Page 37 of Sonnets and Serpents (Casters and Crowns #2)

Eliza went back to check on Henry. There was no change, but at least he didn’t seem to be in pain.

His face was relaxed in a sound sleep, his lips slightly parted.

The layer of dark stubble along his jaw looked strange, since Eliza had never seen him in a state other than attending court.

She longed to see his hazel eyes open, longed to hear her name in his voice.

A rat scurried from among the crates, coming to sniff at Henry, and Eliza shooed it fiercely away. If only it were so easy to protect him from other things, like magic.

Reaching out, she smoothed his shoulder-length hair where it had splayed on the rug, tucking it against his neck.

His clothing was still Loegrian, a buttoned shirt beneath a vest. He always wore his shirt untucked, so she couldn’t blame that on travel, but the dirt and grime was a different story.

One sleeve was rolled above his elbow; the other had been cut with surgical precision in the same spot.

Eliza remembered the sister at the Sarazan tabernacle talking about a wound, and she ran her fingers gently down his forearm, tracing a long mark that had already turned into a fading scar.

The sisters must have accelerated the healing.

In a desperate hope, she leaned close to his ear and whispered, “Wake up, Henry. Please.”

But he slept on, and finally, she returned up the stairs to Silas.

“How is he?” Silas asked, glancing up from his study of the Artifact.

He’d scooted himself to the alley’s edge, resting his back against one of the two buildings enclosing their space.

A middle-aged laundress gathered hanging sheets into a basket near the alley’s entrance, shooting them both suspicious glances and ignoring Eliza’s wave.

Eliza sighed, seating herself next to him. “I don’t think he’s hurt, but he’s just . . .”

“Tasumak, which is much better than shipwrecked. I can fix it, once I can actually walk. I’m no Stone Caster, of course, but every Cast has a means to unravel it, and some are consistent. Yvette made me memorize a list.”

A wave of relief washed away the tension that had knotted her insides since the moment they’d found Henry.

They’d found Henry. After all this time, all the effort . . . they’d found him.

She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling a strange tingle from head to toe. It was like her whole body was still trying to process this new reality.

“I’m sorry,” she told Silas again, glancing down at his bandaged leg. “If I’d followed you right away, you wouldn’t have been hurt.”

“I’m the one who poised a cobra to strike.

In terms of fault, I carry more than you.

” He ran one hand over the bracelet, and when he spoke again, his tone sounded strained.

Perhaps a result of the pain in his leg.

“Now that we’ve found your beloved Henry, Yvette can take care of the leash between us. ”

Eliza didn’t know what to say, so she just nodded. She’d achieved her goal, but it still didn’t feel real.

It wouldn’t feel real until Henry was awake.

Silas set the Artifact down at last. It looked out of place—stark black symbols and clean white edges against the battered sandstone cobbling the ground. Without knowing it was a thing of magic, Eliza could have guessed.

“She said this was made from her father’s bones,” Silas murmured.

Eliza inched back from it. The polished white took on a different shade, unnerving to look at. “Do you think it is?”

“Why not? Magic works in blood, bone, flesh, and soul. Four words on the box.”

“Who would . . .” Eliza couldn’t finish the thought.

Silas looked up at her, his bangs shadowing his dark eyes. “I didn’t kill Iyal Havva. I’ve never killed anyone.”

He said it with a quiet desperation, like he worried she believed differently, but it had been a long time since Eliza had thought of the boy at her side as a murderous shapeshifter. She knew him better now.

“I know.” She gave his hand a quick squeeze that left her fingers warm.

To distract herself, and to tease him, she raised her eyebrows and added, “Just be careful when you become a professor. There’s a very real chance you might bore some poor student to death with a lecture about the influence of Stone Casters on Pravish architecture. ”

He scoffed, clearly trying to appear more offended than his twitching lips allowed. “I’ll have you know I intend to be a greatly sought-after professor, with every lecture hall filled and a long wait list for my classes.”

“Oh dear, oh dear.” Eliza shook her head, clucking her tongue. “So many students, gone so young. May they rest in peace.”

“How dare you.”

