The Serpent Gift

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  I was thirsty. I was also a little hungry. Five mouthfuls of bread were not enough to fill even a belly as shrunken as mine.

  I counted the boards of the ceiling once more. Then I sat up and counted the floorboards, those that weren’t hidden by the bedstead. That was no great task. There were only four. Then I got up, combed my hair with my fingers, and went down into the aleroom.

  There weren’t that many guests at the Black Dragon that afternoon. A peddler with most of his wares spread out around him was having an early supper, and apart from him there were only two old men playing dice. The innkeeper was hardly rushed off his feet. Nevertheless, he seemed to have a strange difficulty in noticing me.

  “Excuse me,” I said. It did no good. Apparently, the dice game took up all his attention.

  “Excuse me!”

  A little louder this time. Loud enough that he felt he had to look at me.

  “Yes?” he said with no hint of friendliness in his manner.

  “Could I have a little water? And perhaps some bread?”

  “Where is your father?”

  “He went out. But he’ll be back soon.”

  “Right. You’ll just have to wait, then, till he gets here.”

  For one tiny moment I wished I had Sezuan’s ability to twist innkeepers and the like around his little finger. It would have been so satisfying to make this mean, unhelpful man bow and scrape. But then I thought of all the rest. The flute. Shadow. Being able to play people to death. And then I felt so miserable that I couldn’t even be bothered to argue with a stupid innkeeper.

  “Just a little water, please?” I asked. I was so terribly thirsty, and this was not exactly one of those nice places that had washstands and water pitchers in the rooms.

  “There’s a well in the square,” he said, with a jerk of his head toward the open door. “You can drink from that like the rest of us, can’t you?”

  There didn’t seem to be a lot else I could do. I moved past the old men and their dice game and walked through the door.

  The Black Dragon was in a steep and narrow alley, surrounded by unpainted walls and windows with crooked, sun-bleached shutters. Not the best part of town. The alley was cluttered with straw and donkey manure and other kinds of dirt. A little farther down I could see the square the innkeeper had been talking about. Steep streets led off in four directions, and in the middle was a single tree—a crooked old rowan tree. I found the well easily enough. Water came splashing through a stone gutter into a trough, and by the trough sat an old woman, knitting. I bent to drink from the water spout.

  “Hang on, dear,” said the woman. “Don’t forget the Prince’s penny.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  She peered up at me. “Oh, you’re not from around here,” she said.

  I shook my head. “No. I’m just here with—with my father. Passing through.”

  “Well, you see, dear, this is the Prince’s water. So you have to lay down a copper penny to drink it.”

  I had never heard of such a thing before. Not even in Sagisloc, where everything was so expensive, had they thought of taking money from you before they would let you have a drink from a town well.

  “But it’s running all the time,” I said. I couldn’t see that it made a difference if I drank a mouthful or two.

  “Well, dearie, that’s the law,” said the woman, switching needles. “And how else would a poor well-keeper like myself make a living?”

  “But I have no money,” I said.

  She looked at me across her knitting. “Not even a penny?”

  “No.”

  “Hmm. Go to the lake then, dear. You may drink there for free. But watch out for the Wyrm.”

  “The Wyrm?”

  “Where are you from, dearie? Everybody knows the Wyrm.”

  Not me. But I didn’t want to seem too odd, so I just nodded. “Oh, yes. The Wyrm.” And hurried on before she started asking me awkward questions about who I was and where I came from. And why we were here.

  I could see the waters of the lake glinting at the foot of another steep street. I didn’t like to get too far away from the Black Dragon, and Sezuan would probably be angry and perhaps uneasy if he came back and I wasn’t there. But I had no money for the well-keeper or the unfriendly innkeeper, and I was so thirsty it was giving me a headache.

  I was no more than halfway down the hill when a small barebellied boy came sprinting past me, howling his head off.

  “Maaamieee!” he cried. “Maaamie! There’s a dead man!”

  He never even noticed me, he was so busy crying.

  A dead man? I felt a chill in my chest and thought of Sezuan. Or had they found Shadow? I could see a small crowd of people down there on the lakeshore, gathered around something. I began to run. When I reached the crowd, I pushed through it, not caring what shoves I gave or took.

  “Look,” said someone, awe in his voice. “The Wyrm had him. But she spat him right out again!”

  The dead man lay on the docks, in a pool of lake water. His dark hair was plastered to his forehead and his cheeks, and he was so pale he looked nearly blue, except for the places where he was bleeding from a thousand cuts and scratches.

  It wasn’t Sezuan, and it wasn’t Shadow.

  It was Nico.

  DINA

  Not One Soul

  “Should we get the castle guards?” someone asked.

  “What do we want them for?” said someone else. “Poking their noses into things that don’t concern them.”

  “But he’s dead.”

  “So? He won’t complain, then, will he? We can always toss him back for the Wyrm to deal with.”

  Nico coughed.

  It wasn’t a very loud or forceful cough, just a small gurgly wet sound, but it made several of the onlookers start back.

  “Uuh! He’s not quite dead!” said a woman, as if Nico were a mouse her cat had caught.

