The Serpent Bride

by Sara Douglass

  Ishbel was a tall woman, but she looked lost beneath all the layers.

  Maximilian tied the cloak around her shoulders. He needed to talk to Ishbel badly, but because of the turmoil of the day they had not yet discussed anything that had happened. Maximilian needed to confront Ishbel about the ring (why hadn’t he had the courage to do this weeks ago?), and about why murder seemed to be trailing her every step.

  Did it have anything to do with Elcho Falling? Was this part of the disaster that was eventually going to necessitate Elcho Falling’s reawakening?

  But for now, Maximilian felt tired and ill, and Ishbel looked even worse, and they were in mortal danger unless they could leave this palace and this city now.

  Talk would need to wait.

  They had gloves with them, but for the moment they kept their hands free so that Maximilian could hold one of hers in a firm grip, their fingers interlaced. Ishbel thought an observer might think it a result of affection, but in reality Maximilian needed close contact with her so that he could cloak her in his almost supernatural ability to move unseen through the dark.

  Ishbel remembered how he’d managed to stand utterly unobserved in her chamber for hours, watching her. Now she, too, enjoyed the same degree of disguise and it made her wonder about him, about the depths within him she had not yet bothered to plumb and, again, why it might be that the Great Serpent wanted so badly for her to be married to this man.

  Sirus had stationed guards, not directly outside their apartment but at the junction of the corridor that connected their apartment wing with the main part of the palace. This was the only means possible by which to leave their apartments, the windows being far too high from which to jump, and so Sirus had not needed to place guards closer.

  The guards were awake and alert: Sirus had no doubt considered the possibility that Maximilian and Ishbel might try to escape. As they neared the guards, creeping along the wall, Maximilian’s hand tightened briefly about Ishbel’s, and he pulled her a little closer to him.

  She felt a peculiar sensation creep over her: a heavy chill, oppressive, and yet humid. Ishbel’s chest constricted, and she had to struggle to draw in a breath.

  Maximilian stopped, watching her.

  Ishbel struggled for a moment or two—not merely to breathe, but to do so quietly—then felt her chest relax somewhat, and her breath come easier.

  Maximilian felt her relax, and he gave her a small nod and squeezed her hand again.

  Then he led her past the guards.

  Ishbel swore that two of them turned and looked at them directly. One of them blinked, but then he looked away again, while the other guard’s eyes slid over them without pausing.

  The cold grew denser, and Ishbel’s shoulders sagged with its weight.

  Again Maximilian’s hand tightened about hers, but then the next step they were past the guards and about a corner, and, for the moment, were safe.

  For an hour they crept through the palace and then the streets of the city. Ishbel’s heart hammered in her chest, not merely with the constant fear of discovery, but also with the weight of Maximilian’s oppressive concealment. She yearned for the spaces beyond the city, for any space, for anything that might give her relief from the pressure.

  By the time they neared the city gates Ishbel was stumbling with fatigue. Maximilian had tried to pick her up, but Ishbel resisted. She murmured at him irritably, then blinked. They were standing outside the gates. How had that happened?

  “Maxel?”

  “I am almost as weary as you, Ishbel. Come. Not far to go now.”

  “Where? Where? Gods, Maxel…”

  “This way.” Again he took her by the hand and led her along a path by the city walls, north, then along a path that branched off to the northeast.

  A period of time later—to Ishbel it felt as if half the night had passed, but she was sure Maximilian would claim the distance could have been measured in the space of a few minutes—they entered a small grove of trees.

  A man stepped forward—Egalion.

  “Maximilian! Thank the gods! We’d almost given up hope.”

  “We still have a way to go yet, Egalion,” Maximilian said. “Do you have the horses?”

  Egalion nodded behind him, and one of the Emerald Guard—Ishbel noted with some rancor that he looked as fresh as if he’d managed an entire night’s sleep in a feather bed—led forward two saddled horses.

