Page 35 of Sonnets and Serpents (Casters and Crowns #2)

All of Silas’s senses were on alert as they crept through the dark. While facing so many unknowns, he welcomed the addition of Kerem’s abilities, but the professor’s words had hollowed out a pit of dread deep in Silas’s bones.

Iyal Mazhar arrested. A magical disturbance.

The pattern was undeniable. Using the kuveti, someone was targeting magic users. Had it started with Iyal Havva? For so long, Silas had considered the university a haven against Pravusat’s darkest dangers, but now two professors had been targeted.

Iyal Mazhar wasn’t one of Silas’s favorites—too short-tempered with his students, too reminiscent of Silas’s own father—but he was a brilliant mind who’d contributed greatly to his field, just like every professor at the university.

Silas had worked on venom projects with him alongside Kerem, and the thought of the short, bearded Fluid Caster turning up as a boneless body made his insides slither down to his shoes.

The tunnel twisted gently. After a steep downward slope at the entrance, it had leveled out and remained flat, and thus far, it hadn’t branched. Silas wondered if it would empty directly at the graveyard—a way for the kuveti to smuggle bodies they didn’t want seen.

Every forty feet or so, a new candle in an alcove lit the path. Silas paused beside one, extending his hand to the wall.

“Nirhaba, friend,” he said.

Behind him, Eliza jumped, grabbing his arm and looking around wildly, as if expecting to find a guard bearing down on them.

Silas nodded toward the wall, and a thin snake wove through his fingers until it wrapped around his hand.

Eliza sighed, releasing her death grip, and he wondered if it was the first time she’d ever been relieved it was just a snake.

Silas lifted the tiny snake to eye level. “Tell me what it’s like down here.”

The serpent flipped its tail back and forth across his pinky before releasing the squeakiest little hiss imaginable. A quick flicker of hazy images and impressions passed through Silas’s mind, and he parsed their meaning.

Humans come and go. Scare out the spiders. Loud stomps. Dragging. Body stink. Big, big, big.

“Fascinating.” Kerem leaned closer, lifting his spectacles. “It must survive on insects down here. Look at that—eyes so small they’re almost nonexistent. You’re accustomed to the darkness, little one.”

“We’re looking for two people.” Silas sent an impression of the ocean-eyed girl and Henry. He couldn’t hope for much, since Kerem was right about the snake’s dim vision.

But the snake flicked its tongue. Lighter feet. Pitter-patter. That way.

After releasing the snake, Silas looked up, his nervous eyes meeting Eliza’s.

“That way,” he rasped.

The trouble was, there was no “that way.” The tunnel continued forward—north, as far as Silas could tell—but the snake had indicated east. After searching for a moment, Silas found another catch in the wall, another secret door.

“Secrets within secrets,” Kerem said, his eyes alight with the thrill of discovery.

“If we find the girl we’re looking for,” Silas warned, “don’t let her . . . touch you.”

Kiss you, he amended silently, but it was safe to assume that skin-to-skin contact was the catalyst and she’d only kissed him because it was more distracting and less aggressive than grabbing him by the throat.

Silas led the way into the branching passage. Eliza trailed behind, glancing over her shoulder as if afraid of being closed in.

The new space wasn’t an ongoing tunnel but rather a connected set of small hollows, like a storage space, or an oversized snake’s burrow.

Candles burned in the corners, casting more light than the sparse guides in the main tunnel.

There was no furniture aside from a few crates and a pair of thick rugs.

A still form lay stretched out on one of the rugs, his back toward them.

“Henry!” shrieked Eliza.

She darted forward before Silas could stop her. He glanced around wildly, spotting a second person crouched in the farthest hollow, watching him from behind a crate. Silas recognized those panicked eyes. Blue as the ocean.

“Come out slowly,” he ordered, feeling the itch of scales across his cheeks.

Eliza fell to her knees beside Henry, turning him onto his back. From this distance, Silas couldn’t tell if he was breathing, but he could tell Eliza was crying.

The ocean-eyed girl rose slowly to her feet, still standing behind the crate as if it could protect her, even though it only came up to her knee. She held her hands up, palms out. They were empty.

Silas narrowed cold eyes on her. “Where’s your box?”

She pressed her lips into a line, apparently determined not to speak.

Eliza whirled to her feet, pointing at the girl. “You! What have you done to him?”

Despite her grief, she managed the demand in understandable Pravish. Her language skills had improved by leaps.