  I touched Nico’s hand. It was cold, and I could well understand why people had thought he was dead. He didn’t look like a living man. I grasped his shoulder and tried to roll him onto his side. Mama had said that that was what you should do with people who were unconscious. There was another weak gurgle from Nico, and a slightly louder cough.

  “Where did he come from?” asked a woman with a large basket full of turnips. “Haven’t seen him before.”

  “He’s my cousin,” I quickly said. “He was supposed to meet me here. He—he must have fallen into the lake on the way.”

  The turnip woman looked at me, suspicion written large on her face.

  “They had the boat out this morning,” she said. “Them from the castle. For over an hour, before the Wyrm chased them back in. What do you suppose they were looking for?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it can’t have been my cousin, ’cause he’s never set foot inside the Sagisburg.”

  Come on, I thought. Believe me. And like Mama had taught us when we were ill to imagine that we were well again, I imagined that the turnip woman was nodding, she was convinced by my story, and in a moment she would stop taking any interest in us whatsoever….

  She shook her head as if a fly was bothering her. Then she settled her basket on her arm and turned to leave.

  Nico was no longer wearing his gray Foundation shirt, and that probably helped. He did not look like a grayling, or a prisoner for that matter. But one of the men in the crowd, a carpenter to judge from the tools in his belt, had caught sight of something else.

  “What’s that?” he said, pointing his hammer at some swollen red marks on Nico’s ankles. “Looks like bruises left by leg irons.” He looked straight at me. “How did your cousin come by those?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t think of a single good excuse that would explain away those marks. And I could not even imagine how to get the whole crowd of people gathered there to believe whatever I came up with.

  “Maybe we should get the castle guards after all,” said someone.

  The s
ound of the flute came so faintly at first that I think I was the only one to notice. It was another tune I had never heard before, a cheerful little thing that made me think of hot sausages and new bread, of the scent of good cooking and the cool damp feeling of a glass in your hand, a glass filled with something cold and sparkling.

  “Right, then, better see what the wife has cooking,” said the carpenter suddenly, apparently forgetting all about the bruising on Nico’s ankles.

  “Wonder what’s on at the Dragon tonight?” muttered someone else and straightened expectantly.

  And within moments the small crowd had scattered, and it was just me, Sezuan, and Nico on the docks.

  Sezuan lowered his flute.

  “Strange fish you’ve caught,” he said.

  “It’s Nico!”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know. I’ve seen him with you and your family.”

  “But if Nico is here and… and nearly drowned…” I could hardly make myself say it: “Then where is Davin?”

  Sezuan looked down at Nico, who still looked more dead than alive.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But if we can get a bit of life back into the young Ravens, we can always ask him.”

  Sezuan carried Nico up the steep alley to the Black Dragon. It shortened his breath quite a bit, and the last bit of the way I had to carry Nico’s legs. To the mean innkeeper he just said that Nico was his nephew whom he had bumped into in town.

  “Had a glass or two too many,” said Sezuan, giving the innkeeper a sort of man-to-man wink. “You know how it is. I’ll lend him my bed and let him sleep it off there.”

  And somehow the innkeeper failed to notice that Sezuan’s “nephew” was soaking wet and bleeding all over, and he even refrained from demanding extra payment now that there were three of us using the “room.”

  “Stay with him,” said Sezuan. “I think it might be a good idea to get some brandy inside him.”

  He disappeared down the stairs. I stared helplessly at Nico, trying to remember what Mama had said about nearly drowned people. Something about blowing into their mouths… but Nico was breathing on his own, even if he snuffled a bit. Something about keeping them warm, too. The cold water! That would be why he looked so bluish white. Like the belly of a dead fish.

  I started rubbing his hands and wrists to get some life back into them. He was so cold. What was taking Sezuan so long?

  “If I raise him,” said Sezuan, returning, “can you get a little of this down him?”

  He gave me a small clay jug. I pulled out the stopper and took a sniff. It smelled powerfully of liquor and juniper berries. Not brandy, that was certain. But whatever it was, I hoped it really was strong enough “to bring a dead man back to life,” as the Highlanders usually put it.

  At first it just ran out the corner of Nico’s mouth. But at our second attempt he swallowed. And then he began coughing in earnest. Sezuan pounded his back, many times, so hard that it sounded as if he was beating him. But it seemed to be what was needed, because Nico was coughing up water now, water and slimy fluid, and when the coughing finally eased, his breathing was much better.

  We took off his wet clothes and tried to get him warm and dry by rubbing him with my blanket, and after a while he started to look less like a dead fish and more like a human being. But he still hadn’t opened his eyes.

  And the way he looked… there was hardly a bit of him that wasn’t cut or scratched or bruised. He looked as if something very large had clawed and chewed at him.

  “They said the Wyrm had him,” I said to Sezuan. “What did they mean by that? What is the Wyrm?”

  “I told you there were monsters in the lake.”

  “You mean the Wyrm…?”

  He nodded. “I have never seen her myself. But plenty of people have. It is why people around here never sail on the lake, or fish in it. Except for the Prince’s own boat, which has some way of cheating her. But even they will usually only go out in the evening, when she is most placid.”

