Page 110 of Sonnets and Serpents
The physician smiled and seemed to understand well enough. Then she spoke to Ceyda briefly, the girl’s face growing more frightened with every word. She couldn’t have been older than Eliza.
“They’re going to evaluate her leg again,” Eliza translated. “See if ... if they have to remove it.”
As the physician left, Eliza seated herself firmly on the edge of Ceyda’s bed. She took the other girl’s hand, giving it a squeeze. Ceyda didn’t pull away. When she muttered a curse about snakes, Eliza’s sympathy reached all the way to her soul.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ceyda rasped, her thin voice high and frightened. She clenched her other hand in the blanket. “Even if they heal me, he’ll just come after me again.”
“Who?”
“Shedskin,” Ceyda spat.
Eliza pursed her lips. Of all the terrible things Silas Bennett was, he wasn’t a killer.
“He never meant to hurt you,” she said. Pointing at Gill, she added, “He sent a Caster so you wouldn’t die.”
Ceyda shook her head, clearly swallowed in panic. “The cobra was too gentle for him. He’d rather kill me with his Sarazan.”
“Sarazan?” Eliza frowned. “What do you mean?”
The girl glanced at Henry, who looked back with cluelessness.
“The Sarazan tabernacle?” Eliza asked. “Did something happen there?”
“I ... made a wave.” Ceyda swallowed, gripping Eliza’s hand tightly enough to leave grooves from her fingernails. “The Artifact felt wrong to use, like—” She said something Eliza couldn’t parse. Heart painting? Perhaps an idiom. “I made a wave to sink the ship.”
She started speaking in longer, rushed sentences, and Elizasnatched translations from any of the words she could scrape together. “A monster from the ocean. Snake as big as Sarazan. Drowned the sailors.”
Ceyda’s eyes darted toward Henry again. “I used magic to get us to shore. No one else.”
“She keeps looking at me,” Henry said softly, the question clear.
Eliza offered him a quick summary. Then, to Ceyda, she said, “Silas didn’t send Sarazan. It’s just a monster in the ocean.”
Ceyda yanked her hand back, shaking her head and then seeming to regret it. She pressed her palms to her temples, squeezing her eyes closed.
“It was afterme,” she insisted, her voice cracking. “Everywhere I go—snakes. Hunting me. I hid underground, and even then, he still found me.”
Eliza frowned. Silas had sent out snakes, yes, but he’d said they could never find any trace of Ceyda. She made it sound like she’d been dodging them on every street corner, not to mention in the ocean itself.
“Are you certain ...” Eliza’s voice trailed into silence as she realized one awful possibility.Silas isn’t the only Snake Affiliate here.
She stood, shying from the thought.
But once it presented itself, she couldn’t shake it.
She remembered standing in the alley with Kerem and Silas, remembered the ease with which Kerem banished the cobra. His exasperated voice:You should have let it bite her the second time.
Silas had felt so guilty over Ceyda’s condition.
But he’d never ordered the cobra to bite in the first place.
Henry moved to stand next to Eliza, his hand hovering above her shoulder. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“No,” she murmured. “Why would he save her then?”
He could have told Silas he was too late. Clearly the threat of death had been real enough from her injury. Why bring her to the healers?
Unless he needed people to see he had a witness. A witness who, conveniently, fell unconscious before speaking to anyone else. Who would likely not last the night.
