Serpent's Tears (Snakesblood Saga Book 2)

by Beth Alvarez

“Ours,” he corrected. “And yes. My father hasn't relinquished control of the ruins, but he may as well have. He doesn't monitor or use the space. With the temple empty, he doesn't watch it at all.”

  The thought of the empty temple gave her a chill. She rubbed her arms as if she could ward it off. “How do you mean to seize it?”

  Rune grinned. “That's the easy part. I'm going to ask.”

  She blinked. “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.” His hand hovered over the map a moment before he marked the location of the new village on the surface, this time with a piece of charcoal. “We have our differences, but he's still my father. We're all on the same side, he and Relythes just can't seem to see that. That's half of why I need this.”

  The borders he'd drawn glowed a sickly shade in the weak firelight. Unsettled, she retrieved a stone from the small pile she kept on the corner of a shelf. It warmed beneath her fingers, a soft glow forming as she funneled her magic into a mage-light. “You think he's simply going to surrender land and not think you've betrayed him?”

  “He's not surrendering anything. And I haven't betrayed him.” Bright flickers in the glow of his eyes hinted at agitation. “I will admit some of the things I've had to do to get this far are... questionable. But everything I've done has been toward unification, not division. I'm not asking him to make a sacrifice. I'm asking him to trust me enough to let me reach places he can't.”

  Shadows splayed across the map as she rolled the mage-light between her fingers and set it aloft. It hung in midair when she drew back her hand. “I'm sorry.” She drew her fingers across his shoulders, gentle and placating. “I didn't mean to upset you.”

  “You didn't.” A shade too much heat lingered in his voice for it to be true, but the light in his eyes softened. He wiped his face with a hand. “I just... I need this to be perfect. This is the chance I've always wanted. An opportunity to prove I can do these things. I can make this island a better place, but he's never given me the chance. It's about time I made my own.”

  Warmth swelled in her chest, the mingled pride and sympathy as strange as it was familiar. His dedication no longer surprised her, but it remained novel. She threaded her fingers through his hair, tilting his head back to press a kiss to his forehead. “You're always working so hard.”

  He smiled haltingly and reached for the box of wax. “I have to.”

  “Just be careful not to overwork yourself. I'd like to have my husband sometimes, too.”

  “You'll have me tomorrow,” he said. “I promise.”

  Tomorrow, she supposed, would have to be good enough. She returned to preparing herbs and tinctures while he worked. Now and then, she stole glances at the maps and charts as he drew existing borders and plans for expansion, proposed roadways, ideal sites for cities, convenient trade routes, and possible placements for Gates. He ate without seeing or tasting what she offered, but his murmured thank-you made her smile.

  When her eyelids grew heavy, she crawled underneath the blankets and lay looking at him for a time. “Will you come to bed?”

  He shot her an apologetic glance. “Soon.”

  For a time, she slept, but the unnatural glow of the mage-light she'd made for him pressed uncomfortably on her eyelids. Though bright enough to wake her, the light had grown dim, indicating several hours had passed.

  “Rune?” Her voice was small, softened by sleep.

  His hand paused over a sheet of paper finer than anything she'd made for herself, one of her quills caught between the sides of his fingers so it wouldn't be damaged by his claws. His eyes were faded, dull, but stubbornness still gleamed in their depths. Even so, he put down the pen and crept to the bedside to kiss her brow and draw the blankets closer to her chin.

  “I have to get this right,” he whispered.

  She slipped an arm from under the blankets so she could cradle his face in one hand. “It can wait.”

  Rune caught her hand and kissed her fingertips. “No. I'm to travel to Ilmenhith to speak with him in three days. We're going back to the outpost tomorrow. It has to be now.”

  Unhappy, she tried to voice her disapproval. Instead, only a tiny squeak of a sigh escaped her throat.

  “Soon,” he promised, and returned to his desk.

  When she woke again, the mage-light had all but extinguished, its feeble light just tracing the outline of his features where he lay sleeping against the desk, quill pen still in hand.

