Page 6 of Sonnets and Serpents (Casters and Crowns #2)

Eliza woke in the night to furious shouting. She kicked against the thin cotton blanket tangled around her legs. Her silk nightgown stuck to her skin, and once more, she longed for the cold winter back home.

Orange light flickered outside her window. Was there a fire?

She threw open the shutters, squinting down into the street.

There was no uncontained fire, only a collection of torches, held aloft in angry hands. Eliza recognized the stocky innkeeper, shirtless and shouting in Pravish. He stood in the circle of torchbearers.

At their center was a lone, short-haired man, perhaps in his thirties, grinning wildly at those surrounding him. His hands twitched at his sides, and Eliza gasped as she realized his fingers had been replaced by scaled talons, the type a large eagle might have.

The innkeeper took a threatening step forward, bellowing a clear accusation.

The man laughed.

Eliza finally saw past the man’s animal features to the bloodied corpse at his feet, and her stomach flipped. She clamped a hand to her mouth.

One of the women in the circle screamed something, charging forward along with the man beside her.

In a puff of golden mist, the shapeshifter disappeared, replaced by an enormous eagle, his wingspan at least as wide as Eliza was tall. His piercing shriek cracked the night air, and he swooped at his attackers, raking his talons through the woman’s arm and the man’s cheek, leaving them bleeding.

The world tilted in Eliza’s view. She stepped back from the window, struggling to breathe as her throat closed. From outside came the sound of more shouting and another scream. Torchlight flickered, shadows crawling across her wall.

She had never seen a real shapeshifter before.

She’d heard the legends, the horrifying stories of children consumed in their cribs, replaced by a monster adopting human skin.

When she was young, she’d laughed at those stories, the way she laughed when performers came to the palace and pretended to be the legendary Einar, brandishing a sword against a three-headed chimera. Stories never frightened Eliza.

Until her father told her sternly that shapeshifters were not a story.

His mother had executed one when she’d been queen, and sometime during Eliza’s life, there would be another loose in the kingdom, and no one would see it coming until it was too late.

Until it was already a monstrous killer on a rampage.

Then Eliza no longer found the legends funny.

I need to help, she thought. She fumbled for her sheathed dagger, which rested against her pile of clothes, but once she held it in her hands, she froze.

What could she do against a demon?

Slowly, she inched back to the window and peeked out.

Stripes of blood painted the street, glistening in the orange light.

Four people lay collapsed, but four others had captured the shapeshifter and wrestled him to the ground.

He was a man again, spitting at his captors, howling and bucking as if possessed. Inhuman.

Eliza clutched her small dagger to her chest.

A group of veiled men arrived, identical to those who’d tried to arrest Eliza in the marketplace.

Kuveti, she heard them called. She shrank against the edge of her window, unable to close the shutters lest that draw attention.

In glimpses, she watched the kuveti knock the shapeshifter unconscious, bind him, and drag him away.

What kind of nightmarish place had she come to?

She sank to the floor, back against the wall, both hands around the only weapon she possessed. The helmsman’s warnings made sense now, his concern that she didn’t appreciate the dangers of magic in Pravusat.

Silas’s voice taunted her from memory. You’re the one out of place.

If she’d let him arrange a voyage for her, she could have left behind the shouting and the miserable humidity and the fresh memory of blood spilled in the street. She could have left behind the fear that those veiled men would catch her again and drag her all the way to prison.

The way they’d dragged off a shapeshifter.

Did they throw their prisoners in cages with shapeshifters to fight for entertainment? She’d read of gruesome practices like that in fables, and in this country, anything seemed possible.

She was beginning to doubt everything, spiraling like a ship caught in a whirlpool.

Abandoning the dagger, she stumbled across the room and snatched up her book of sonnets.

The light from the window was faint since the torchbearers had dispersed, but she knew this poetry better than her own name, and the bindings remembered all her favorite pages.

So even in a dim blur, she could see the words, crisp and clean. She could see the individual petals of a dried white flower, pointing her to the first two lines of her favorite sonnet.

Love, my crown, most precious gems within its settings gold;

Patience abiding, unceasing hope, and mine endurance bold.

“Unceasing hope,” she whispered. “Endurance. Bold.”

She would not lose herself to fear or to a lawless country or to whims. She would finish what she’d started, even if everyone else deemed it impossible. She would hope. She would endure.

That was the essence of love.

She’d already searched the docks and markets. She could not go to the royal palace without revealing her identity and making herself a pawn in political games. There was one other noteworthy part of Izili.

On the northern side of the city, the land rose sharply into its highest point atop a set of cliffs. Eliza had noticed a collection of buildings set back from the cliffs but still raised above the city. White with blue accents, towering and yet somehow welcoming. Obviously important.

Henry surely would have noticed them as well. Perhaps he was recovering there. Perhaps it was safer than the run-down streets of the city proper.

Tomorrow, she would search there.

After spending a night in the dorms, the first person Silas sought out on campus was not the dean; it was his favorite professor.

The university had a quieter atmosphere than the city, likely because its arrangement gave the impression of a shelter from the world.

All the buildings faced inward, as if they held council the same way the people within them did, and the ground had been cultivated by Stone Casters to grow towering trees, shading the paths.

It was a haven—part of Izili in name but separate in every practicality.

In the city proper, faded yellow stone mingled with dark-grain wood to create striking two- and three-story buildings.

