Page 62 of Sonnets and Serpents
Yvette called out, “He’s freshly twenty, Your Highness, and if you don’t both get in here, we’ll eat the food without you.”
As it turned out, the project they’d been bent over was a traditional Pravish birthday meal. It was unnecessary of them, but generous, and it made Silas smile. Yvette divided portions for everyone and shooed them all into the corner to sit on cushions. Baris happily explained each dish and its significance to Eliza—rabbit kebabs for the energy to leap into a new year of life, rolledmezedumplings because the concerns of the previous year should be bundled up and swallowed, and, most delicious of all,balimav, a sweet pastry baked with honey and nuts.
“Because life is delicious!” Baris roared, filling his mouth with a huge square ofbalimav.
Yvette brought out a set of wooden cups and poured a ginger drink that had Eliza doubled up and coughing at the first sip. Silas laughed, but even knowing what to expect, thezenzilstill made his eyes water. Eliza caught his gaze and lifted her glass, wiping her nose as she did so. When she spoke, her voice had a raspy edge, but she was grinning.
“What’s the right toast in Pravish?” she asked Yvette.
Yvette smiled, hair beads clacking as she tilted her head. “Yeni basi, yeni cilt—that’s best.”
New year, new skin.The shedding of the old to make way for the new. Pravish really did have the best meanings.
Eliza sat straighter on her cushion and pointed her glass toward Silas. Loudly, she said, “Yeni basi, yeni cilt!”
She stressed the wrong syllables, but Silas smiled anyway. Yvette and Baris echoed the toast, and Silas raised his cup in return, though he was smart enough not to drain his all at once,the way they did. Eliza took the smallest sip possible, with all the dignity of a princess.
“Now,” boomed Baris. “Time for the advent story!”
“Eliza can tell it.” Silas waved his cup in her direction. “Her favorite part is the very helpful donkey.”
The princess frowned, then gasped. “That book from the library?”
“Oh, he showed you?” Yvette grinned. “When I was teaching Silas Pravish, I made him readThe Advent Moonsix times, and he swore he’d never look at it again.”
“That’s how you knew all the pictures!” Eliza jabbed her finger in his direction.
“It was fun,” he admitted, “letting you think I had every book in the library memorized.”
She shoved him, almost falling off her own cushion in the process. He laughed.
“I will tell it,” Baris declared. “My version is best. Everyone quiet now.” He paused dramatically, and when he began again, he’d deepened his already rumbling voice. “Far away and yonder, the pixies danced beneath the sacred moon. The new lunar year is heralded, and under its light, no creature can be the same.”
Silas settled into his cushion, sipping his bitingzenziland listening to the familiar story. Baris gave it some colorful embellishments—a few sassy pixies, an appearance from a wild boar “to add danger”—but the heart was the same. An arrogant human couple, a string of fatal mistakes, a tragic end.
“I don’t think I like that story,” Eliza admitted. “I wish it could have been happy.”
Yvette sat forward with an instructor’s gleam in her eyes.
“Brace yourself,” Silas muttered to the princess, taking the final sip of his drink.
“Happiness is the entire point of it,” Yvette said. “In fact,The Advent Moonis the most important romance ever told.”
Baris nodded sagely while Eliza sputtered.
“But it isn’t romantic!” she protested.
“Of course not!” Yvette smiled. “Had the couple been pleasant and the husband done no wrong and the wife loved him deeply, the story wouldn’t be memorable. As it is, it stirs feelings! Anger motivates us toward defiance, so our anger at the couple’s decisions leads us to say, ‘I will never make that mistake.’ We understand what romance should be, because the story shows us what it isn’t, and in the end, we use it as a map to find our own happiness.”
“Or,” Silas added, “we heed the story’s warning, and we avoid relationships so that we never wind up as a grieving donkey.”
“And we are never happy,” Yvette countered. She reached out to squeeze her husband’s hand, and he kissed her cheek.
Eliza looked as though it was suddenlyherbirthday. She beamed in Silas’s direction, and he rolled his eyes.
“I’ve tried telling him the only real happiness is in love,” Eliza said.
“A girl after my own heart,” said Yvette. “Yet I wouldn’t completely agree. There’s plenty of real happiness in the world. Romance is only auniquehappiness, one I find worth pursuing, no matter how difficult the path.”
