55. Sybilla
Chapter 55
Sybilla
K rait hadn’t given me trouble about immediately wanting to meet the beasts of Sahlmkar after we were wed. If anything, he regarded me with adoration for it.
We did not have the luxury of time. The scorching dust-coated air burned my lungs as we met the afternoon sun outside the Temple of Shadows. Not even the harsh climate and oppressive heat could shake the lightness in my step; not even the pain in my joints would ruin my wedding day.
I ignored the steady throb of pain in my ankles. I’d take my tonic when we got back to the flat before it got any worse.
I would be fine.
As though sensing my worry, Krait reached into the satchel to retrieve a green vial and handed it to me.
Sighing in relief, I said, “How did you know?”
“Your brow pinches a bit, and your gait grows stiffer. You’re sure you want to do this today?” he asked.
I downed most of the vial and teased, “I deal with you daily—how much more monstrous could these beasts be?”
Huffing a laugh, Krait said, “Sources save us. We’ve been married not ten minutes.”
We stepped carefully around textile tents and avoided collision with carriages on the narrow dirt-coated cobblestone street.
“Where are they kept?”
“They lie in the tombs below the city.”
“And now...you want me to wake them up? Just like that?” I asked uneasily.
He took my hand. When he spun the wooden ring on my finger, warmth flooded me. For once, when I had approached that altar, there had been no hesitation—no inclination to run.
“Just like that.” He quirked a brow. “Frightened?”
“Of course not,” I scoffed the lie.
We passed a barren block of row houses with boarded windows and cracked foundations. Sahlmsaran guards stood watch at each end of the streets, and a few trailed us wherever we went, keeping their distance at Krait’s request.
Krait led me into an alley just behind the row houses; the narrow path was devoid of any foot traffic. Barely any light reached the cobblestones here, and the shade was a reprieve from the sun.
At the end of the alley, an iron door stretched at least twenty feet tall.
When we reached the entry, Krait placed his free hand just above the doorknob. He whispered a charm in Brennac. I reminded myself to tell him later that I’d like to learn his ancestors’ language.
After he spoke the charm, gears turned within the door, making an awful grating noise. We backed away, and the door swung open.
It was pitch black inside—a void reminiscent of Krait’s Shadows. He stepped forward and took a torch off the wall. With another whispered charm, it sputtered alive with flame.
“Can Source-wielders control any Source?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Small charms here and there are possible, like that one. It’s much harder, nearly impossible, to hold and wield other Sources than one’s own; it takes too much energy. Power isn’t a bottomless well. At some point you do reach an end, a moment when you can’t go on. Even for you—that is a universal rule.”
With the flame he held, he lit more sconces on our way down a stone stairway.
“Asterie was able to light all the sconces at once in the Luz crypts,” I challenged him.
He smirked. “I don’t deal in light. I’m weakest at charms that require fire or sun. She also had a piece of Fen’s magic too.”
We continued to step into the belly of the tombs below Sahlmkar. The stone walls around us were dark gray, and the air grew sticky and too warm. It smelled of soil, mold and dust. When we reached the bottom, the tunnel forked in four possible directions.
“Oh, joy. A maze,” I mused.
He brushed back cobwebs. “Purposefully so.”
I tried to remember which direction we went—left, left, right, straight, left, right. The winding path had so many turns that I grew dizzy, and my anxiety mounted. Finally, we reached another door. This one was as large as the entry but a sooty color and carved with a pattern reminiscent of the Shadows often ebbing from Krait.
“Was Desidero an ally to Isolde?” I asked, finding it oddly comforting to think our ancestors may have aligned once.
“Desidero was thought to have been in love with her daughter Isleen.” His words were darkly alluring. I rose to my tiptoes to brush a kiss across his bottom lip.
“Of course he was,” I mused as Krait’s hand dug into my hair to steady me.
“As thrilling as it would be to take you here, we need to focus, my Queen.”
I returned to flat feet. “Fine,” I huffed.
Krait leaned down to kiss me once more, before he whispered another Brennac charm to unlock the door. It opened to a large cave.
The dark lava stone domed high above us. When Krait began to light torches around the perimeter, I finally saw them . They towered above us, their vicious intentions set in stone.
They had obsidian scales that covered their long lengths and legless, snake-like bodies. Their curved faces resembled the angular shape common in the rattling serpents of this realm. Feathered wings stretched high above their serpent heads. They were utterly terrifying to behold.
Any prior confidence drained from me.
“Giant flying snakes? You’ve got to be kidding,” I whispered mostly to myself.
Krait looked over his shoulder at me as he lit another torch. “Don’t tell me you’re getting cold feet about this,” he said.
I shot him a pointed glare. “No, I am just unsure how I’m meant to control something so...horrifying.”
Krait stepped behind me. “There is only one way to find out. We start with this one,” he said as he turned me by the shoulders toward the largest. “This is Lymrasi—their leader. We’ll speak with her first. It’s believed that if she accepts you, the others will too.”
Before I could think twice, Krait stepped behind me and urged me forward with his front against my back. He placed my hand on a giant scale of the beast’s nose. He kissed the top of my head as an amber glow shone bright, which made me stumble into his chest.
I squinted against the glare. Life seemed to return to Lymrasi’s dusty stone scales, and they glimmered black against the lamplight. Krait pulled me back a few paces as the serpent wound and stretched.
He kept me between him and the beast. Motherfucker.
“Now? We’re waking her now? ” I gasped as the serpent licked the air, still coming out of its stone sleep.
“If not now, when?” he whispered in my ear. I would kill him if we made it out of this cave alive.
