Page 5 of Sonnets and Serpents
Baris cocked his head. “Will you take more classes now?”
“Studying costs money.”
“Pay for them with papayas! After you buy them from me, of course.”
“Oh, I have something else in mind for the university.” Silas smirked. “I’m going to havethempayme.”
Baris gave a full-throated laugh. He turned his attention for a moment, threatening a woman who’d been about to leave without buying. They haggled until she carried away a dozen papayas, and Baris admired a new bronze ring much too small for his hands; perhaps he intended it for his wife. In Loegria, Silas had never seen anyone trade for goods or jewelry; the market operated solely on the exchange of money. In Pravusat,everythingwas money.
“Do you think the universitywouldtake papayas?” he asked.
The question earned another laugh before Baris assured him the university was “uptight like your country.” Hard silver only.
It didn’t matter. In the morning, Silas would speak to Iyal Afshin, the dean, and offer his services as a professor. With a position at the university, he could settle permanently in Pravusat. Build a life. Forget all about the one he’d left behind in Loegria.
First, he had to find the lovesick princess and convince her to go home to her sister.
“You are, what, sixteen?” Baris demanded.
“We’ve had this discussion before. I’m nineteen.”
“Sixteen and a half, then. The university will not allow sixteen and a half to teach. Come work for me! Gather papayas, twist-twist and done. Even sixteen and a half can manage.”
“I’ve done orchard work before, and it’s miserable.” Silas’s best friend, Guillaume Reeves, owned a lemon orchard. Since meeting Gill, Silas had worked four harvests at the Reeves estate, because even though hehatedit, the torture of sweat on his back was preferable to the torture of enduring his father’s expectations at home.
“I’m an academic,” he told Baris, “not a hired hand.”
“Bah, then you are of no use to me. Be gone with you and your hands until you can buy papayas! If I see your Loegrian friend, I will send them to the university.”
Baris waved him off, and Silas stood, ducking to avoid the canopy over the stall. But he’d only gone a few paces deeper into the market when a quick succession of impressions flashed through his mind.
Girl smell. Shadow men. Loud. Fear.
Silas cursed.
The horn-nosed snake had found Eliza, all right, and she was being arrested by the kuveti.
When Eliza first heard the shouts, she didn’t realize they were directed toward her. Everyonein the market was shouting; it seemed like how all Pravish people communicated.
She’d been in Pravusat exactly one week and had hated every minute of it. It was loud and aggressive andblazingly hot.
When she’d left home, the castle grounds had suffered frost each night, and the thick clouds promised oncoming snows, with all the delights of her favorite season. Pravusat did not believe in winter. It believed only in sand and chaos.
When two men grabbed her by the arms, Eliza glared up at them, demanding to be unhanded, but she quickly realized these were no random marketgoers. The two men wore dark uniforms with veils, only the slits of their eyes visible. One of them spoke in Pravish. Eliza caught a few of the most common words—you, quiet, come—but the context was clear.
She was beingarrested.
“There’s been a mistake,” she protested, trying and failing to yank free. Her mind spun. She couldn’t have broken any laws. She’d only been going from person to person in the market, trying to find someone who spoke Loegrian, someone who might have seen Henry.
For the past week, that had been her quest, though all she’d earned for it was a lot of cursing and dismissals. She’d returned twice to interrogate the dockmaster, and he answered her only by shaking his head, but she refused to believe there were no survivors of theDuke’sshipwreck.
She refused to believe the last time Henry had smiled at her had been thelast.
The ship she’d arrived on had already departed, so she’d hired a room at an inn near the harbor, and she’d spent every day embroiled in her search. She was exhausted, her strength as frayed as her clothing, her soul as hungry as her stomach, butthere was nowhere to go except forward. She would not accept any other path.
“Let me go!” she snarled again as the uniformed men began to drag her forward. “I’m a—”
She clamped her jaw shut before she could sayprincess. She’d kept her identity a secret thus far, because she knew a princess far from home without a single guard would be an easy target. She also knew her father was searching for her, probably cursing her name and swearing to drag her back home before she did something to embarrass him and the crown of Loegria.
