Page 23 of Sonnets and Serpents (Casters and Crowns #2)

Rather than heading directly to the library the next morning, Silas introduced the princess to the campus bathhouse. And he enjoyed the way she blushed once she realized the function of the building.

When had he started enjoying her easy blush?

Unlike most of the buildings on campus, the bathhouse carried accents of color reminiscent of Izili proper—stripes of warm pink on the pillars and cheerful orange on the sloping roof.

A few exquisitely detailed mermaid statues pointed the way to the entrance.

Inside was a central corridor of polished wood, gleaming in the light of a large fireplace at the end of the hall.

The rest of the space was sectioned into private areas, curtained off from one another.

“I’ve never been to a public bathhouse!” Eliza hissed.

“If you wanted to be treated like a royal,” Silas drawled, “then I suppose you shouldn’t have left the palace.”

She’d realize soon enough—the university bathhouse practically was royal treatment. The stalls were private, and at the moment, Silas desperately needed some privacy. As much as he could get with the Cast in place.

The previous night was still haunting him.

He’d told himself to ignore the princess’s plight, but instead, he’d grown more tangled in it.

He could still see her tears in the moonlight, could hear himself confessing things he’d never intended to tell her.

He’d been a fool to talk about his first transformation.

And yet, he was still thinking about the way she’d looked at him. The way she’d surrendered her weapon even when he couldn’t do the same.

He was still thinking about her soft voice whispering, Affiliate. Like a truce. Like a peace offering.

“Two baths?” asked the woman at the front desk, leaning forward in her cushioned chair.

Silas shook himself back to the moment. He paid for two stalls, which the woman recorded in her ledger before ringing one silver bell and one golden, the chimes harmonizing as they echoed down the hallway.

One male attendant and one female opened stalls, and Silas ducked into his without a backward glance at Eliza. Warm steam swirled against his skin with a sleepy, comforting weight, and a light floral scent wafted through the air.

The stall interior was small enough he didn’t have to worry about being yanked around by his bracelet, but all the same, he was annoyingly aware of Eliza’s presence just one stall over, like a ghost he couldn’t be rid of.

It didn’t help that she whispered in awe at every feature, asking questions about the pipes and the domed ceiling dotted with holes to let in the sunlight.

His attendant stepped around the tub—a hollow depression cut into the floor itself—and crouched by the wall.

He was a Fluid Casting student, as they all were in the bathhouse, and would be on rotation, offering volunteer hours to practice Casting.

Within moments, he’d called steaming water from a pipe in the wall, filling the bath.

He left a basket of soaps and a bell Silas could ring if he needed a temperature adjustment or anything else.

Alone at last, Silas breathed for a few moments. It felt like so long since he’d had solitude.

Yet, even now, someone kept intruding on his thoughts.

“This is amazing!” Eliza was still loud and energetic even in a whisper.

Her attendant giggled, her reply an indistinct murmur.

Silas ordered his thoughts to his research. He stripped, climbed in the tub, and dunked his head underwater to plug his ears.

Truthfully, the research was half his frustration.

His discovery at the Sarazan tabernacle should have thrilled him—he’d found evidence of his magic stealer.

But it was only unnerving, because it wasn’t as if he’d caught a glimpse of her on a city street.

She’d been in the company of another Loegrian. Shipwrecked with one.

After trying to steal Silas’s magic, had she followed him back to Loegria? If so, why hadn’t she finished the theft she’d begun?

Perhaps she’d been unable to find him in his homeland. Most of his brief trip had been spent either with Maggie or Gill. Perhaps the strict regulations had made her realize Loegria was the most unideal hunting grounds for magic stealing, and she’d returned home.

Where she’d just happened to share a boat with Henry Wycliff.

Or had he been a target?

Too many questions, not enough answers. It made Silas’s skin itch. He surfaced in the bath, snatched a bar of soap, and scrubbed away the faint pattern of scales on his arms.

He’d thought himself a random target. Hoped he was a random target. Hoped the ocean-eyed girl had come to campus—a place crawling with magic—and just happened to light on him as the first magic user in her path. Now he believed she’d targeted him specifically, even if he had no idea why.

And he couldn’t explain her interest in Henry. Though they were both members of court, Henry and Silas shared no connection beyond passing acquaintance, if that, and Eliza had been insistent the other boy didn’t possess magic.

Unless Henry was also an Affiliate. If so, he’d been the biggest of fools to pursue a Loegrian princess; he’d been courting death.

Silas raked his fingers through his hair, leaning back with a sigh. Above him, the ceiling let in a thousand pinpricks of sunlight through minuscule holes. A sky of daylight stars. It was beautiful, he supposed, but stars belonged to the night. It felt wrong.

Everything about the world felt wrong.

Each time he went out in the city, he wasn’t searching alone; he had a network of snake spies.

But just as he and Eliza had hit nothing but dead ends, his snakes had brought back a hundred failed reports through magic.

There was no sign of the ocean-eyed girl or of Henry, not in any corner of Izili.

He’d told Eliza they might have left the country. It was a possibility. Silas was convinced the symbols on the magic stealer’s box were Cronese. But did that mean she was Cronese herself, or was this another invasion of Cronith into Pravusat?

