Page 3 of Sonnets and Serpents (Casters and Crowns #2)

ONE WEEK LATER

The worst day of Silas Bennett’s life was the day his father tried to kill him.

Second-worst was the day Silas agreed to track down a reckless princess. When taking the assignment, he learned exactly three things about the girl he was supposed to find.

One: Her name was Eliza de Loegria. The “de Loegria” was not a true surname but simply a mark of her royal lineage. She was, quite literally, “Eliza of Loegria,” as if every other Loegrian citizen were not “of Loegria.” A prime example of royal arrogance.

Two: She was a princess. Not heir to the throne—that title belonged to her older sister, Aria.

Considering Silas hadn’t known of Eliza’s existence until Aria requested his assistance, he could say that being second-born in a royal household held as many perks as being second-born in any other.

The privilege of the second-born was to always be a second thought, which Silas knew from his father’s treatment of his own younger sister.

His father had tried to marry Maggie off to an abusive drunkard, which was the only reason Silas had made a deal with a royal. Crown Princess Aria stopped the marriage, protecting his little sister, and in return, Silas agreed to protect hers.

He knew only one additional thing about Princess Eliza, and it was the worst of the list.

Three: She was a fool, of the variety commonly known as “a hopeless romantic.” She’d run away from home—and in her sister’s direct words—chasing a boy.

It would be one thing if Eliza had just gone to a neighboring town, but no. She’d crossed the ocean to Pravusat, a country where she presumably didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the dangers, and definitely didn’t belong.

Silas sighed. The Izili outer market bustled around him, a sprawling collection of blankets, canopies, wagons, and crates, where merchants hawked everything from fruit to furniture, bartering in brightly violent tones that charged the air with passion.

Unlike Eliza, Silas knew the markets and streets of Pravusat well. Izili—the capital city—had been his temporary home for the two years he’d studied at its university.

After crossing the ocean between Loegria and Pravusat, then bribing two dockworkers and almost losing a finger to a cranky old lady, Silas had tracked Eliza to this market, the biggest in Izili. Now he just had to find her among the packed, colorful crowd.

A horn-nosed snake slithered beside him, its dusty yellow pattern blending with the sand, and Silas could feel its pulsing anxiety—hundreds of people packed into a single market with all their baggage and noise and trampling.

“We’re looking for the girl out of place,” Silas said quietly. His magic didn’t need words, and the snake certainly didn’t speak either Pravish or Loegrian, but he found it easier to direct commands with spoken language than through focus alone.

The horn-nosed snake darted off, disappearing into the cluttered merchant stalls pressed against the city wall. That left Silas to search the crowded main thoroughfare.

Unlike the markets of Loegria, where everyone arranged things in neat, orderly rows and used permanent wooden stands to display their goods, the markets of Pravusat were like a big family picnic, where everyone threw down a rug in any available space.

Untethered chaos in the form of a winding maze that changed daily.

But there was always familiarity, if one knew where to look, and although merchants changed specific location, they favored the same general areas of the market.

So he wasn’t surprised when Baris called out a loud greeting in Pravish, waving a hand missing the last two fingers. “Silas the student! Come to buy a papaya!”

Before Silas could dodge it, Baris shoved a basket of fruit into his legs, bruising his shins. Silas stepped back with a hiss, which only made the large, dark-haired man laugh.

“Soft as a snake!” The Pravish idiom was a compliment meaning someone led such a blessed life, they were allowed to have a soft underbelly, though Baris used it for more literal reasons.

Ducking out of the walkway, Silas crouched on the merchant’s rug. “I’m looking for someone. Another Loegrian, like me.”

Like me was the wrong description. They may have been from the same country, but Eliza belonged to the ruling family, who created laws to persecute magic users—registration and branding for Casters and death for Animal Affiliates.

Silas was one of those Animal Affiliates.

So, no, he and the princess were nothing alike. And while Silas had no desire of his own to help her, he would swallow the poison for his sister’s sake.

Baris scooted closer on his rug. “I heard you’d gone back to your country. Izili University is no longer good for you?”

“I finished my studies, so I went home for a while.”

Specifically, he’d gone home for a single week where everything had gone horribly wrong. He’d been disinherited, banished, and even forced to strike a deal with royalty. It had been a mistake, going back to Loegria.

At least it was a mistake he’d never make again.

“Obviously,” said Baris, “your country does not appreciate snakes as we do, since you are back to us so soon.”

He had no idea. Loegria enforced a bloodthirsty prejudice against shapeshifters—the derogatory term for Animal Affiliates—which included ridiculous myths about infants being eaten by demons who then assumed their forms and lay in wait to devour others.

Silas was very, very careful to keep his magic a secret back home. But here in Pravusat, there were no laws against Affiliates. He could have transformed into a viper right in front of Baris, and the man would have only put him to work guarding the papaya baskets.

Baris cocked his head. “Will you take more classes now?”

“Studying costs money.”

“Pay for them with papayas! After you buy them from me, of course.”

“Oh, I have something else in mind for the university.” Silas smirked. “I’m going to have them pay me.”

Baris gave a full-throated laugh. He turned his attention for a moment, threatening a woman who’d been about to leave without buying.

They haggled until she carried away a dozen papayas, and Baris admired a new bronze ring much too small for his hands; perhaps he intended it for his wife.

In Loegria, Silas had never seen anyone trade for goods or jewelry; the market operated solely on the exchange of money. In Pravusat, everything was money.

“Do you think the university would take papayas?” he asked.

The question earned another laugh before Baris assured him the university was “uptight like your country.” Hard silver only.