  “But do you think he—They said she had spat him back out!” I looked at Nico’s scratched and torn skin. How did lake monsters eat their prey? Did they swallow them whole, or did they chew?

  In that moment, Nico’s eyes finally flew open. His gaze flickered wildly from side to side, as if he couldn’t figure out where he was. Which wasn’t so odd if the last thing he remembered was the cold waters of the lake. Or worse—the belly of the Wyrm. I shuddered at the thought.

  “Nico,” I said.

  He turned his face, and for once he looked into my eyes. And kept looking for a long time.

  “Are you alive?” he finally asked.

  How that scared me. People didn’t say things like that if they were in their right minds, did they? Could the head take damage from too much cold, black lake water?

  “Yes,” I whispered. “And so are you. But you came very close to drowning.” I thought it best not to mention the Wyrm right off.

  Then Nico caught sight of Sezuan. It took him only a moment to figure out who he must be, despite the fact that he had never seen him before.

  “Blackmaster.”

  He made it a curse, an insult. And you could practically see his mind racing, trying to figure out what I was doing here, alone, with Sezuan.

  Sezuan didn’t say anything. He just inclined his head graciously, as if Nico had just greeted him with perfect courtesy.

  “Sezuan promised to help free you and Davin,” I said quickly. It was so confusing. After Shadow’s death I had made up my mind to hate Sezuan, and yet here I was, defending him to Nico.

  “Where is Davin?” asked Sezuan.

  A haunted look passed over Nico’s face. “I don’t know where he is now,” he said. “But I know where he was. And there is no time to lose if we are going to get him out of there safely.” Then his gaze grew so strange and inward-looking that I began to worry once more about head injuries. “Him,” he said, “and all the rest of them.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “The children. The prisoners. And all the others, all the scared and damaged ones, until there is not one single captive soul left in his whole damn castle.”

  It was as if his words hung there in the air, for a horribly long time. It was impossible. He had to know it was impossible. Why then did he say it, in that stubborn I-want-it-to-happen way, when he knew it couldn’t be done?

  “Nico,” I said, feeling frightened. “I just came to save my brother. And you.”

  “Yes,” he answered. “And that was bravely done. But, Dina, it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough at all.”

  Sezuan tried to talk some sense into Nico. They fought about it for almost an hour, until Nico’s eyes started closing of their own accord and he could barely speak. And even then he stuck to his impossible decision. I sat listening, feeling more and more miserable. I wanted them to stop fighting. I wanted us to free Davin and go home. That was difficult and dangerous enough, but at least it seemed to me to be just barely within reach of the possible.

  I didn’t understand what had happened to Nico. He who had not even been able to kill Drakan when he had the chance—how had he come to hate the Educators so much?

  “But what is it they do?” I asked in the end.

  “They destroy people’s souls,” he said. “They destroy the souls of children.”

  The last was clearly the worst as Nico saw it.

  “But how?” Because I simply couldn’t understand.

  Then he told us about the whipping post. And the key to wisdom. And the Hall of the Whisperers.

  “They destroy you from the inside,” he said quietly, “until there is no will or hope or dream left inside you. Some of the children, and I think even some of the prisoners, if you opened the door and said, you’re free, you can go now, they would still stay where they are. Because they no longer have the simple courage to do anything else. Because they can no longer even imagine anything else.”

  “But, Nico—how do you expect us to free th
em, then? If they can’t even help themselves. If they just… if they just call out for the nearest guard the minute they see us, because they are too scared to do anything else?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Not yet. But there has to be a way. I’ll just have to think of something.”

  “And how long might it be before the Young Lord has conceived of such a plan?” asked Sezuan in sour tones. “I merely mention it because even such lodgings as these are not free of charge. Nor are we free from danger. The only reason the castle guards are not already knocking at the Black Dragon’s door is because of me and my little Blackmaster tricks.” The last words were particularly acidic, because Nico had made no secret of his opinion of Sezuan and his serpent gift.

  “Don’t call me that,” said Nico.

  “What?”

  “Young Lord. I am no one’s lord, nor do I wish to be.”

  “But the title of hero and savior, now, that would suit His Lordship nicely?”

  That did it. They would now begin to fight again, I just knew it. And I couldn’t stand listening to another round of it.

  “Do we have a little money for bread?” I asked. “I’ll get it.”

  Sezuan looked at me, and his expression grew somewhat gentler.

  “You must be starving,” he said, fishing a few marks from his purse. “Here. See what our skinflint landlord will give us for this.”

  I trudged downstairs into the aleroom. It was crowded to the bursting point now, and no one paid me any notice. Everyone seemed to be looking at the same man. Something familiar about him, I thought. He appeared to be in the middle of a story.

  “Then there was a terrible storm. The wind was howling and roaring and whipping the lake waters into a froth.”

  I tried to catch the innkeeper’s attention, but this was even more difficult than it had been earlier in the day. He, too, was completely engrossed by the story the man was telling.

  “Well, it was pitch-dark down there in the belly of the Wyrm, so he lit himself a fire…”