The Sleepless

Prologue

The sun was rising, and the serpents had been screaming all night.

The girl had lain awake listening to them, unable to sleep, just like every other citizen of Addersport.

She’d pushed her dormitory bed right up against the windowsill, so she could hear them especially clearly; their voices were high and eerie, a sound like a wet finger dragged across glass.

Addersport sat next to and within the sea; waterways invaded the city like veins through a leaf, and the smaller sea serpents had swum up these convenient thoroughfares until every canal glinted with scales of blue, green, yellow, and black.

To cross a bridge in Addersport these days was to run the risk of feeling a set of serrated jaws close around your ankle.

The footpaths that ran along each waterway were positively lethal. The city was under siege.

That morning over breakfast, the orphanage was rife with the rumour that the city officials had brought in an actual magpie to deal with these rogue monsters—a mage, dedicated to one of the twelve gods, able to ask a boon and banish the serpents.

The girl looked into her bowl of porridge and considered: which god?

The Hooded Crow, perhaps. The god of death could turn all the serpents into so much seagull chow with a wink.

Or the Pack, the god of the chase. They could bless the city’s whaling ships with the ability to hunt the beasts.

Outside, the screaming continued.

In the afternoon, while the children were packed into the dusty school room for their lessons, a group of men in city guard uniforms arrived, their faces closed and grim.

Sitting at her desk by the door, the girl couldn’t hear what passed between the guards and the bursar of the orphanage, but she caught a glimpse of a small bag being handed over.

It looked heavy, and it clinked when the bursar put it in his pocket.

When the guards left and the bursar turned away from the front door, he glanced up and caught sight of the girl.

To her surprise, his normally sallow face flushed crimson, and he quickly moved out of sight.

The girl, staring at the dusty floor where he’d been standing, felt a cold tremor move through her.

Something was happening, and it wasn’t good.

So when they came for her, she wasn’t particularly surprised.

It was the middle of the afternoon by then, and the orphans were busy at work, darning clothes for pennies.

A boy and a young woman came into their work room and stood for a moment, surveying the children.

The pair were so richly dressed that, as one, the orphans fell silent.

They rarely saw visitors at all, let alone ones in burgundy silk and golden thread.

The boy was perhaps only thirteen or fourteen years old, and he was handsome in a cold sort of way, with black hair pulled back from his face in a braid.

His eyes were hazel, almost tawny coloured, and they seemed to hungrily consume everything they looked at.

The woman looked nearer twenty years old, with brown skin and hair hidden under a swatch of embroidered cloth.

In the centre of their chests they both wore a solid gold pin in the shape of a lion; rubies spilled from its claws like blood.

The girl, who at twelve summers was the oldest in the room, stood up from her pile of cloth. Her heart was beating too fast and the air felt thick with danger. Meet it head on , she thought.

‘Who are you?’ she asked. There were no staff present. The bursar had made himself curiously absent. ‘What do you want?’

‘Impertinence,’ said the woman, although without any heat. If anything she looked bored. ‘Can’t you see who you’re talking to?’

‘Acolytes of the Bloody Claw,’ the girl said, her eyes drawn to the lion pin. She could feel the other children staring at her. She cleared her throat. ‘That’s my guess. But what does the Bloody Claw want with orphans?’

‘She’s clever, this one,’ said the boy. He half turned to the young woman. ‘You know Mother likes it best when they are clever, Dalesh.’

The girl blinked. Could these two be brother and sister?

The woman grunted. ‘ What use is a sacrifice if you’re not really losing anything?

’ The words had the tone of something she had spoken many times before.

‘Our lord likes His food to plead eloquently as well as squeal deliciously.’ Dalesh sighed.

‘But she told us to look them all over. Mother has entrusted us with an important task.’

‘Ah, it’s fine.’ The boy waved his hand, swatting away the woman’s concerns like flies. ‘I’ve got a feeling about it. And you know that Mother trusts my feelings.’

The woman grimaced. ‘Fine.’

‘It’s decided then.’ The boy smiled—a sharp, brittle thing with no warmth in it at all—and gestured impatiently at the girl. ‘Come along, you. We don’t have all day. You’re coming with us.’

The girl took a step backwards. Around her, the other orphans had all drawn back, as though afraid that they might catch her fate from being too close.

‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’ She balled her hands into fists. ‘The bursar can’t just sell children. This isn’t some backwater village where you can wander in and do what you want. This is Addersport.’ She took a breath. ‘You’ll have to drag me out.’

The boy sighed.

‘If you insist.’

Out under the summer sun, the air rang with the sound of serpents.

Members of the city guard dragged the girl through the narrow streets, taking care to avoid the main waterways until they came to the Tumble Stone, a huge piece of natural rock that thrust up from the seabed at the very edge of Addersport.

Over hundreds of years the city had built its port around the Stone.

They had carved steps into its side and a smooth platform at its summit.

Once, the elders of the city had used the Tumble Stone to watch for pirates and raiders; on special occasions people were married there, and flowers were thrown into the water on festival days.

When the girl arrived at the Stone, it was surrounded by a great crowd of city folk.

They were quiet, watching either her or the figure that stood at the summit of the Stone.

The girl could barely make it out herself.

The bright sun stood behind the person, whoever it was, carving them into a thing of shadow.

