Page 35 of Sonnets and Serpents
He gave a quiet laugh, never lifting his eyes. “I have a key. But being able to enter a door without one is a good skill, and, deprived of practice, good skills fade.”
With a twist of the knob, the door swung inward, and he smirked up at her.
It was charming, in a roguish way, but she would have died before telling him as much. She stepped past him into the opened room.
Only to immediately retreat, pressing one hand to her nose.
“Ugh.” She made a dry retch, eyes watering. “Are you sure this is an office? It’s not an uncleaned washroom?”
Even Silas wrinkled his nose. “That’s snake musk. Hold on.”
He entered the room, head cocked as if listening to something. After a moment, he lowered himself to his stomach in front of a set of shelves, extending his hand into the shadows beneath.
Eliza tensed, expecting him to be bitten by an unseen viper. She should have remembered who he was.
Whathe was.
He withdrew his hand, and a thin white snake had threaded itself through his fingers and around his wrist. It flicked its tongue rapidly, head swinging back and forth, looking for something to bite.
Eliza inched backward.
“You’re safe,” Silas cooed, not to her but to the snake, as if the creature were something innocent and cuddly. He turned his hand, evaluating the reptile, not seeming to care how close its swinging head came to his eyes. “An albino—and a young one. No wonder he’s helping you. Get into some trouble?” After a moment’s pause, he nodded. “Well, you’re lucky you weren’t eaten.”
He wastalkingto asnake.
She remembered witnessing him in the library, talking to the python. She’d ignored the sign of a shapeshifter, attributing it instead to Pravusat’s love of snakes.
How dearly she’d paid for that mistake.
Eliza backed up until she reached the end of her invisible tether, which, unfortunately, tugged on the bracelet. Silas’s arm rose in her direction, the snake along with it, and both of them fixed their cold eyes on her.
“Relax,apta. If Tulip can’t swallow you, this one definitely can’t.”
“It could poison me,” Eliza rasped.
“Most snakesaren’tvenomous.” Silas raised his eyebrows. “Even Tulip.”
“It has fangs!”
“You have teeth as well, Highness, and somehow, I think you’re more inclined to bite me than she is. Should I be concerned aboutyourvenom?”
As ifElizawere the danger here.
All the same, heat rose in her neck, and she folded her arms across her chest, ignoring his smug expression. He took the snake to a back corner of the office, forcing Eliza to follow him, pulled by her bracelet. Then he cleaned whatever had caused the assaultive odor, opened a window, and lit a stick of incense on the room’s desk.
Under the calming fragrance of sandalwood, and with bothsnakes on the other side of the room, Eliza finally had a chance to survey the office. The two windows let in a good amount of natural light, and the desk held an oil lamp for evenings. There were more shelves than she’d seen in Yvette’s office but with fewer books and more creepy bottles of substances she wasn’t sure she wanted to evaluate closely.
When Silas moved, she kept him in the corner of her eye while pretending to study some kind of hooked stick hanging between shelves. He picked up a sheet of parchment from the desk, lips pursed as he read, and when he turned it briefly to look at the empty back, she could see the front looked like a written list.
Curiosity tickled her throat. She cleared it.
“Settle in,apta,” he said without looking up. “These’ll take me a while.”
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked.
“Not bother me,” he shot back. “Otherwise, it’ll take longer.”
Easier said than done. Eliza had never been a skilled manager of boredom, and it was more dangerous now than ever.