It didn’t matter. In the morning, Silas would speak to Iyal Afshin, the dean, and offer his services as a professor. With a position at the university, he could settle permanently in Pravusat. Build a life. Forget all about the one he’d left behind in Loegria.

First, he had to find the lovesick princess and convince her to go home to her sister.

“You are, what, sixteen?” Baris demanded.

“We’ve had this discussion before. I’m nineteen.”

“Sixteen and a half, then. The university will not allow sixteen and a half to teach. Come work for me! Gather papayas, twist-twist and done. Even sixteen and a half can manage.”

“I’ve done orchard work before, and it’s miserable.

” Silas’s best friend, Guillaume Reeves, owned a lemon orchard.

Since meeting Gill, Silas had worked four harvests at the Reeves estate, because even though he hated it, the torture of sweat on his back was preferable to the torture of enduring his father’s expectations at home.

“I’m an academic,” he told Baris, “not a hired hand.”

“Bah, then you are of no use to me. Be gone with you and your hands until you can buy papayas! If I see your Loegrian friend, I will send them to the university.”

Baris waved him off, and Silas stood, ducking to avoid the canopy over the stall. But he’d only gone a few paces deeper into the market when a quick succession of impressions flashed through his mind.

Girl smell. Shadow men. Loud. Fear.

Silas cursed.

The horn-nosed snake had found Eliza, all right, and she was being arrested by the kuveti.

When Eliza first heard the shouts, she didn’t realize they were directed toward her. Everyone in the market was shouting; it seemed like how all Pravish people communicated.

She’d been in Pravusat exactly one week and had hated every minute of it. It was loud and aggressive and blazingly hot.

When she’d left home, the castle grounds had suffered frost each night, and the thick clouds promised oncoming snows, with all the delights of her favorite season. Pravusat did not believe in winter. It believed only in sand and chaos.

When two men grabbed her by the arms, Eliza glared up at them, demanding to be unhanded, but she quickly realized these were no random marketgoers.

The two men wore dark uniforms with veils, only the slits of their eyes visible.

One of them spoke in Pravish. Eliza caught a few of the most common words—you, quiet, come—but the context was clear.

She was being arrested.

“There’s been a mistake,” she protested, trying and failing to yank free. Her mind spun. She couldn’t have broken any laws. She’d only been going from person to person in the market, trying to find someone who spoke Loegrian, someone who might have seen Henry.

For the past week, that had been her quest, though all she’d earned for it was a lot of cursing and dismissals. She’d returned twice to interrogate the dockmaster, and he answered her only by shaking his head, but she refused to believe there were no survivors of the Duke’s shipwreck.

She refused to believe the last time Henry had smiled at her had been the last.

The ship she’d arrived on had already departed, so she’d hired a room at an inn near the harbor, and she’d spent every day embroiled in her search.

She was exhausted, her strength as frayed as her clothing, her soul as hungry as her stomach, but there was nowhere to go except forward. She would not accept any other path.

“Let me go!” she snarled again as the uniformed men began to drag her forward. “I’m a—”

She clamped her jaw shut before she could say princess.

She’d kept her identity a secret thus far, because she knew a princess far from home without a single guard would be an easy target.

She also knew her father was searching for her, probably cursing her name and swearing to drag her back home before she did something to embarrass him and the crown of Loegria.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” she amended. “You can’t arrest me for nothing!”

The guards ignored both her protests and her struggles, steering her toward the city, its scattered rooftops visible above the battered Izili wall.

That wall would have been a disgrace in Loegria.

Gaping holes riddled the soft yellow sandstone that no one had bothered to repair.

It couldn’t keep out a thieving child much less stop any kind of assault on the city.

Her father would have burst a vein to see it; he kept the infrastructure and defenses of Loegria immaculate, even though their country hadn’t seen war in centuries.

“Help me!” Eliza shouted, turning her focus on the people of the market instead of the guards. In response, they only bartered more fiercely, customers and merchants alike avoiding her gaze in such a pointed way that she knew they saw her need.

They simply didn’t care.

She fought more fiercely, kicking at the guards’ shins, driving her weight to one side and then the other. They were clearly accustomed to struggling prisoners because they never broke stride.

Then a whoop echoed above the market noise, and a pair of papayas came sailing through the air, each one smacking her guards in the face.

Eliza blessed whatever kind stranger was throwing fruit.

Laughter bounded through the stalls, and her guards began their own furious shouting. Eliza seized the opening, twisting free of the guards, then took off running. She was short and slim, so she squirmed through cracks between stalls, ducking beneath low canopies.

Glancing back, she saw someone chasing her, but the man was both younger and taller than the guards, and he was alone.

Had he thrown the papayas?

If so, he might be chasing her to demand payment.

Pravish people didn’t believe in generosity; she’d learned that while trying to get a chart of the course Henry’s ship had taken.

It had cost her five silver dubs just to get the chart, and then another three for the dockmaster to mark it with the route and the location of the shipwreck.

Safest not to get caught again. By anyone.

But just as Eliza made that determination, she tripped. Not over a merchant rug or crate.

Over a snake.

Eliza shrieked, scrambling away from the dusty yellow serpent, which watched her with a lifted head and hungry eyes. Thankfully, it darted off as the man approached.

She was so shaken, she allowed the stranger to grab her hand and haul her to her feet, and when he directed her toward a hole in the city wall, she followed. It was the opposite direction the snake had gone.

Eliza clambered through the broken barrier, her silk clothing snagging on thorns of stone. She banged her head on the rock, leaving a pounding ache in her skull and snarls in her carefully braided hair. Rubbing her head, she glared back at the wall.

And then she realized she was alone in a shadowed alleyway with a stranger.