  Maximilian looked at the horses, then at Ishbel.

  “I’ll carry Ishbel with me,” Maximilian said to Egalion. “She’s too tired to sit a horse by herself.”

  Ishbel wanted to protest, but Maximilian was right. She’d fall the instant they left her to balance herself, and the next moment Maximilian had mounted one of the horses, and Egalion was lifting her up to him, and Ishbel could finally succumb to the cold heaviness and lean against Maximilian, and sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Pelemere, the Central Kingdoms

  Maximilian wanted peace and he wanted quiet, and above all he wanted the opportunity to talk with Ishbel. They had been married some two months, and still she was a complete stranger to him—even more the stranger now, he felt, than when he’d first met her. Events were crowding in, and murders and wars piling up around them. What Maximilian had thought would be a simple business—the procuring of a bride—was now becoming ever more dangerously difficult by the hour.

  He was growing increasingly concerned about the escalating crisis between the Central Kingdoms and the Outlands. This, combined with the vision he’d experienced on the way to seduce Ishbel, solidified in Maximilian’s mind the certainty that Elcho Falling was about to wake.

  Ishbel knew far more than she had admitted to him thus far, and Maximilian didn’t think he could go on much longer, or farther, without prizing some of that knowledge out of her. She must have some of the answers locked within her. Not all perhaps, but many, certainly. She was of Persimius blood, she’d come from the Mountain at the Edge of the World, and she was somehow intimately connected with Elcho Falling.

  But, oh, what a complicated woman she was! Her refusal to discuss matters that held any discomfort for her frustrated Maximilian beyond measure, yet at the same moment Ishbel endlessly intrigued him. Her reserve challenged him, her reluctantly awakening sexuality inflamed his desire for her, while her secrets angered and discouraged him and added to his ever-growing anxiety about Elcho Falling and what he needed to do about it.

  At the grove of trees, Maximilian had given the Emerald Guard some brief orders, then, as was his wont, had turned his horse off in another direction, taking himself and Ishbel northwest. He was heading for one of the isolated woodsman’s huts about which Borchard of Kyros had told him.

  An hour after dawn, the new day’s light almost lost amid the deepening snowstorm, Maximilian carried Ishbel inside the hut.

  She slept through most of the day, waking only in the very late afternoon when Maximilian kicked open the door and stumbled inside, his arms laden with wood.

  “Maxel? Where are we?”

  “A woodsman’s hut deep in a forest northwest of Pelemere.” Maximilian dropped the wood onto the heap by the stove, removed his outer clothing, shook it free of snow, then stood before the fire, warming his hands.

  “Why?” she said, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and sitting up.

  “Because we needed to get away from Sirus.”

  “And the Emerald Guard? Garth Baxtor? Egalion? Lixel?” She dragged a blanket about her shoulders.

  “They are secreting themselves deeper in the woods.”

  “But we’re here. By ourselves.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Maxel…why?”

  “I needed to talk to you without the others about.” I need to wrest out into the open some of the secrets crammed into that beautiful head of yours.

  He could see her withdraw, see caution and anxiety shut down her face.

  “And because I wanted time with you alone,�
� Maximilian continued, “just to know you. You are my wife, and I your husband, and yet we are strangers to each other.”

  “That is not unusual in high marriage, surely.”

  He shrugged and moved to a small cupboard, from which he removed some dried provisions. “Hungry?”

  She answered him with her own shrug, which Maximilian chose to interpret as an affirmative, and so he tossed some dried peas and beans and herbs into a pot of water and set it to the stove to simmer. “I am afraid that this king and queen shall have to eat as peasants,” he said.

  She gave a small smile at that. “I’m sure that it will be better fare than what Sirus would serve us in his dungeons.”

  Maximilian chuckled, cutting thick slices from a loaf of very stale bread and scooping out a portion of their centers so that they could be used as trenchers for the soup.

  Ishbel had wandered over to the stove, still wrapped in a blanket, and was now looking curiously at the soup. “How did you learn to cook?”