“Iyal Gravestone, they’ll call you. Or Iyal Deathsgate. Iyal—”

He took a swipe at her, and she leaned away, giggling. But he hissed at his own movement, scrunching his face in pain and straightening again. A slow, deep breath lifted his chest.

“Are you—?”

He cut her guilty question short. “It’ll heal. That’s what wounds do.”

She couldn’t help glancing at the scar on his neck. A murder attempt from his own father—could such a wound really heal? Or was it a surface illusion with pain still aching beneath?

Eliza tried to find the words to tell him how strong he was, how much he inspired her, how sorry she was for misjudging him in their first days together. But in the end, she only said, “If you transform, would that heal it?”

He snorted. “If only. I wouldn’t have a wound in my snake form, which would be helpful for pausing blood loss, but I’d still feel the physical strain, and injuries are taxing on my magic.

I wouldn’t be able to transform for as long.

With a more severe injury, I wouldn’t be able to transform at all. ”

“Guess we’ll have to heal it the regular way, then.”

Eliza grabbed the supplies Iyal Kerem had left behind, and she set to work changing the wrapping on Silas’s leg. He grabbed her wrist, protesting, but she shook him off.

“Sit back, Iyal Deathsgate. I may be an uneducated princess, but I at least know the basics.”

Silas tried to think of what to say to Eliza, but for once, his mind failed him.

There was too much to say, all of it tangled ideas and feelings that couldn’t find their way into a proper language.

As a result, he sat stiffly while her soft, gentle hands wrapped his wound.

His leg burned like someone had stabbed a hot poker through his calf, though Eliza’s cool fingers against his skin and her fierce concentration wrinkling the freckles across her nose made a decent distraction.

Until, at last, she finished, and Silas picked up the Artifact and pushed his way up the alley wall, testing his weight on his injured leg to stand.

“How is it?” She held her hands slightly raised, like she was ready to catch him if needed. The mouse catching a falling viper was comical enough to make Silas smile.

“Stings like Sarazan’s fangs,” he said. “But I’ll live.”

He knew what she’d want him to turn his attention to. Slowly, he limped his way back down the stairs to Henry Wycliff.

“Still have your dagger?” Silas extended his hand, and, in response to Eliza’s sharp glare, he added, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to stab your beloved.”

He pricked the small outer hollow where Henry’s hand met his wrist, squeezing out a drop of blood.

The fascinating thing about Casting was that the types were intertwined: Stone Casting rested in the bones but could often be undone by blood drawn in the right way, and Fluid Casting rested in the blood but could sometimes be undone by breaking the right bone.

Understandably, not many people tried undoing Fluid Casts without the assistance of an actual Caster.

Henry stirred, and Silas backed away, resting on a crate with his injured leg stretched out in front of him. Eliza knelt by Henry’s side, her hand hovering above his shoulder, as if afraid to touch him.

“Henry?” she whispered.

Slowly, the knight blinked his eyes open, and his gaze wandered a hazy path before landing on Eliza. Then he stared. Mouthing wordlessly, he pushed himself up on his elbows.

Only to be knocked back down by Eliza throwing her arms around him with a delighted shriek.

Despite himself, Silas remembered the morning she’d climbed into his bed, afraid of earthquakes. If he could relive it now, he wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t miss a moment of having her that close to him.

To what end? he asked himself.

Henry managed to sit up again, pulling Eliza with him, and his return hug was so forceful, Silas could see the strain of knuckles through skin.

A decent person would give them a moment of privacy for this reunion, but he was trapped by both his leg and his bracelet.

He tried to study the Artifact again, but the black symbols slid together as his vision refused to focus.

“Eliza, what are you doing here?” Henry asked hoarsely.

Eliza was crying, clutching his face with both hands.

“I thought you were dead. As soon as I reached Pravusat, the first news I heard was your shipwreck. They said there were no survivors. Then I went to the tabernacle, and they’d seen you, but I wasn’t certain.

Everything was so confusing and overwhelming.

We searched everywhere and—what are you doing here? Who was that girl? How did you—”

Every word tumbled faster until she was scarcely coherent. A few scattered words even came out in Pravish, and Silas wondered idly if she was dreaming in it. Yvette had once told him the mark of absorbing a language was when it bled into dreams.

