Page 27 of Sonnets and Serpents (Casters and Crowns #2)

Silas threw himself back into research, trying to puzzle out why the most promising experiments for magic stealing all failed and what could be done differently.

Eliza must have been boiling mad, because her boredom usually overcame her attempts to ignore him.

He kept waiting for her to burst out with a question she couldn’t help asking, but she never did.

She kept her eyes on her sonnets, and, later, he heard her using broken Pravish to ask the librarians for information on the kuveti.

Come evening, they went to the dining hall, only for one of the servers to stop Silas before he could claim a plate.

Was everyone in the world mad at him?

“Silas Bennett? Iyl Yvette’s sent for you.”

After being unable to break the Cast with a kiss, he’d suspected there was something wrong with it, but when he’d tried to visit Yvette before going to the library that morning, she’d been off campus, so he’d been forced to leave a note.

“She specified I couldn’t eat first?” Silas asked.

The server gave an apologetic smile. “Very specific, Mr. Bennett.”

That worried him.

“Follow me,” he told Eliza, though it was hardly necessary. After all, they were chained together. Maybe for life.

But when they reached Iyl Yvette’s office, she wasn’t pacing or showing any signs of worry over a horribly skewed Cast. Quite the opposite—she was laughing with her husband, both of them bent over some kind of project on her desk.

“Silas the student!” Baris called out, straightening with a two-handed wave. “Nirhaba and happy birthday, you blessed snake!”

Silas blinked.

Eliza gasped, finally breaking her vow of silence. “It’s your birthday?”

“Is it?” he asked.

Yvette playfully slapped Baris’s shoulder. “I told you. Oblivious.” She leaned toward Eliza, despite the fact they were still a room apart, and confided, “My darling erkek can’t imagine the single-mindedness of my students. And no one’s more single-minded than this one.” She pointed at Silas.

He had the childish—snakish?—urge to stick his tongue out, but he resisted.

“What a waste!” Baris griped. “To be born under the fortune of the advent moon and not even remember!”

“That’s your holiday,” Silas pointed out, “not mine.”

Baris slapped his three-fingered hand to his heart. “He wounds me! He speaks Pravish like a son, yet he wounds me.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me it was your birthday!” said Eliza. She spoke Loegrian, but for the sake of everyone’s understanding, Silas chose to speak Pravish along with Baris and Yvette.

He shrugged. “I wasn’t secret-keeping, apta. I just don’t care to keep track.”

If anything, she looked even more aghast. “Do you even know how old you are?”

Just to irritate her, he made a show of frowning in thought. “Thirty-eight? Fifty-two? Once you’re old enough to attend school, the numbers don’t matter, do they?”

At least Baris laughed.

Yvette called out, “He’s freshly twenty, Your Highness, and if you don’t both get in here, we’ll eat the food without you.”

As it turned out, the project they’d been bent over was a traditional Pravish birthday meal.

It was unnecessary of them, but generous, and it made Silas smile.

Yvette divided portions for everyone and shooed them all into the corner to sit on cushions.

Baris happily explained each dish and its significance to Eliza—rabbit kebabs for the energy to leap into a new year of life, rolled meze dumplings because the concerns of the previous year should be bundled up and swallowed, and, most delicious of all, balimav, a sweet pastry baked with honey and nuts.

“Because life is delicious!” Baris roared, filling his mouth with a huge square of balimav.

Yvette brought out a set of wooden cups and poured a ginger drink that had Eliza doubled up and coughing at the first sip.

Silas laughed, but even knowing what to expect, the zenzil still made his eyes water.

Eliza caught his gaze and lifted her glass, wiping her nose as she did so.

When she spoke, her voice had a raspy edge, but she was grinning.

“What’s the right toast in Pravish?” she asked Yvette.

Yvette smiled, hair beads clacking as she tilted her head. “Yeni basi, yeni cilt—that’s best.”

New year, new skin. The shedding of the old to make way for the new. Pravish really did have the best meanings.

Eliza sat straighter on her cushion and pointed her glass toward Silas. Loudly, she said, “Yeni basi, yeni cilt!”

She stressed the wrong syllables, but Silas smiled anyway. Yvette and Baris echoed the toast, and Silas raised his cup in return, though he was smart enough not to drain his all at once, the way they did. Eliza took the smallest sip possible, with all the dignity of a princess.