  She slid from the blankets and padded across the room to brush her fingers across his back. He jerked awake and stifled a groan.

  “Come,” she ordered, pulling his arm. “Sleep.”

  This time, he did not argue. He followed her to the bed and collapsed into it, asleep before she drew the covers. Firal curled close against his back. For a fleeting moment, she took the sense of being his protector, and the uneasiness it formed in the pit of her stomach robbed her of all further sleep.

  22

  The Price Of Poison

  The last time Kifel set foot in the ruins, he'd been a young man. Like any Eldani, he didn't show his years, but he felt them—more, as of late. He tried not to let the weight of time drag him down. Things would have been different, were he not alone. If only he'd been able to keep Envesi happy, kept her in the palace. Perhaps then he might have known his child.

  Not for the first time since leaving Wethertree, he berated himself. Not only for his failures, but for that line of thought. Nondar was right; he'd always known Lomithrandel was not truly his son. Nondar himself had confided as much when the boy was first brought to Ilmenhith, daring to pit his word against that of the Archmage. But Kifel had always worried and wondered if he’d made a mistake in believing the old Master.

  Despite all their wisdom, the mages didn't know what magic might do to an unborn child. It was not unreasonable to think a mage's child might be tainted. For years, Kifel had been torn between the hope that perhaps Ran secretly was his child, warped by his mother's magic, and the gut-clenching fear that came with knowing that if Ran was not his blood, then chances were his blood child was dead.

  In spite of the now-certain knowledge that Ran was not his, Kifel couldn't stop thinking of him that way. As his son, his child, the one he'd thought could be his heir. A daughter who was related by blood complicated the matter. His throat tightened. A blood child who was perfect, whole. Part of him felt relieved the offspring he'd begged Envesi to keep had not been twisted the way she’d claimed. Then guilt arose anew. Ran's condition did not dictate his worth. Yet, Kifel could not keep the thoughts at bay.

  He followed the winding hallways of the ruins, pausing now and then to inspect the walls for sigils that were all but worn away. Their final argument still echoed in his mind, so many years later. It was the last time he'd seen her cry, the morning his wife, her dark hair yet unbleached by magic, had learned of the child growing within her womb.

  She had suspected, but mages were unable to sense the presence of their own unborn offspring, their magic overshadowing the delicate strands of energy that constituted another being. Energy she had threatened to have drawn until the child was unmade. The idea still gave him chills.

  Envesi blamed him for all of it, of course. For their arranged marriage, for her lost chance of attaining the rank of Archmage on the mainland. For any other woman, being the future queen would have been enough. It had taken all of his determination—and every ounce of his influence as crown prince—to strike the bargain that kept his child alive.

  Only days after his father's death and Kifel's coronation as king, he'd let his queen leave. With her, she'd taken a portion of his wealth and his finest court mages, striking out to establish Kirban Temple on the southern edge of the ruins. All he'd held was the promise she would spare his child. Months later, Nondar delivered Lomithrandel to his door.

  It would have been a lie to say he'd felt no repulsion at first sight of the infant. Kifel's first impulse had been to kill the miserable creature, to spare him a life that surely
would have been nothing but pain. But pity—and the realization he would have no other chance at the family he so desperately wanted—won out. The loss of his bride had taken great effort to bury, and the idea of remarrying did not sit well with him as long as his wife still lived. Though she was estranged and the royal court had declared their marriage invalid, he was no widower. Truthfully, he'd always clung to some feeble hope that, once the temple was well-established, she might return to him.

  That hope had been foolish.

  The corridor ended abruptly, forcing Kifel to turn around. Without the aid of a Gate, the trip had already taken too long. The mages in Wethertree had tried to open a Gate to the temple, so he could continue on foot from there, but every attempt to create one ended with the portal going askew and falling apart. Only Nondar's expert hand kept the fierce energies from escaping the mages' control. The destination had changed too much from their memories of it, Nondar said, leaving Kifel with no choice but to travel from Wethertree by horseback. But he couldn't blame them. From the warped glimpses of the temple he'd caught through the unsteady Gate, he hardly recognized the place, himself. Not that the ruins were any better. The guide sigils had decayed to the point they forced him to make more blind guesses than purposeful turns.

