Page 53 of Sonnets and Serpents
Where she’d justhappenedto share a boat with Henry Wycliff.
Or had he been a target?
Too many questions, not enough answers. It made Silas’s skin itch. He surfaced in the bath, snatched a bar of soap, and scrubbed away the faint pattern of scales on his arms.
He’d thought himself a random target.Hopedhe was a random target. Hoped the ocean-eyed girl had come to campus—a place crawling with magic—and just happened to light on him as the first magic user in her path. Now he believed she’d targeted him specifically, even if he had no idea why.
And he couldn’t explain her interest in Henry. Though theywere both members of court, Henry and Silas shared no connection beyond passing acquaintance, if that, and Eliza had been insistent the other boy didn’t possess magic.
Unless Henry was also an Affiliate. If so, he’d been the biggest of fools to pursue a Loegrian princess; he’d been courting death.
Silas raked his fingers through his hair, leaning back with a sigh. Above him, the ceiling let in a thousand pinpricks of sunlight through minuscule holes. A sky of daylight stars. It was beautiful, he supposed, but stars belonged to the night. It feltwrong.
Everything about the world felt wrong.
Each time he went out in the city, he wasn’t searching alone; he had a network of snake spies. But just as he and Eliza had hit nothing but dead ends, his snakes had brought back a hundred failed reports through magic. There was no sign of the ocean-eyed girl or of Henry, not in any corner of Izili.
He’d told Eliza they might have left the country. It was a possibility. Silas was convinced the symbols on the magic stealer’s box were Cronese. But did that mean she was Cronese herself, or was this another invasion of Cronith into Pravusat?
He’d found research on using written language to shape Artifacts, so he’d experimented with words painted on snakeskin, testing his native Loegrian along with Pravish and Cronese.
The Artifact effects were strongest if he used Cronese. Why was that?
It couldn’t be the language’s cultural attitude toward magic, because Cronith and Pravusat both had comparable freedom of magic compared to Loegria’s discrimination.
There was something unique about the language itself, something the magic stealer had discovered and harnessed.
If I had another ten years to study, he thought. But he had to scrape results together in the next two months. If he wantedto learn anything further down this path, he needed to know exactly what words had been inscribed on the magic stealer’s box. He needed to study it up close.
If the ocean-eyed girl couldn’t be found, could Silas lure her out?
While he tried to construct plans for that, he finished his bath, toweling dry before dressing and exiting the stall. He was so caught up in his thoughts that he was shocked when he came to a lurching stop in the hallway.
From inside her stall, Eliza shouted in protest. He heard water sloshing, and he retreated a few steps to give her freedom of movement again.
“Sorry,” Silas called, rubbing a hand across his face. Whatever fledgling plans he’d had in mind vanished in the wake of a returning princess, who always crowded out all his other thoughts.
He was never going to solve anything with her around as a distraction.
While they finished drying by the bathhouse fireplace, the princess surprised him by saying, “You tried to tell me about the girl with Henry. I wasn’t listening.”
Silas waited, trying to gauge if that was an invitation or a trap.
“You said she was dangerous.” Eliza’s voice had grown small, and she drew her knees up on the cushion, wrapping her arms around them. “Do you think she’s ... hurt Henry?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Silas said honestly.
“Could you tell me how you met her?”
Thatwasan invitation. Not an order.
Silas found himself torn. He hadn’t shared his research goals with anyone but Afshin, and even the dean wasn’t interested in his process, only his result. This was something Silas had to accomplish by himself.
But he couldn’t do much ofanythingby himself while chained to a princess. Thus far, they’d been pulling each other in different directions, even after finding out the two people they were trying to find were somehow linked. They needed to collaborate.
Yet Silas couldn’t help dreading the result. If he told the princess what he was fighting for, what his future hinged on, it would mean she could sabotage it.
“Please, Silas?” Eliza whispered. The firelight brought out the copper tint in her eyes, and she looked both earnest and downtrodden, sitting with her damp hair loose over her shoulders. Her fine silk clothing was ragged, marked by snags and holes gathered in her desperate search, and her fair skin bore splotches of red from their days out in the sun.
