Page 37 of Embrace the Serpent

I was going to lose him. My mind latched on to the thought, letting it carve a groove through me like an oxcart carving a path on a dirt road.

A pair of huntsmen marched Mirandel in front of us, back across the bridge, into the courtyard where the bodies of a dozen

huntsmen lay on the ground. There was no blood, no gore.

Rane knelt beside one, his long silver hair brushing the flagstone, and let out a relieved breath. “They’re just asleep.”

Mirandel sniffed.

It wasn’t mercy. Mirandel wasn’t capable of mercy. It was probably that it was faster to command them to fall asleep than

it was to kill them.

“You will be kept in rooms as befits a messenger,” Rane said. “And released at dawn.”

A pair of huntsmen marched Mirandel away. She shot me an oily, triumphant look. Her choker was in my hands, but she had a

right to gloat. The damage was done.

“Where is she going?” I asked quietly.

Rane kept his gaze on her until she was marched into the palace. “To the lower levels. There are some lovely rooms with no windows and only a single barred door.”

“Like a dungeon?”

“We’re far too civilized to have a dungeon,” he said. “It’s a perfectly humane holding room.”

“She deserves a dungeon,” I said.

He didn’t disagree. But he was avoiding my gaze.

He spoke to his huntsmen, and the word went out, and the machinery of his kingdom began to turn.

The watchtower sent a report confirming Mirandel’s story. From their position at the lake’s edge, they could see lights at

the border, smoke from fires.

One of the eagle folk had flown as close as she dared, and before the soldiers had chased her away with arrows, she had counted

a dozen command tents being set up and had glimpsed flags being hoisted. The Emperor’s standard flew, bearing his crown.

I touched my chest, over my scar.

Only the soldiers from the Imperial City used that flag. But the scout reported other flags, from the five garrisons closest

to the borders of the Serpent Kingdom. They had once been the armies of the neighboring lands, until they were conquered.

Their parents or grandparents had fought against the Emperor, and now they fought alongside him.

My nails bit into my palms. I knew what was coming: the report mentioned a flag bearing the crown and flames of Lady Incarnadine.

She was here. It was the Emperor’s army in name, but she was the one who led them, who swept through kingdoms and stole their

children.

The troops were making no effort to hide their presence. They were confident.

We had less than a full night to prepare for war.

I slipped out of my thoughts and caught the last of Rane’s words. “...Vanon was the best at locating the cracks in the

border. He must’ve shown Mirandel. But the cracks are not wide. It will take time for the bulk of the armies to enter the

kingdom. We must stay calm and prepare.”

He parceled out his orders to the huntsmen. “Send word to the watchtower that we need an idea for how many soldiers there

are, and how fast they’re coming through. The town must be evacuated at once, and all the townspeople brought here.”

“They won’t want to leave,” one of the huntsmen said.

“You must convince them. Their lives are what matter now.” Rane steeled himself. “And send word to the heads of the families.

I will meet with them in a half hour’s time.”

He had never seemed so kingly, so much the Serpent King, and so little like Rane.

The huntsmen dispersed to carry out their orders, and Rane came to me, at last meeting my eyes. “How long would it take you

to do what you needed to do?”

“A year,” I whispered.

“There’s no choice, then.”

“Rane.”

“How does it work, exactly? When my heart is put in, the borders will be fixed.”

“Yes.”

“What about the soldiers already inside?”

I thought back to what I had read in the design. “The heartstone grants permission to enter. And each person who is granted

permission can share it by claiming another as theirs, like you did to me when you, uh”—I glanced over my shoulder and lowered

my voice—“bit me.”

His lips quirked into the tiniest of smiles.

I continued, “With a new heartstone, the permissions would be redone. You would grant permission to whomever you wanted, and...

you may be able to revoke permission to anyone inside the borders.”

“They would be forced out?”

I hesitated to confirm, to give him another reason to give up his heart. “I’d have to double-check.”

He nodded. “How long would it take?”

My mouth was dry. “Rane...”

He cupped my face, his thumb tracing my cheekbone. He didn’t want this any more than I did.

If everything could stay the same, if Rane’s heart was the exact same size as his grandfather’s and came precut, the work

would be somewhat simple, a matter of hours. But Rane’s heart would not come out of his chest cut and faceted. Cutting even

the simplest jewel was nerve-racking work. There’s no way to fix a mistake. A cut is forever.

