Page 5

“What does it matter to you whether I eat her or not? Move aside.”

“Mother Angma,” the snake said respectfully, “I would advise you to let this child go. Her blood is worth nothing to you now.”

The snake gestured to my ankle with his tongue. Already a painful lump had formed, and strange green streaks limned my veins. Great Gadda, it hurt!

The tiger let out a furious growl. She whipped her tail at the snake, catching him and flinging him into the bushes. Then she whirled back to me, ready to unleash her fury. But as she watched me trying to limp out of the clearing, her anger vanished.

She blocked me from leaving. “Poor, poor girl. You think he has saved you, don’t you?”

No. I didn’t think anything other than how my leg hurt, how the world was spinning, and how I wanted to go home. How I missed Mama.

I tried to run past the tiger. A bad idea.

She pressed a paw to my chest, her yellow eyes swirling with lurid enchantment. “The Serpent King has poisoned your blood,” she said viciously, “and so I shall curse your face. You will never look at it without feeling pain.”

Strange, that in the moment that should come to define me, I felt so little. Only a tingle across my face, then a thick, suffocating pressure that rose to my neck, as if there were an invisible string cutting off my breath. Then nothing.

Nothing but a premonitory shiver that tracked down my spine as shadows spun beneath the tiger’s fur, and her eyes…changed. They were still yellow, still mesmerizing. But her pupils had gone from black to a bright and violent red. Like blood.

“Bring your sister to me before her seventeenth birthday,” she said in a quiet, lethal tone, “and I will undo my curse. If not, I will come for you both—and you will wish you had died.”

Then, with one great leap, she bounded into the jungle.

She was gone.

It felt a long time before the snake slithered back into view. Everything was blurry, but in the dense mess of green, I could easily make out his red scales and glittering eyes.

I didn’t care if the tiger had wounded him. Or what curse had befallen me. “You hurt me,” I accused.

“I had to bite you,” replied the snake. “Otherwise, Angma would have devoured you. But now my poison runs through your blood. If she tries again to eat you, it will harm her.”

I didn’t like his reasoning.

When I touched my ankle, the green streaks transferred onto my fingers. They wouldn’t rub off, either, no matter how hard I tried. “It hurts.”

“The pain will go away,” the snake said, sounding apologetic. He paused. His mouth stayed open, and though I did not know how snakes spoke, I got the sense he wanted to say more. Instead, he asked, “What’s your name, little one?”

“Channi,” I whispered. “Channari.”

If a snake could smile, this one did. His mouth curved as he flicked out his thin, forked tongue. “Moon-faced.”

Mama and Adah had named me Channari because I was born under a full moon, and when I arrived my eyes were wide and open, catching its silver light. But I wasn’t about to tell that to a stranger. A snake, no less.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

His smile faded. Only then did I see the claw marks on his scales, raw and pink in the jaundiced sunlight. Many years later I would learn that when a snake dies, he can see the future, for a brief instant. And that this snake, who had sacrificed his life to protect me, was the king among his kind.

“My name doesn’t matter,” he said. “For you, you need Hokzuh. Say his name.”

“Hok…Hok…zuh.”

“Remember it. He’ll come looking for you one day, when you are older.”

Before my eyes, the snake’s skin turned white, his scales becoming like tiny sea pearls studded along his body. His head was still lifted, while the rest of his body curled, slowly shriveling and going limp. “You’ll need him.”

“Why?”

“One sister must fall for the other to rise,” he replied, so softly that I almost didn’t hear. He folded his head into the center of his coiled body, eyes closing. “Sleep now.”