  “I often tend for myself.” He nodded at the hut’s basic interior. “In Ruen I abandon my kingly duties from time to time and spend a few days by myself in a woodsman’s hut, similar to this, in the forests to the north of the city.”

  “Why? Why the need to be by yourself?”

  “Because I find it impossible to be surrounded by faces all the time. Because I find my own company healing.”

  “Then it must be aggravating for you to have me here, now.”

  “I could have sent you on with Egalion, but I chose to bring you with me.”

  “Ah yes, to interrogate me.”

  “Ishbel, sit down at the table with me.”

  She hesitated, but finally did as he asked, taking a bench on the opposite side of the table.

  “Ishbel, what do you think about the murders? Evenor, and then Allemorte, yesterday.”

  “I don’t know anything about them, Maximilian. Why ask me?”

  “I am asking for your thoughts, not for a detailed explanation.”

  She gave another small, disinterested shrug, and would not meet his eyes. “I have no thoughts on them. I was so isolated in Serpent’s Nest that I am naive in the ways of the outside world.”

  Naive in the ways of the world. Maximilian really didn’t know what to make of that. In many ways she was—that she’d been terribly isolated he had no doubt—but in other ways Ishbel appeared as old as the very land itself.

  “Ishbel,” he said gently, “yesterday a man fell dead at our feet, murdered with poison. How did it happen? Who did it?”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “I wasn’t accusing you, Ishbel, but, oh, murder is starting to follow you. Why?”

  She dropped her eyes, and fiddled with a nonexistent particle on the tabletop.

  “Ishbel?” Maximilian said as gently as he could. “Please…”

  Again, a shrug. “I don’t know, Maximilian. I don’t.”

  He reached over and took her left hand. “Ishbel, all I want to do is to get home safely, with you and with our child. But at the moment I very much fear we’re not going to get there, not safely or not ever. I hold you at night, and feel you drifting ever farther away from me. I want a marriage, Ishbel. I want you. I want a family. And I want to know why you were the target of that assassin yesterday, not Allemorte.”

  Her hand was very cold and still in his, and Maximilian wondered if that coldness and stillness extended all the way to her heart.

  “Perhaps it was Sirus,” Ishbel said. “He doesn’t like me. He doesn’t like any Outlanders.”

  “It wasn’t Sirus. There was magic involved yesterday, and darkness swirling all about us. When my ring—”

  “I don’t want to talk about the ring. Not any ring.”

  Maximilian resisted the urge to pick something up and smash it against the wall. Instead, he contented himself with tightening his grip about her hand. “Ishbel, please—”

  “I don’t want to talk about the rings!”

  “Well, I do. For all the gods’ sakes, Ishbel, there is nothing to be afraid of about two chatty rings!”

  She looked at him then, and Maximilian’s heart turned over in his breast. He’d never seen anyone look so lost, or so afraid.

  “I’ve heard them before,” she said, so softly that Maximilian had to lean forward to catch her words, and even then he wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.

  “What? The rings?”

  “The whispers.”

  She was trembling now, and Maximilian slid around to her side of the table, sitting beside her on the bench and wrapping her in his arms. All his anger of a moment earlier was gone.

  “Tell me,” he said, very softly.

  She was silent a long time, and Maximilian did not think she would answer.

  Then, just as he was about to sigh and stand, she began to speak.

  “When I was eight a plague came to my family’s house.”

  Maximilian said nothing, but tightened his arms about her slightly, settling her more closely against his body, resting his cheek against the top of her head.

  “My family all died within a day. Everyone in the house died, save me.”

  “The plague spread fast,” Maximilian said.

  “Yes. Too fast. The people of Margalit barricaded the house, refusing to allow me out in case I carried plague with me. They hammered shut all doors and windows, and did not listen to my pleas. I begged, over and over, beating at the closed door, but they turned their hearts against me.”