He’d found research on using written language to shape Artifacts, so he’d experimented with words painted on snakeskin, testing his native Loegrian along with Pravish and Cronese.

The Artifact effects were strongest if he used Cronese. Why was that?

It couldn’t be the language’s cultural attitude toward magic, because Cronith and Pravusat both had comparable freedom of magic compared to Loegria’s discrimination.

There was something unique about the language itself, something the magic stealer had discovered and harnessed.

If I had another ten years to study, he thought. But he had to scrape results together in the next two months. If he wanted to learn anything further down this path, he needed to know exactly what words had been inscribed on the magic stealer’s box. He needed to study it up close.

If the ocean-eyed girl couldn’t be found, could Silas lure her out?

While he tried to construct plans for that, he finished his bath, toweling dry before dressing and exiting the stall. He was so caught up in his thoughts that he was shocked when he came to a lurching stop in the hallway.

From inside her stall, Eliza shouted in protest. He heard water sloshing, and he retreated a few steps to give her freedom of movement again.

“Sorry,” Silas called, rubbing a hand across his face. Whatever fledgling plans he’d had in mind vanished in the wake of a returning princess, who always crowded out all his other thoughts.

He was never going to solve anything with her around as a distraction.

While they finished drying by the bathhouse fireplace, the princess surprised him by saying, “You tried to tell me about the girl with Henry. I wasn’t listening.”

Silas waited, trying to gauge if that was an invitation or a trap.

“You said she was dangerous.” Eliza’s voice had grown small, and she drew her knees up on the cushion, wrapping her arms around them. “Do you think she’s . . . hurt Henry?”

“I don’t know what to think,” Silas said honestly.

“Could you tell me how you met her?”

That was an invitation. Not an order.

Silas found himself torn. He hadn’t shared his research goals with anyone but Afshin, and even the dean wasn’t interested in his process, only his result. This was something Silas had to accomplish by himself.

But he couldn’t do much of anything by himself while chained to a princess. Thus far, they’d been pulling each other in different directions, even after finding out the two people they were trying to find were somehow linked. They needed to collaborate.

Yet Silas couldn’t help dreading the result. If he told the princess what he was fighting for, what his future hinged on, it would mean she could sabotage it.

“Please, Silas?” Eliza whispered. The firelight brought out the copper tint in her eyes, and she looked both earnest and downtrodden, sitting with her damp hair loose over her shoulders.

Her fine silk clothing was ragged, marked by snags and holes gathered in her desperate search, and her fair skin bore splotches of red from their days out in the sun.

You cast the same shadow, said Yvette’s voice in his memory. He and Eliza were both frustrated in their goals, but she was open about hers.

“She has a way to steal magic,” Silas found himself saying. He swallowed heavily.

And he prayed he wouldn’t regret this.

Once committed, he told her everything: his first encounter with the ocean-eyed girl, his agreement with Afshin, and his research thus far. Eliza listened with wide eyes and appropriately timed gasps, but she never interrupted.

Saying it all out loud didn’t give him any more clarity than he’d found in the bath, but it carried a kind of comfort. Most of that came from the girl sitting beside him, focused and nodding along, like she wanted to see him solve this problem.

“One of the experiments I studied used composition warlockry,” Silas said.

“The hypothesis was that a Fluid Caster can draw out magic like they can draw out blood, and a Stone Caster can contain it in stasis the way they can hold a person in sleep.

It was extremely promising, but it failed like all the others, and no one is sure why.

“Maybe if I had years to work, I could find my way to this discovery through experimentation alone, but I have weeks. I have to get my hands on the magic stealer’s Artifact and reverse engineer it. That’s the only way.”

“Except we can’t find her,” Eliza said, speaking for the first time.

“Except we can’t find her,” he agreed.

To his surprise, the princess laughed. Silas raised an eyebrow. She started sectioning and braiding her hair, a faint smile on her face.

“I’m looking for the boy I want to kiss,” she said. “You’re looking for the girl who kissed you. They’re together. We’re together. You know what this is, right?”

“The third-worst day of my life?” Silas drawled.

“Fate,” said Eliza, grinning.

“There’s no such thing.”

“Obviously you’d say that, because you’re you.”

It was mildly offensive, but at the same time, it summoned a strange tingle in his chest. He wasn’t certain whether she was calling him cynical or delusional or something else, but whatever it was, it wasn’t snake or shapeshifter. She was defining him by some human characteristic.

“And obviously you’d believe in fate,” he returned. “Because you’re you.”

“Because I’m right,” she said primly, pinning her braid with finality. She lowered her arms. “Well, I know one thing—we won’t find either Henry or Lady Magic Stealer lurking in the university library. I think we should go to the market.”

“I have snakes looking,” Silas countered. “And in the meantime, I can still research. Two tasks at once.”

“But your snakes can’t interrogate merchants to find out if any of them have seen a strange white box with markings. That sounds like something a sharp merchant eye would notice, right? Out of place, possibly valuable?”

In response to Silas’s pause, she grinned, obviously knowing she’d said the right thing.

Perhaps this collaboration could work after all.

“Get your shoes,” Silas said.