Page 79 of Sonnets and Serpents
The world was bigger than it should have been. Far too big. The ground pressed up like jaws trying to close around her, but when she shrank from it, she could only curl in on herself, not stand. She had no legs. Above her loomed the prison bars and a human Silas. He looked strangely pale, even ill, his skin drained of its usual honey tones, his inky hair missing its rich depth. With gentle hands, he reached through the bars to pick her up.
Eliza squirmed. She opened her jaws, then snapped them shut again because she didn’t want to bite him. She wanted to cry at howwrongeverything felt—the shape of her own mouth, the way her body moved, the lack of any limbs to flail. She was herself, but she was all wrong, wrong,wrong.
Then the wrongness vanished, swirled away in a puff of mist. She was human again, kneeling next to Silas outside the cell. She choked on a sob.
Silas pulled her into his arms, rubbing his hands over her back, his touch firm but soothing along the curve of her spine. Eliza clung to him, burying her face in his chest, finding comfort in the steady rhythm of his heart. She realized he was murmuring words in her ear.
Her sonnet.
“Love, my sword,” Silas whispered. “A sharper blade will nowhere be found. Which severs lies, defends the truth, and holds me honor bound.”
Warmth fluttered through her chest, giddy little butterflies that banished the last vestiges of feeling like a snake. Eliza wriggled back in his arms, smiling up at him.
“Ne’erwhere,” she said, pleased to be able to correct him for once. “A sharper blade will ne’erwhere be found.”
“That’s not a word.”
“It’s poetry. It’s meant to create an impression.”
“Well, it clearly made the wrong impression on me.” With clear concern, he shifted his hands from her back to her left forearm, examining the spot where he’d bitten her. The twin wounds were smaller than she’d expected, red but not bleeding, barely pinpricks in her skin. “Are you all right?”
Eliza nodded slowly. She’d survived. And Silas had gone out of his way to make the experience as gentle as possible.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He lifted an eyebrow. “If you enjoy being a snake that much, I’ll transform you anytime.”
She shoved his chest, and he flashed a smug grin. Then he stood, lifting her along with him, his hands steady around hers.
“We don’t have much time,” he said, serious now. “Look for anything that could be a tunnel entrance—a trapdoor, a seam in a wall. Anything strange.”
Eliza nodded again, and together, they crept down the hallway.
They searched without speaking. It was easy at first, since the guard Silas had taken out was the only one posted in this wing of the prison, and the other cells were empty. Clearly the kuveti had put their captured princess in the “luxury” area.
But once they reached the fork where the guards had initially tried to separate them, the prison took on more life, and they had to creep past inhabited cells, trying not to alert anyone who might shout for a rescue. Eliza couldn’t look inside the cells; she wanted to throw the doors open, regardless of consequence.
Silas took down another guard—a close call, since the woman spotted Eliza a moment before Silas bit her. Luckily, the guard spent that moment in slack-jawed shock rather than in raising the alarm.
They found no trapdoors or any other signs pointing to an underground entrance.
Eliza saw Silas’s lips moving as he murmured somethingsoundless. Counting the minutes since the first guard went down?
If they never found the tunnel entrance, she would have to become a snake again. Silas had warned her briefly of his exit plan involving Kerem—where the professor would be called in by the kuveti to provide antivenom, and the two of them would escape as snakes in his bag. She hadn’t allowed herself to think of it. Theywouldfind the tunnels. They had to.
A rat scurried past her heels, and she clamped down on a startled yelp. As she watched, the rat scampered into an empty cell, then squeezed through a hole in the wall and disappeared. Eliza squinted in the gloom, trying to better make out the space where it had vanished.
Hesitantly, she reached for Silas, but her fingers met air. She turned to find he’d slunk down the hallway, his head tilted as if listening to something.
A moment later, she heard it too. A familiar voice.
She crept with Silas to the corner.
In the next hallway over, standing beneath the greasy light of a dirty lantern, Iyal Kerem was arguing with a kuveti guard. It might have been a whispered argument to begin with, but Kerem’s voice had risen.
“I want straight answers regarding his state!” he said sharply.
The professor looked frazzled. His half-tied hair was coming loose, strands of it catching in his spectacles.
