust was still there.

His gaze held mine. “We’ll figure it out.”

My heart was trying to flutter out my throat. It felt strange and dangerous to admit it to myself, but I trusted him.

We parted ways with the theater troupe not long after, at one of the many roadside villages that catered to travelers. Maras told me she would sell my old clothes in a town far from here with such a knowing look in her eye that I realized they knew we were on the run, and they still chose to help us.

“Thank you,” I said.

Barad half jokingly offered Rane a place in the troupe. He couldn’t bring himself to make me the same offer, joke or not. I figured he couldn’t risk that I would take him up on it.

I let Grimney out the moment they were out of sight, and he stretched with such a flair for drama that I wished Barad could have seen it.

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