Coiled By the Naga (Bred for the Rift #2)

Aude

“Take her.”

My father says it to his soup, doesn’t look up, reaches for the salt.

He owes more than the boat and the house and the leaking thatch, more than the twenty years of nets I hauled before light because his hands shook too early in the day to pull them.

The men in the doorway collect for the Alliance, and what the Alliance takes from a settlement with no coin left is an omega. He has one.

One of them takes my wrist. The other lifts my pack off its hook, packed the way I always leave it, ready for a tide that won’t wait. The door shuts, and I am the one walking, down the steps and onto the dock, while the man who made me sits and eats.

They take me south by water.

A skiff, low and broad. The two collectors talk over my head like I am ballast that might shift. I sit in the bow, because the bow is where you read what is coming, and reading water is the last thing my hands still do without asking anyone.

The current runs east under the hull, steady, the pull that stacks the big fish against the rocks at the turn of the tide. Kelp to the south, the heads of it rolling under the swell. I mark the set of it the way I have marked water since I was nine. None of it is mine to use. I am not here to fish.

On the second morning we pass a cove where the land has rotted.

The rock above the tideline wears a dark stain, bleeding down out of the cliff from somewhere inland, and the trees on the headland stand dead with their bark peeling off in sheets.

A gull rides the air over them, its feathers too dark, the wrong color all through, and it turns its head to keep the boat in view.

The sea under us doesn’t change. Whatever is eating the headland hasn’t crossed the waterline.

The garrison comes up on the cliff at midday and I stop watching the water to watch it.

It is cut into the rock, not built on it.

Arches opened straight out of the stone, windows hung over open water, stairs cut switchback down the face to a dock at the tideline.

Spray climbs the lowest windows and slides back.

Higher up, armored shapes stand at the arrow slits, and they are watching the land, not me.

This is a war post. They have not brought me somewhere safe.

They have brought me to the front and handed me to the thing that holds it.

The collectors set me on the dock, turn the skiff, and pull away without a word.

A quarter mile out the kelp line shows dark on the east current, where I would drop a net if a net were mine to drop.

My hands want the work. There is no work for them here.

There is only whatever is coming down the cliff toward me, because something is coming. I can hear it.

Not feet. A long, heavy slide, scale over stone, a weight that moves in pieces. He rounds the last turn of the stair and the sound makes sense.

From the waist up he is nearly a man, wide through the chest and shoulder, the skin gone to scale, the face built a hair too broad at the jaw and slit-pupiled as nothing human is.

Below the waist he is serpent, and the serpent keeps going, coils as thick through as my own body, scale a dark violet that runs to black along the ridge and pales at the belly where the light catches it and throws it back the color of a bruise three days old.

He pours down the last steps, stacks himself loop over loop, and lifts the man’s half of him up until I have to crane the whole way up to meet his eyes.

Then his scent reaches me, and somewhere below my own say-so my body starts answering it.

It isn’t a feeling that arrives. It is a feeling that is done to me.

It rolls off him on the wind off the cliff and goes into me through my skin and the back of my throat, and everywhere it touches, something gives.

My knees loosen. A wet heat opens low in my belly and drops lower, a wanting with no decision behind it.

I am standing on a dock I was sold onto, and my own body has started getting ready for him while I watch it happen, and I cannot make it stop.

I know what is happening. They warned me on the boat, in the flat voice you’d use to read off a tide table.

His kind scent a body and then answer it, and a body answers back whether it was asked or not.

The wanting is real and it is not mine, and holding both at once makes me want to put my hand through his face.

“Get it off me,” I say. It comes out rough. “Whatever you’re putting in the air. Get it off me.”

His tongue tastes the space between us, black, split. The row of pits along his jaw takes the light and holds it. “I can’t,” he says, and the voice is the one human thing left in him, low and almost kind, which is the worst of it. “It isn’t something I do. It’s something I am.”

“I’m Aude. I have worked this water my whole life.” I keep my voice level while my body runs hot for a creature I have known the length of a tide change. “Read whatever you want off me. You will anyway. But I want food and a place to wash two days of salt off before any of the rest of it.”

Whatever the pits tell him, he sits with it a moment. A loop of him has crept across the planks toward my feet. He looks down at it and draws it back, and the long muscle shakes with the cost of pulling it in.

“Sarn,” he says. “I hold this post. Come up.”

He climbs, the coils flowing up the stair ahead of him, and I follow a serpent up a cliff full of windows, each turn handing me the same sea from a new angle.

The stair passes the mouths of other rooms. His soldiers move in them, more of his kind, and when I pass, each one goes still and tastes the air and finds me, then looks away fast, like I am something they have been ordered not to want.

My room opens off the stair halfway up. Pale walls, a bed sized for me, a chest, a table, and an arch cut clean through to open water with no glass in it, the sea filling the whole frame end to end. The salt air moves through and keeps moving.

I go to the arch instead of the bed. The water from up here is the same water, the kelp a dark patch to the south, the current still running east. Out there a boat is working that line without me.

The woman who could read every foot of it stands in a room cut into a cliff because the man who should have crewed beside her sold her and stayed at his table.

I don’t cry over it. You cry when you’re wronged by someone who should have known better. He knew. He counted me to the coin. There is nothing in that worth salt water, and I am done spending it on him.

What is worth my attention is below me in the rock.

The thing that came down the cliff and turned my own body against me without once touching it.

The wanting he put in me hasn’t gone. It sits low and patient and waits, and somewhere under this floor he waits with it.

I press my hands to the cold stone sill and make myself look at the water, the only part of this place that was ever mine, and I try to want it more than I want him.

It doesn’t work. He has already shown me it won’t. So I stop trying to want the water more than I want him, and start working out what I will do about wanting them both.