A low hiss escaped the beast’s mouth before it stretched its neck toward the ceiling and shook it side to side with a lethal grace. When the serpent’s double lids lifted, a slitted pupil of gold stared right at me.
Luckily, I’d relieved my bladder back at the falls; otherwise, I’d have surely pissed myself for the second time in front of Krait.
She hissed out, “Who holdsss the power to wake me?” Lymrasi’s tongue tasted the air in front of my nose.
I held my breath, cold sweat building on the back of my neck despite the cave’s sticky heat.
“I-I—” I stammered. Krait squeezed my shoulders tight. “I am Sybilla Wymark, Queen of the Central Corridor and the Last Daughter of Isleen.”
Lymrasi tilted her neck as her wings flapped twice, blowing back the curls from my face. “Ahhhh, yesss. And with an heir of Desssidero. How prophetic. But are you worthy?”
Her gaze beat down on me as her mouth opened just enough to reveal venom dripping from her fangs.
She smelled of mourning and death—not putrid or rotten but like the very essence of loss. The feeling tugged at my mind, wanting me to think of all I’d personally lost. It was like a mental attack on my very soul.
It took a great deal of energy to push Lymrasi out of my thoughts, and I strained to ward both my mind and Krait’s. “Ahhh and she lovesss him too. It is a shame that Caym cursssed me to kill his brother’s kin,” she hissed, and coiled back as though about to strike us.
“No!” I ordered with a raised hand, and Lymrasi’s neck halted mid-swing. “You answer to me, not Caym. I seek your help against him.”
Krait said nothing but held onto my unraised arm and let me press into him, steadying me. We stood our ground against the beast of nightmares, and she sized us up as though we were mice to be swallowed.
But she did not strike.
I’d stopped her.
“Ssso you can control me. What reasonsss do you have for needing my help?” Lymrasi asked.
“We require reinforcements against Caym’s rise. I’ve come to offer you freedom in exchange for your help,” I said. The beast coiled its long tail around itself.
“I do not bargain,” she answered. “That is Death’s way.”
Setting these beasts free seemed unwise anyway.
“Then what will it take to gain your favor in the impending war against him?”
“I only require one thing. Then me and my children will help you,” Lymrasi said as she licked the air.
“Name it,” I challenged. Dealing with conditions had always been my strong suit.
She hissed, “That when the time comesss, you will not hesitate to defeat him. No matter the cossst.”
I looked over my shoulder. Krait’s brow furrowed, but he nodded.
“Deal. How do we wake the others?”
“Only I can do that. Come to me when Isssolde’s power hasss been restored to Caym.”
A lump formed in my throat. They would not help until our doom was imminent.
“Fine…We will be back,” I said. “Do not leave here. Am I understood?”
Lymrasi whispered as she slunk deeper into the cavern, “Yesss, young Isssleen. We are now indebted to one another. But you are on borrowed time.”
Her words made me shiver.
I’d make riskier deals with beasts of nightmares if it meant Caym never got the chance to destroy our realms.
I hoped we were not too late to fight him, to return him to a state of sleep until the next black moon.
On our walk back to the flat, Krait grabbed my hand and pulled me aside. He pressed me against the wall of a shop just a few blocks from our destination.
“Can we consummate our marriage right here?” he asked. “Something about watching you command a giant snake has gotten me all sorts of eager.”
I smirked and swatted half-heartedly at him. “Someone will see. There are guards right over there.”
“Let them.”
He leaned down, and when his mouth took mine with feverish indulgence, my knees went weak. Kissing my husband here, open to prying eyes, open to whatever judgment was dealt us, felt too good not to be wicked.
There may have been a man slinging leathers into a cart yards away. The sound of a chime might have meant someone opened the shop door feet away from us.
None of it mattered, because I was drunk on a man I never should have fallen for, but had anyway. I moaned into his mouth as he reached down and pulled my thigh up around him, seeming intent on exactly what he’d asked for.
“My King.” The sound of clanking armor grew louder. Not now. I was too consumed in his kiss to be stopped.
He parted from me, staring into my eyes with swollen lips and mussed hair. “When we get back to the flat, we’re finishing this,” he promised.
“My King,” the soldier repeated, and Krait righted me on the ground. We turned to face the disorderly group of soldiers that stood at the corner. They were winded and huffing.
“Officer Ryn requires your help at the prison. He requested that you come alone.”
A young soldier approached with a note, and though I couldn’t make out the words, I recognized Ryn’s handwriting. I looked between the soldier and my husband. “I stay by your side.”
Krait scanned Ryn’s note. “I promise when I determine it’s safe, I will come get you,” he reasoned. “If Ryn thinks it unwise, trust him. Please.”
The lust of our prior moment of wild desperation had passed and had been replaced with the stone facades of two rulers negotiating.
“I’ll determine whether it is unwise. Hand it over.”
He passed me the note.
Something is very wrong with the prisoners here. They’ve grown rapidly ill. Come quickly. For the love of all things good, keep Sybilla away in case it’s contagious.
“I’m coming with you,” I demanded again.
He took both of my hands and brought them to his lips to kiss the palm of each. “Please stay in the flat until I understand what’s happening. The last thing I can handle is losing you to some mortal illness that could have been avoided, Sybilla.”
If I pressed him, he would break. But logic won out. “You come right back.”
Krait’s head dipped so he could whisper into my ear. “Of course. I’m very motivated to pick up where we left off.” Then he planted a kiss just below my ear that made my knees weaken again. Heat spread across my cheeks as the guards looked away.
“Okay,” I agreed, still hating the idea of parting from him.
He passed me the satchel and then he turned his attention to the guards and said, “See her safely back to the flat.”