“I—” Henry stammered, clearly trying to parse the barrage. His eyes moved from Eliza for the first time, landing on Silas.

Silas lifted his fingers from the Artifact in a half-hearted wave.

“Lord Silas? You’re here too?” The knight blinked hard, as if expecting what he saw to change.

“Lord?” Eliza repeated with a frown.

“Just Silas.” Now wasn’t the time to discuss the details of his disinheritance, so he said only, “I live here. Here in Izili, not here in the dank, underground tunnels, obviously.”

Perhaps he should have explained more. Perhaps it would have erased the betrayal in Eliza’s eyes.

“You know each other?” She directed the question at Henry, her gaze cutting sharply back to him.

“We’ve crossed paths at the Reeves estate.” Henry shook his head, still looking dazed. “He was always reading. For the longest time, I thought he was Baron Reeves’s brother. Until Baron said they were friends.”

Brothers was accurate enough, at least in an emotional sense.

Even at the mention of Gill, Silas felt a stab of longing for what he’d left behind, what he’d never have again.

Plenty of things could be replaced in life, but not people.

That was why it was so dangerous to forge relationships in the first place.

He looked down at the flat yellow band encircling his wrist, binding him to a girl who had her attention on someone else.

“It isn’t safe here,” he said abruptly. “We don’t know who else Ceyda is in league with or who else knows about this place, and the main tunnel is a highway for the kuveti. We can talk at the university.”

With more effort than it should have taken, he managed to stand and maneuver himself back up the stairs.

Eliza fretted over Henry, who kept assuring her he was uninjured, just weakened.

He must have been under the tasumak for an extended period.

Once he came back to his full senses, he’d be ravenous.

Out on the street, Silas flagged down a cart puller to take them to the university. The three of them piled into the back of the wooden cart, and Silas clenched his teeth, bracing himself for the long, bumpy ride over uneven streets.

Though, somehow, it wasn’t as uncomfortable as watching Eliza snuggle up to Henry’s side, resting her head on the knight’s shoulder.

Under Silas’s directions, the cart puller left them at the healing hall, one of the outermost buildings on campus.

Both a Fluid Caster and a non-magical physician looked him and Henry over, though the knight remained tense the entire time.

Based on his comfortable mention of Gill—“Baron,” as most people called him—Silas hadn’t expected Henry to be wary of Fluid Casters.

Perhaps he was still disoriented from the sleeping Cast.

“I’m sorry I can’t do anything to speed the antivenom,” said the Caster on duty after she finished examining Silas. “Circulation Casts cause harm if not done right, and I’m a first-year student. Once Iyal Mazhar or Iyl Daria come in for a shift, I could send for you.”

Silas declined. Given enough time, his body would reach the point where it had to heal on its own anyway, and the tea she had given him had eased the pain.

He hesitated, then asked, “Has there been any word on Iyal Mazhar? I’d heard he was . . . missing.”

The girl frowned. “He skipped his morning shift, but no one’s told me more than that.”

“Never mind.” Silas thanked her again and exited.

He took Henry and Eliza to the dining hall, where they managed to catch the last scraps of the evening meal.

As predicted, Henry inhaled everything available, including half of Eliza’s plate after she insisted for the third time that she was full.

But he acted strangely while he ate, hunching his shoulders as if trying to ignore everyone else in the room, flinching when the staff turned any attention on him.

He’d acted the same way with the healers.

Silas had a sneaking suspicion why, but he wasn’t about to address it in public.

The dorm had never felt farther away, and though the Caster’s tea had eased the burn in Silas’s leg, he still limped.

He tried to focus on the light fading from the sky, the layers of gray clouds painting long streaks across the darkening ocean in the distance.

It was almost unbelievable how much had happened in a single day—their planned arrest, the torturous search in prison, everything in the tunnels.

He’d transformed Eliza into a snake only hours ago. The memory of her trembling in his arms was sharp and fresh, as was her smug expression when she corrected his sonnet and the warmth in her voice when she thanked him.

Now that she had her beloved Henry back, how long would she stay? Probably not a moment longer than it took Yvette to break the Cast.

Silas found himself suddenly hoping Yvette would take an immediate, possibly indefinite research leave.