  How long had it been since he'd walked these hallways? Since before Ran was born, at least. It was strange and fitting that the boy had always found solace wandering the ruins, the same as Kifel had in his youth. But then, Ran was not so unlike him. They'd been close once. With effort, he kept himself from dwelling on how that had changed.

  The winding paths spun him ever closer to the entrance to the underground he sought. He'd taken little with him. Half the waterskin on his shoulder remained, but the evening meal was nothing more than bread and a bit of jerky. Sleep did not come easy beneath the stars, not when he knew what waited for him below. Breakfast the next morning saw the end of his provisions, but noontime put his feet on the stairs into the underground.

  Kifel had been to the tunnels often, but had rarely ventured into their depths. In his childhood, the ruins had been monitored closely. His father had sought to eliminate the last of the Underling forces, driven underground by a king now generations past. Kifel had thought it silly to expend time and effort hunting the remnant of a broken people, a notion he'd carried with him into adulthood. But the threat of enemies lurking underground made the ruins dangerous—and all the more appealing to a bored boy whose father dragged him about on the crown's business. Whenever they traveled to a guard post at the edge of the ruins, it had never taken Kifel long to find his way into the winding hallways.

  Sighing, Kifel touched the sigils that marked the wall. They pulsed with a faint light whenever his fingers brushed over them, illuminating just enough for him to read what they said. He barely remembered how to work them; he pressed a hand flat against the wall to keep the sigils lit as he knelt to search for the line of marks carved where the wall met the floor. It took a moment to find them, but when he touched the age-worn grooves, they flared to life. Bright blue light shot down the hallway as the flowing script became visible. More knowledge lost to the ages, he supposed, forgotten along with whoever had been responsible for carving the tunnels in the first place. He'd discovered the lights by accident, tripping in the dark and catching himself on the wall. Those lights had often helped his father find where he hid.

  The tunnels sloped downward at a steady rate. On occasion, the branching paths gave Kifel pause. Despite the sigils, he couldn't tell how far he had gone, nor was he certain where he was going. But as long as he moved downward, it was progress, and as he delved farther into the cool deep of the underground, he began to hear whispers and the scuffling of feet as denizens of the underground hurried to avoid notice.

  Perhaps his father had been right in his desire to kill the last of the Underlings. Once Kifel took the crown, he'd called back the men stationed at the ruins. He'd watched his father search for years without finding anything. Kifel had believed there was no one there. It wasn't until Lumia was exiled and vanished into the ruins that he began to reconsider.

  Kifel paused to glance over his shoulder. The sigils had dimmed behind him, leaving the path at his back hidden in shadow once again. Unsettled, he touched the hilt of his sword and carried on. Signs of life appeared in the form of lights, their cool illumination washing out the soft, comforting glow of the sigils that lined the floor. The twisted sconces resembled tangled vines, he thought, thorny shapes that struggled to choke out the lights they held. He trained his eyes on the dim passage ahead. When he reached the open doorway at the end of the hall, he found himself still once more, breath stolen by the sight before him.

  The size of the great hall rivaled his throne room in the palace of Ilmenhith. Columns stretched far overhead and roaring fires in the iron braziers between them gave the room a pleasant warmth, though a haze of smoke obscured the lines and angles of the vaulted ceiling. Sweet-smelling wood chips and herbs mixed with the tinder drove away the mustiness of the underground. And at the very end of the room, perched upon a throne, was the woman who—had he his choice—should have been his greatest ally.

  “You've come to me.” Lumia's head tilted as she spoke, her words full of wonder. She was everything he remembered, dressed in ivory silk, with golden hair that glowed like the sun in the red light of the fires. Her hips still swung with a fluid grace when she walked toward him, her eyes still glittering like gems. She had always been magnificent, but her appearance was just one of the vanities that had been her downfall. “After all this time, you've come.”