Every so often, a splash of orange, red, or pink added another contrast to the wild color scheme, though the paint was always splotchy in application, as if the building’s owner only had a few hours for the task but simply had to have something set their home apart.

The entire city was like an art student on a deadline, throwing haphazard colors on the canvas and telling themselves that, really, any construction counted as art.

If Izili was the splattered canvas of a student, the university was its composed professor, dressed in a sharp alabaster suit, looking down at the work with a concerned frown.

The university’s main building—the Yamakaz—was domed and arched, tiered in four massive levels.

It carried no harsh angles at all, everything rounded and softened beneath the touch of magic.

Lines of blue lapis accented the white alabaster on each dome, and statues or stone murals marked each curving wall and arch, depicting the mythology of Pravusat, the history of the university’s founding, and significant discoveries made by the university’s greatest minds.

If a Stone Casting student showed particular excellence, they were allowed to contribute to the Yamakaz’s decoration when they graduated.

Silas was wildly jealous—his magic, for all its benefits, didn’t lend itself to art.

He stepped through the Yamakaz’s arched doors and breathed deeply the scents of ink and incense. He’d told Eliza that Pravusat was home, but that wasn’t entirely accurate.

This was home.

Students milled in every open space, books open before them on tables or the floor. They studied in groups or talked with assignments pushed aside, forgotten. They hurried up and down the spiral staircases, coming to and from lectures on the second floor.

Directly ahead, the main floor held the library, a collection of endless shelves Silas could lose himself in for days. But the library wasn’t what he’d come for.

He climbed to the third floor where the staff offices were located and followed a curving hallway down a series of doors interspersed with narrow windows.

One door gave him pause—not the one he’d come in search of, but one with a string of braided yaslari flowers draping its handle.

Purple, the color of mourning. A small boat of incense burned at the foot of the office.

Silas frowned. The plaque on the door read Iyal Havva.

Pravish mourning traditions were private and rarely included graveside or memorial offerings.

Something truly awful must have happened to the professor.

Silas had only been gone a month—a week in Loegria plus the twenty days of sailing to get there and back—yet there’d been a tragedy in his absence. That seemed ominous.

He continued until he came to the door marked Iyal Kerem. Out of habit, he tried to walk right in, but the door had been locked.

“Who is it?” called a gruff voice from inside.

“Just a passing adder.” Silas lowered his hand, rubbing his palm self-consciously on his tunic.

A moment of silence, and then a rush of footsteps to the door before Kerem threw it open. The top half of his black hair was pulled back in a ponytail to keep it out of his face, and he wore thin-rimmed spectacles over his dark eyes. Seeing Silas, he gave a rare smile.

“Silas! Oh, good. I know I wished you well and all that, but I hoped you’d return. You belong here.”

Silas offered a smile of his own, and when Kerem gestured, he stepped into the office. A dry, musty smell rose from the research shelves where Kerem kept snakeskin, fangs, and preserved bones, familiar and more comforting than it should have been.

While attending university, Silas had been Kerem’s research assistant in everything but name, and together with a Fluid Casting professor, they’d studied the properties and applications of snake venom.

Kerem was well-known in Pravusat for developing a way of treating snake bites with antivenom.

Revered though they might be, that didn’t stop venomous snakes from being deadly when crossed.

“Since when did you start locking your door?” Silas asked. He felt like he’d never left, yet at the same time, he’d been away too long.

“Oh.” Kerem waved a hand. “Precautions, I suppose.”

“I saw Iyal Havva’s door down the hall, with the yaslari.”

“Nothing like that,” Kerem said quickly. “It’s protection for my students, not me. I’ve had more dangerous materials on hand lately.”

“More dangerous than vipers and venoms?”

“The most dangerous vipers and venoms, then, let’s say. You’ll love this.” From a shelf, he snatched a vial containing fine white powder, like limestone dust. “Hold that, but don’t open it.”

With care, Silas turned the vial in his hands, examining the powder. “You didn’t,” he said, fighting a grin.

Kerem reclaimed the vial, lifting his spectacles to peer at it up close. “Powdered venom. Can you believe it? Mazhar was ready to give up when we finally got it.”

Silas’s shoulders drooped. “I’m gone a single month, and you make the breakthrough without me.”

Working with Kerem had been an unexpected bright spot in Silas’s university career.

The research was thrilling and challenging, but the largest comfort lay in working alongside someone who truly understood Silas’s situation.

Kerem wasn’t just a fellow Snake Affiliate, but in his youth, he’d been captured by Cronese slavers who traded Affiliates like exotic pets to wealthy buyers.

He knew what it was like to be targeted for magic, what it was like to almost die for it.

Kerem lowered his spectacles with a smirk. “Innovation is an ever-progressing river, you know that. But in this case, Mazhar did all the work; only a Fluid Caster could have dried the venom. Now that you’re back, let’s make the next innovation a feat of Affiliate magic, shall we?”

“I’d like that.” Silas swallowed. “I’m trying to make my stay permanent, but I need to speak to Afshin. When I left, I told Iyl Myrna to donate my things, but she said you claimed them.”

Kerem pointed to a closet on one side of the room. “I knew you’d be back, Silas. You belong here.”

It was the second time he’d said it, and it felt truer than ever, especially once Silas opened a chest to find his clothes and books tucked neatly inside. His old life in storage, just waiting for him to resume it.

This time, he wouldn’t look back.