Page 83 of Sonnets and Serpents
“There was only one person with the kuveti. I may not have seen your face, but I know it was you. And when you set your bag beside the cupboard while you stole whatever you wanted from his study, I saw the Artifact inside. I knew it was made of bone—Stone Casting. I knew it didn’t belong to you, so I took it back. It was only after you left and I could see my father that I realized, he ... he didn’t have ... I realized it was ...”
Her blue eyes dripped tears, but she only glared with fiercer heat. “You used my father’s bones to make your Artifact, and I only wish I could have used it to kill you.”
When she turned to run, Silas couldn’t react. Kerem stood, reaching as if to catch the girl, but she dodged around him. She lunged at Eliza, clearly trying to retake the Artifact, but the princess was faster, ducking behind the crates, and Ceyda apparently thought it better to escape without the Artifact than not at all.
She dashed up the stairs and out of sight. There was a bang like she’d thrown open a trapdoor.
Too late, Silas remembered the cobra. “Wait—”
A sharp, high-pitched scream echoed down the stairs.
Silas’s blood ran cold. He jolted into motion at last, running up the stairs and emerging into a narrow alley crossed withoverhead laundry lines. A black cobra sat poised among the cobblestones, hood flared and fangs exposed. Ceyda had fallen to the ground before it. Blood marked a puncture site just above her ankle.
“Don’t move,” he ordered her.
She curled her lip at him, and then she scrambled away.
Silas swore. Before the cobra could bite her a second time, he stepped forward, focusing on a command to halt the strike.
Unfortunately, a sharp yank on his bracelet interrupted his focus and made him stumble. He’d reached the end of his leash with Eliza.
The cobra struck, pumping venom into his leg.
Eliza had imagined so many reunions with Henry Wycliff. She’d imagined finding him at an inn, watching his hazel eyes widen from across the room as they focused on her, then running to meet him halfway and throwing herself into his arms. She’d even imagined him trapped in a kuveti prison cell, imagined rescuing him from the dark.
She’d never imagined a reunion where she couldn’t speak to him. Where he lay unconscious in a dark cave, the victim of a sleeping curse.
Ceyda ran, and Eliza wanted to follow, wanted to wrestle answers from the girl and force her to undo the magic on Henry. But she hesitated, unwilling to leave Henry’s side.
She hesitated too long.
The yank on her bracelet finally gave her the push needed, and she staggered up the narrow staircase, only a few steps behind Iyal Kerem. She expected to find Silas with a trapped Ceyda. Silas was so good at everything, it didn’t cross her mind that he might fail. That he might get injured.
And never from a snakebite.
With a sharp gesture, Kerem banished the cobra, sending it slithering down the alley. Silas stood with an ashen face, breathing raggedly. Blood stained the cuff of his pants, dripping down into his ankle-high boot. When Kerem told him to sit, he lowered himself slowly, favoring his injured leg. The professor crouched beside him and rolled back his pant leg.
The twin-puncture wound was so much bloodier than the little pricks on Eliza’s arm. The skin around it was already beginning to discolor and swell.
She remembered Kerem’s comment about venom on skin.Tissue will rot, even with magic beneath.She thought of Henry, already unconscious. She didn’t know if he would wake up, if he would be all right.
Not you too, she willed Silas.
“You should have let it bite her the second time,” Kerem said, exasperated.
“I should have,” Silas agreed through clenched teeth.
Fishing in the bag by his side, the professor said, “I’m not prepared with a cobra antivenom, but I have something general for elapids. It will have to do.”
“Eliza?” Silas’s voice was low.
It took her a moment to shake off the daze, to meet Silas’s eyes, and then everything inside her shrank.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She’d felt the yank on the bracelet, and she knew this was her fault. There was no way Silas would have gotten himself bitten by a cobra, not without her limiting him.
He waved off the apology, pointing at the Artifact still clenched in her hands. “I want a look at that.”
Of course. Even bleeding on the ground, his first priority was research. Eliza was tempted to throw the box at him. Instead, she knelt by his side and handed it over.