Using magic, Silas reached out for any of the snakes he’d put into place before his arrest. He could sense a cobra overhead, which put them a few streets northeast of the prison.

The magic stealer stood in front of a narrow, steep staircase that had been cut directly into the stone, which presumably led up into the city.

He pointed the cobra in that direction, ordering it to make a threatening show in case the girl tried to run.

Kerem knelt by Henry, his fingers pressed to the pulse point at his neck. He tested his eyelids, before he declared, “Tasumak.”

A Stone Caster’s coma, a magical hibernation. Henry was alive.

“You’re a Stone Caster,” Silas said to the ocean-eyed girl.

She gave no answer. For the briefest instant, her eyes flickered toward another crate, shoved back into the deep shadows by the stairs.

“Eliza.” Silas pointed at it. “Open that.”

Though the princess cast an agonized glance at her fallen knight, she did as instructed. From the depths of the crate, she produced a familiar white box, holding it on her palm. She stood and took a step as if to bring the Artifact to him.

“Don’t trust him!” the girl cried, speaking at last. “He killed my father!”

Silas blinked. Of all the various insults shot at him through the years, murderer was new, and it was more offensive than shapeshifter. Shapeshifter may have been vulgar, but at least it was accurate.

“What’s your name?” Kerem asked gently, addressing the girl with the same calming presence he used on frightened snakes.

She swallowed, her eyes darting frantically between the three of them. “Ceyda Polat.”

A shadow of grief crossed the professor’s face. “You must be Havva Polat’s daughter.”

Iyal Havva. The first boneless Stone Caster.

Silas frowned. “I’m sorry for your loss, but I wasn’t even in the country when your father died.”

Finally, his trip home carried some good with it.

But the girl spat in his direction, her expression and tone dripping venom. “Shedskin!” she accused.

Eliza protested, her own expression fierce on his behalf. “Just because he’s a snake—”

“Shedskin means liar,” Silas explained, though the fact that Eliza would defend him for being an Affiliate meant more than he could say.

“You were in the country.” Ceyda’s voice cracked, and her hands, still raised, shook with tremors. “Is this a show for your friends? Are you going to pretend we haven’t met twice already?”

“We’ve met once, when you—”

“Of course you won’t admit the first—when you dumped my father’s body.”

Silas frowned, looking to Kerem for any kind of explanation.

“From what I heard,” the professor said quietly, “Havva was dead long before his body was discovered. Since he was on a research leave, no one was looking.”

“I didn’t even know him!” Silas protested. “I took my Stone Casting classes from Iyl Yvette. I’d never heard Iyal Havva’s name before I saw the memorial at his office door.”

Ceyda surged toward him, and despite himself, Silas jumped back a step.

“I saw the vial of venom! It was labeled with your name: Silas Bennett. Father said it was part of an experiment, told me not to ask questions . . . and then he didn’t come home.

” She shook her head. “I searched. I waited. Days without anything. Then, one night, when I saw the kuveti coming, I hid in Father’s study, crouched in a cupboard.

I couldn’t see clearly, but I knew. When they didn’t search the house, just silently unloaded a cart, I knew what they were unloading.

I knew why they’d come to his study, why they carried something heavy to the table.

Only someone who was part of his experiment could have led them there. ”

“I wasn’t there!” It was the only objection Silas could offer, his mind spinning with the implications of what Ceyda was saying.

“There was only one person with the kuveti. I may not have seen your face, but I know it was you. And when you set your bag beside the cupboard while you stole whatever you wanted from his study, I saw the Artifact inside. I knew it was made of bone—Stone Casting. I knew it didn’t belong to you, so I took it back.

It was only after you left and I could see my father that I realized, he .

. . he didn’t have . . . I realized it was . . .”

Her blue eyes dripped tears, but she only glared with fiercer heat. “You used my father’s bones to make your Artifact, and I only wish I could have used it to kill you.”

When she turned to run, Silas couldn’t react.

Kerem stood, reaching as if to catch the girl, but she dodged around him.

She lunged at Eliza, clearly trying to retake the Artifact, but the princess was faster, ducking behind the crates, and Ceyda apparently thought it better to escape without the Artifact than not at all.

She dashed up the stairs and out of sight. There was a bang like she’d thrown open a trapdoor.

Too late, Silas remembered the cobra. “Wait—”

A sharp, high-pitched scream echoed down the stairs.