“Now,” boomed Baris. “Time for the advent story!”

“Eliza can tell it.” Silas waved his cup in her direction. “Her favorite part is the very helpful donkey.”

The princess frowned, then gasped. “That book from the library?”

“Oh, he showed you?” Yvette grinned. “When I was teaching Silas Pravish, I made him read The Advent Moon six times, and he swore he’d never look at it again.”

“That’s how you knew all the pictures!” Eliza jabbed her finger in his direction.

“It was fun,” he admitted, “letting you think I had every book in the library memorized.”

She shoved him, almost falling off her own cushion in the process. He laughed.

“I will tell it,” Baris declared. “My version is best. Everyone quiet now.” He paused dramatically, and when he began again, he’d deepened his already rumbling voice.

“Far away and yonder, the pixies danced beneath the sacred moon. The new lunar year is heralded, and under its light, no creature can be the same.”

Silas settled into his cushion, sipping his biting zenzil and listening to the familiar story.

Baris gave it some colorful embellishments—a few sassy pixies, an appearance from a wild boar “to add danger”—but the heart was the same.

An arrogant human couple, a string of fatal mistakes, a tragic end.

“I don’t think I like that story,” Eliza admitted. “I wish it could have been happy.”

Yvette sat forward with an instructor’s gleam in her eyes.

“Brace yourself,” Silas muttered to the princess, taking the final sip of his drink.

“Happiness is the entire point of it,” Yvette said. “In fact, The Advent Moon is the most important romance ever told.”

Baris nodded sagely while Eliza sputtered.

“But it isn’t romantic!” she protested.

“Of course not!” Yvette smiled. “Had the couple been pleasant and the husband done no wrong and the wife loved him deeply, the story wouldn’t be memorable.

As it is, it stirs feelings! Anger motivates us toward defiance, so our anger at the couple’s decisions leads us to say, ‘I will never make that mistake.’ We understand what romance should be, because the story shows us what it isn’t, and in the end, we use it as a map to find our own happiness. ”

“Or,” Silas added, “we heed the story’s warning, and we avoid relationships so that we never wind up as a grieving donkey.”

“And we are never happy,” Yvette countered. She reached out to squeeze her husband’s hand, and he kissed her cheek.

Eliza looked as though it was suddenly her birthday. She beamed in Silas’s direction, and he rolled his eyes.

“I’ve tried telling him the only real happiness is in love,” Eliza said.

“A girl after my own heart,” said Yvette. “Yet I wouldn’t completely agree. There’s plenty of real happiness in the world. Romance is only a unique happiness, one I find worth pursuing, no matter how difficult the path.”

Eliza frowned. “Love isn’t difficult. It’s just something you feel.”

Yvette raised her eyebrows, the same pitying look she gave to students spouting off in lecture hall.

“Love is not an emotion,” she said. “It is a choice built on emotion. Attraction, appreciation, admiration. The Advent Moon may be worth another look from you.”

“But they did it wrong,” Eliza protested. “You said that yourself.”

“They gave poor responses to very real difficulties, my dear.

Indulging vices, acting without thinking, performing tiny acorn-cupfuls of betrayal—these are all inevitable in a relationship, and what we see in the story is a love that could not last because it was built on the shallow ground of attraction without full appreciation.

“Had the wife fully appreciated her husband, his strengths and his weaknesses, she could have forgiven his error, she could have loved him even when he was not in his best form, and she could have helped him back to his best. But she preferred the ghost of the image she’d crafted for herself, a handsome representation without the depth of a real person. ”

Yvette leaned forward, the ends of her red scarf trailing in her lap. “Real love is difficult, because it requires the most vulnerability two people can ever give, and the most forgiveness.”

Silas rolled his empty cup back and forth in his hand. He thought of one of the last conversations he’d had with Gill, when his best friend had told him he was in love with the future queen.

If she cares enough to change an entire kingdom for you, Silas had said, then take my blessing. It’s just an awfully big gamble to make, Gilly.

And for what? Silas had never seen any evidence that love was worth the risk. Yvette and Baris seemed happy, but they were both good people, and he couldn’t imagine them being any different if they were just a merchant and a professor in separate worlds.

One thing was certain: Silas was happy on his own. A relationship was an invitation for pain, and he already bore the scar of one betrayal.

Never again.