And I didn’t exactly have a perfect workspace. In the village at least I’d had a blacksmith to help me. Here, if they knew what I was doing to their king, I was sure they’d hand me over to Incarnadine themselves. Or just murder me. I might even have deserved it.

My chest tightened, and I forced myself to breathe.

Once cut, the next problem would be the setting.

To do it right—to fully understand the heartstone’s setting and make sure there were no traps to removing it, to take time

to measure each facet of the old stone and research every cut that would be made to the new heartstone, to find or make the

same mix of metals of the same purity and composition—a responsible jewelsmith would take months. A responsible jewelsmith

would take at least a month to just be sure of every possible effect of removing the old heartstone, before even starting to consider how best

to implement Rane’s.

I thought of that pressure on Rane’s heart. I would have liked to figure out a way to mitigate it, to ease him slowly into

it. The thought of Rane’s heartstone shattering made a cold hollowness open in my chest.

But that wasn’t what he was asking. He was asking for me to save his people, not save him.

I thought of the most difficult jewels I’d worked on. There was a trancelike state I could get to, where things flowed from

me. It would take a week, maybe. I couldn’t ask him for that, for his people to fight that long, to spill that much blood.

My voice wouldn’t rise above a whisper. “Three days.”

It was a gathering of the heads of each branch of divine peoples, each fantastical and noble, some wise and others fierce,

of every possible size and clad in a magnificent array of styles. And then there was me.

I felt myself shrinking into my skin, and somehow Rane could read my mind, because every time I thought of running out the door, his hand brushed my back.

We had gathered in the dining hall, around the long table, though there were many that preferred to stand or, more accurately,

loom.

There were peris, two of them, tiny and charming, and I wished I could just talk to them about their craft.

From there, it got considerably less friendly. There were frog- and toad-like folks who swelled up every time someone said

something they didn’t agree with. There were sylphs and naiads, who sighed and giggled behind their hands in an oddly malicious

way. The rakshasa leader, who seemed to be picking his teeth with a human thigh bone. I avoided eye contact with the tiger

folk and, really, every divine person much larger than I was.

The loudest were the eagle folk, huge and feathered, winged and with piercing eyes. Power radiated from them, the kind that

made me think they could be a pain in Rane’s side if they so chose.

Rane was calling for order. “Yes. The Imperial Army is at our border. They have found a weakness in the enchantments. But

I have a plan. I will be able to reinforce the enchantments soon. I need three days.” He paused. “However, they have given

us till dawn to surrender.”

“So war has come to us at last,” said the head of the eagle folk.

Someone said, “If we surrender... no blood will be spilled.”

“But we will never be free again. They’ll trap us all. You want to be slave to a ring?”

“Let us fight. If the twilight of the divine is upon us, let us not go meekly.”

“The Serpent King has a plan. If we just hold out—”

“Plans, plans. All plans fail.”

“Just because your plans fail—the plans of an imbecile might fail, but that does not mean all plans will.”

It descended into arguments. Some were directed at Rane.

Rane bore it without flinching. I took a step forward, and Rane’s hand touched mine, holding me back. He shot me a glance,

and I read a small bit of delight in it. You would fight for me?

A clear divide emerged. On one side were the kind of divine people who had lived quietly in the wild and were content to follow

Rane’s lead. And then there were the fiercer sorts who had left kingdoms of their own to take refuge here. The kind whose

pride was all the more precious because they had already given so much of it up.

After a minute, Rane crossed his arms, and a person that looked like a tree banged their arm—or branch—on the table for silence.

Rane nodded his thanks. “I should have told you sooner,” Rane said. “The truth is, the enchantments have been weakening for

some time. I kept it from you, thinking I could solve it on my own.”

A toad croaked, “Fat load of good that did.”

Rane went on. “My ancestors made a promise to you, and it’s my intent to uphold it.”

One of the tiny peris said, in a squeaky, noble voice, “Now, son, we’re all in this together.”

The golden-plumed leader of the eagle folk boomed. “What is your plan? Why does it need three days?”

Rane took a deep breath and admitted the truth. About me being a jewelsmith. About what had protected them all this time.

About his great-grandfather’s heartstone.

They were silent.

Rane’s voice filled the room, quiet though it was. “As I said, we have a solution.”

“What solution is there to that?”

Rane tapped his chest.