Page 76 of Embrace the Serpent

He looked at me pityingly. “Qrrzy.” The stones that made him up were thousands of years old, he said.

The plants emitted a bitter scent. It did smell rather like the medicines that city apothecaries dispensed in glass bottles.

“Fine,” I said.

Grimney took the plants and—by using one hand as a mortar and the other a pestle—he ground them into a paste.

Rane’s breathing was shallow. With one hand on his chest to hold him down, I yanked out the arrow.

Rane moaned.

The arrow came out easily, but the blood—my mouth filled with bile and I tried not to gag. Luckily, it hadn’t gone in too deep. Perhaps because the tip was dented—maybe it hadn’t picked up enough speed to pierce deeper.

I quickly washed the wound, packed it in Grimney’s plants, and wrapped it in clean bandages. I did the same with the wound in his side.

“Rane?” I whispered.

His lips parted. The tension was gone from his body; he’d slipped into deep sleep. I cleaned up, and then sat by his side.

His dark eyelashes cast long shadows that nearly brushed his cheekbones. They trembled as he dreamed. He breathed in, sharp, and relaxed, his muscles loosening one by one, his palms splaying, his shoulders falling into the mattress.

I blinked. His eyelashes were silver. And then, from the roots of his hair came a shimmering as his dark locks turned pale and grew until they brushed the tops of his ribs. His cheekbones sharpened, his lips grew a touch thinner, and most startlingly, iridescent scales spread over his skin, creeping up his neck and ears, though his face remained smooth.

In the space of a heartbeat, he had changed. The tension between his brows eased, as if he had let go of his last burden.

I had half risen, my arm shielding my face, and when it seemed that the changes were done, I lowered myself, and with a quick glance behind me, I leaned in.

It felt like gazing upon a secret.

Tiny silver scales covered the backs of his hands and cascadeddown his long fingers, making delicate patterns around his knuckles. They glinted in the firelight like diamonds. A jolt of recognition went through me. A memory came, of the Serpent King, on our wedding day, his hand reaching for mine.

But his face wasn’t the Serpent King’s. Neither was it Rane’s.

And yet it was familiar. Each individual feature was familiar; the long eyes were the Serpent King’s, the strong, straight nose was Rane’s. The coloring was the Serpent King’s, but the slenderness of his face, the way his lips curled at the corner as he dreamed, those were Rane’s.

But who was he?

I waited hours at his bedside, filling with hope at every twitch of his lashes, every change in his breath. He didn’t wake, but he had no fever. If he just woke for a moment, if I could figure out how to get to his kingdom....

I got to my feet. Grimney sat on the edge of the bed, watching the sleeping figure like a loyal bodyguard.

I couldn’t bring myself to think of him as Rane. Needling me, at the back of my mind, was the feeling that I didn’t know him. I mean, we were just strangers making a deal, so it wasn’t like I expected to know his favorite color or anything. But that I hadn’t known his true face?

My mind was drawing connections, making leaps that I didn’t want to face. So what if he looked like the Serpent King? Maybe all serpent people did. Maybe any serpent person could call up an army of snakes with a drop of blood.

I needed space to think.

The hallway had filled with dappled sunlight from the holes in the roof. Tattered tapestries hung limply, too faded to make out, but an image flashed in my mind of them whole and vibrant, depicting tales of divine peoples, the whole story captured in a single panel. I imagined being small, lying on the floor and looking up at the tapestries. The image faded.

The moss squelched underfoot nauseatingly, so I leapt from patch to patch of bare tile, like a child, skipping along.

I followed the roar of the sea, to a set of double doors standing ajar. I slipped through without touching them. Dust motes danced in the slanting rays of sunlight, and all was bathed in a golden haze.

The far wall was all arches and simple columns, open to the sea. The shutters had long rotted away, and scraggly rags whipped in the wind.

They had been pale silk once, dancing in the wind.

I crossed to them, stepping over the rotted cushions that were strewn across the once-beautiful carpet. Even now, faded by sunlight, the thread work was astonishing. It had been soft, I remembered—

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