Page 103 of Embrace the Serpent

I pulled my mother’s ring from my finger. “Will you marry me?”

He laughed, delighted. “Yes.”

I slipped it on his finger. He had no rings, no jewelry, and I tapped the scale in his hands.

He flourished it and said, “And you, will you marry me?”

A warmth rose in me from my toes to the tips of my hair. “Yes.” I took the scale from him.

He kissed me, and I rose onto the tips of my toes to kiss him back. I didn’t want to think. I wanted to drink him in, to get lost in the softness of his lips, in how his hair slipped through my fingers, in how he smiled into the kiss and that smile sank into my skin and settled deep in my bones.

If this was our last kiss, I wanted it to be everything. It would have to last me a lifetime.

We broke apart, and he whispered to me. “They can take out my heart. But it isn’t just my heart that loves you. My eyes, the tips of my fingers.”

I laughed into him. “Your liver? Your toes?”

“Everything,” he said. “Even my nose hairs.”

“You can keep those.”

A mild cough came from behind us. The healer had arrived.

I pulled away, but Rane held on to me and said, “You won’t lose me.”

I wanted to believe him. I didn’t want to lose him. And I didn’t want him to lose himself. He was so good at playing the Serpent King or the charming just-a-huntsman role of Rane. He hid his secret face so well that I worried he might not care for it. I didn’t think he found it as precious as I did.

It was just a room, a spare bedroom. But in the moonlight the bed looked like an altar. A small, wizened figure waited by the bed, with bluish skin and long whiskers.

“Are you ready, my lord?” the figure said in a deep, melodious voice. “Do not fear. My father was once called to your great-grandfather’s side for the same ritual we do now.”

Rane lay down on the bed. “Let’s get on with it, then.”

The healer put his hand on Rane’s chest, right above the scar, and he began to chant what sounded like a lullaby in breathy, whispered tones.

The healer’s entire body became translucent, and slowly, he reached into Rane’s chest, his hand disappearing.

Rane’s gaze locked on to mine. Fear flickered in his eyes, and his hands gripped the sheets so hard his knuckles went white.

Rane’s entire body tensed like a wire pulled to the brink of snapping.

The healer withdrew his hand, and clutched in it was an immense jewel of deepest, darkest red.

A choked sound came from Rane, his eyes shuttering. The healer handed the heartstone to me.

I clutched it to my chest—it was warm, and I felt its power seeping into me, all curiosity and joy and cheeky mischief—and finally I could touch him. I stroked his hand, his arm, his face, until the tension left his body.

His eyelids trembled. I whispered a prayer.When he opens his eyes, let him be there. Let me not have lost him. Let him still be mine.

A shimmer went through the air around him, as he knitted an illusion over himself almost unconsciously, wiping away every last trace of his true face.

He opened his eyes, and I met the cold gaze of the Serpent King.

20

His huntsmen surrounded him the moment he stepped out into the corridor, a half dozen of them speaking at once, their gazes sweeping him from head to toe.

I stood with the healer in the dark of the room, watching Rane through the doorway. The healer turned to me, his face drawn and desperately sad, and gave me a thick velvet cloth. Carefully, I wrapped the heartstone in layers until it was safely bundled up.