  Kifel squared his shoulders. “I've not come for you.”

  Her expression melted into neutrality and her tone grew cool. “He will never be you.” She stopped just within arm's reach and let her hand trail over his chest. “You've given him your strength. Your passion. But he will never be you.”

  He stared down at her impassively. “Have you really become so desperate, Lumia?”

  “If only a king were so easy to replace.” She snatched her hand away and glared. “At least your son fights for what he wants.”

  “You knew it was unavoidable. My marriage was arranged, I had no part in it.”

  “Because they wanted an Eldani mage for a queen.” Her lip curled with a sneer and her eyes darkened. “I thought we were allies. I thought we wanted the same thing. Yet you surrendered everything. We had a chance to end this war. To end the power tearing our home apart. And yet you wed her.”

  “You never loved the idea of peace,” he snapped. “You were in love with power. You envied my title. My palace, my crown. You pined for them from the moment you joined my father's court.”

  “Curse your father!” Lumia drew back and spat at the carpet underfoot. “Curse your mother and curse your queen! If magic sows discord, then we can only find peace through its decay.”

  “It's in our blood, yours stronger than mine. We cannot control that. There must be another way.”

  “And the answer was to found the temple?” She raised a brow. “To empower what should have been destroyed?”

  Tamping down his anger, Kifel sucked in a breath. She would never understand the choices he'd made. In her eyes, her cause was everything. But no cause could replace the family he'd craved. The family he'd sacrificed everything for.

  “Where is my daughter?” Kifel demanded.

  Lumia's eyes narrowed, a cold smile twisting her mouth. “So you abandon your son so easily? The moment you learn the truth about the brat you sired, all those years together are forgotten?” She leaned close. “He's taken her, you know. I'm sure he's bedded her by now. How terrible it would be for either of them to know the truth—that the moment you learn of her, you care for your poor little foundling no more. Or that he received all your love, which should have been hers, even after what I made him.”

  The inflection in her words made his stomach knot. “What you made him?”

  She chuckled and glided past him to circle one of the g
reat iron braziers. “Perhaps he might have had a normal life, if I'd let him be. It's all your fault, you know. You supported the Archmage in that venture, gave her free rein over the future of magic. If not for that, perhaps I would not have carried on alone. Perhaps I would not have felt the need to corrupt the power as she brought the poor thing to life.” Her voice lilted with amusement and she stared into the fire, a gleam in her eyes. The licking flames sent shadows roiling across her smile. “Oh, just remembering gives me chills. The way she screamed when I twisted the flows. The way it made his flesh blister and warp. I didn't know what to expect, really. I'm not sure why the magic gave him that form. Perhaps because I'd been watching that lizard as it scaled the wall.”

  Kifel's breath caught in his throat, his heart hammering in his chest as her confession sank in. “You ruined him,” he choked. “You destroyed his life!”

  “I saved his life!” Her eyes flashed, cold blue against the reflection of the flames. “I saved yours. What might your beloved queen have done if she thought herself capable of creating more like him? Mages that know no limit? With the strength of all creation at their fingertips? Please. She sought to overthrow you. If he'd turned out as your Archmage intended, he would have unmade himself by now and taken half your kingdom with him. Had she not considered the project a failure, you would be dead.”

  “How could you?” His stare carried every bit as much disbelief as his words. “He was a child!”

  “He was an abomination!” she snapped back. “Even before I touched him. A child born of magic alone can never be anything but a monster.”

  Kifel unsheathed his sword before he knew what he was doing. Anger clouded his vision, fury at the pain she'd caused his son bringing everything inside him to a white-hot boil. He surged forward and she squealed when the blue-silver metal of his blade shaved skin from her neck. He barely stopped himself from pushing it farther, his grip on the hilt of his sword tightening until his knuckles turned white. “Where are they?”