  “Oh, Ishbel…”

  “It lasted forever. At least that’s how it felt to me. Aziel later told me it was a month. I tried to kill myself. I thought that was the only way I’d escape. I rolled in the vileness excreting from my mother’s body and…and…”

  “Ishbel…sweetheart…”

  That endearment, combined with the closeness and comfort of his arms and body, broke down Ishbel’s final barriers.

  She shuddered, leaning in as close to Maximilian as she could. “One day my mother’s corpse began to whisper to me.”

  Maximilian stiffened, horrified. “Whispered?”

  “It would not stop, Maxel. I ran all about the house, and it whispered and whispered, and I could not escape it! It spoke with the same voice as did the rings. Maxel…”

  Maximilian could hardly force the words out. “What did the whispers say, Ishbel?”

  “They told me…to…to…prepare, prepare, for the Lord of Elcho Falling shall rise again.”

  Maximilian froze. Nothing worked. His heart appeared to have stopped, his brain could not manage a single coherent thought, he could not force his breath in or out of his lungs.

  The Lord of Elcho Falling shall rise again.

  Even though he’d been steeling himself for this moment, the sudden, absolute confirmation of his worst fears threw Maximilian into utter denial.

  “No,” he finally whispered, “I don’t believe you.”

  She tore herself out of his arms.

  “Then stay away from me if you cannot believe me! Stay away!”

  The next moment she had thrown open the door and had run outside, clad in nothing but her underclothes and a blanket.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Pelemere, the Central Kingdoms

  She struggled through the snow, hardly aware of the cold penetrating her body, the ice about her bare feet, or of the fact that she had lost her blanket.

  No. I don’t believe you.

  She sobbed, hating him. How could she have told him of the whispers? What a fool she was—to have believed his lie of comfort, only to hear him say, No. I don’t believe you.

  She had never told anyone. Never. Not even Aziel. What had possessed her to tell Maximilian?

  She heard a step behind her and, not looking, lunged to one side, desperate to avoid him. She stumbled, her breath catching in her throat as she fell, and the next moment she was held tight in his arms, so tight she could almost not breathe, and she heard him sob as well, and kiss her face and forehea
d.

  “I believe you, Ishbel. I believe you. Gods, I am sorry. It was such a shock, what you said. Come away inside now, come, I have you. I am sorry, so sorry…”

  He kicked the door closed behind him and bore her straight to the fire, not letting her go, holding her as tight as he dared, saying he was sorry over and over and over.

  “You have been through horror, sweetheart,” he murmured against her hair, “no wonder you fought against the ring, why you will not wear it. It must truly have terrified you. Oh…” He cuddled her close, kissing her face and neck over and over, relaxing only once he felt her relax. “Are you warm enough now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please don’t hate me for what I just said, Ishbel. Please.”

  “I don’t hate you, Maximilian,” Ishbel said, meaning it. She had not felt this safe in years. Twenty years, to be precise, since her mother had last held her, and told Ishbel how much she loved her.

  “It was what you told me what the whispers had said, about the Lord of Elcho Falling rising—”

  “You have heard of him?”

  There was a slight hesitation. “There are legends in which he is mentioned.”

  “Then I do not want to hear them,” she said. “I hate him. Over the years I’ve had visions of him, and always I know that if ever he catches me, then he will wrap my life in unbearable pain and sorrow, for pain and sorrow trail in the darkness at his shoulders like a miasma. I know he will ruin my life. He will ruin the world.”

  She stopped, leaning against him, finally allowing herself to feel comfortable, to feel safe, and not understanding his shocked silence.

  “It is all right,” she whispered, taking one of his hands and cradling it against her breast. “I hate him as well.”

  Maximilian did not speak for a long time. “What do you want, Ishbel? Really want?” he said finally.

  “To go home to Serpent’s Nest,” she said. “To go back home. To be safe from the Lord of Elcho Falling. I will only feel safe from him there.”