‘What’s going on?’ She’d asked the question all the way through the streets, in varying tones of outrage and fear, and with every curse word she knew thrown in, but none of the guards had responded. Now, the boy with the cruel eyes and the woman called Dalesh took her from them.

‘You’ve been given a very great honour today,’ said the boy.

He took hold of her arm and began walking her up the stone steps.

He was taller than the girl and had little trouble moving her.

Dalesh walked on the other side, her grip even tighter.

‘You will shortly meet Mother Maura, one of the most celebrated mages in all of Tlevrae. Aren’t you lucky? ’

‘A magpie?’ The girl threw herself backwards, trying to wriggle out of their hands. ‘You’re taking me to a bloody magpie ?’

Dalesh squeezed her arm viciously. ‘You don’t want to say that in front of Mother,’ she said evenly. ‘She doesn’t approve of that particular nickname. You’ll show some respect or you’ll regret it.’

‘Although,’ added the boy, half laughing, ‘you won’t regret it for very long.’

By now they had come to the top of the Tumble Stone.

The sea stretched away in front of them, a deep dark blue in the very distance but a churning white and green below the stone.

The figure came forward and a pale hand with red fingernails reached out and closed around the girl’s wrist. She felt all resistance leave her body. She was powerless here.

‘This is the best you two could do? A scruffy little ragamuffin? It’s barely a snack for our lord.’ The woman’s voice was rich and deep, like the purr of some great, lethal animal. ‘To give Him anything less than what He desires is dangerous. I shouldn’t have to say this to you.’

The girl summoned all her strength to lift her head and look at the woman whose fingernails were digging into her flesh.

She was tall and imposing, with high cheekbones and a vast amount of auburn hair that cascaded down her back, both loose and bound in plaits and braids.

A single streak of white began at her temple and was lost in the larger chaos.

She wore scarlet robes, and across her forehead there was a golden band with a single ruby claw set in its centre. Her eyes were a sharp yellowish green.

‘She is the right choice,’ the boy was saying, his voice full of confidence.

‘I’m quite sure of it, Mother. She’s bold, clever, just brimming with piss and vinegar.

Plenty of fight in her. If she’d been left to live her life, she certainly would have made something of it, and won’t our lord find that delicious?

All that potential, offered up to Him. It’ll be more than enough to fuel this spell. ’

‘I will be the judge of that,’ Mother Maura snapped, dragging the girl over to the edge of the Tumble Stone. Below them, the sea serpents churned the water in a hungry frenzy, their shining hides flashing gold and silver in the sun.

‘You see them, child?’ Mother Maura peered over the edge, her lips pursed.

‘Dirty jih beasts. Filthy monsters. They’ve done nothing but disrupt this city’s trade for weeks.

Not to mention the number of lives lost. Eleven dead, I believe.

’ The woman grinned, revealing white, neat teeth.

‘Eleven lives used for nothing more than to line a wyrm’s belly.

A waste. But you, darling girl, you get to save the city.

Your life won’t be a waste. When the serpents pull you to pieces, your life will be devoured and savoured by my lord, and then He will give me a crumb of His power to banish them. ’

The girl opened her mouth, willing the words to form on her tongue.

‘Let… me… go.’

Mother Maura chuckled. She took hold of the front of the girl’s shirt and shoved her so close to the edge that she could feel the emptiness at her back.

The mage leaned forward, her arm held out straight, and the girl trembled all over.

All the mage had to do was let her go, and she would be gone, dropped into the sea like a pebble lazily cast into a pond.

She looked behind Mother Maura to see the acolytes watching closely.

Dalesh looked faintly pained, as though the whole thing was distasteful, but the boy was watching raptly, his hazel eyes eager.

‘My Lord the Bloody Claw,’ Mother Maura was saying, her voice lifted above the roar of the sea and the screaming of the serpents. ‘Take this life of potential, feast on it, and grant me a boon.’

There was a shimmer around the woman, something like the heat haze on a road on a very hot day. Maura’s eyes flashed like a cat’s, and the girl had a fleeting sense of something else being there with them; something huge and powerful, that reeked of blood.

‘What’s your name, girl?’

‘Elver.’ For a moment the girl wondered if speaking her name would save her somehow; if once she was named the mage would show her mercy.

The woman laughed.

‘Goodbye, Elver.’

Mother Maura let go, and the girl fell into the sea.

There was an awful, yawning sense of nothing, and then she struck a mass of hard, cold bodies.

For a moment it was as though the sea itself had vanished; she had fallen instead into a country made of serpents, a solid land of hissing and scales like battered silver coins.

Elver saw her sandal come off, saw blood in the water, and then a pain like nothing she had ever imagined seized her around the midriff.

A huge, yellow sea serpent had its jaws around her and was sinking its long, barbed teeth into her flesh.

There was no breath or room to scream. Another moment and she was tugged down, under the black sea water and the writhing bodies, the dappled light of the sun speeding away from her, the human world left far behind.

I’m dead , she thought, I’m dead .

And then something else began to flow into her veins, something cold and dark that ate up her own red blood and replaced it with poison.

The girl’s eyelids fluttered once or twice, a strange hiccuping tremor that moved through her whole body as her final breath left her.

When she opened her eyes again, the inner life of the sea was revealed in a flickering corona of colours, and the vast head of the yellow serpent hung before her.

When the creature spoke, its voice rang inside her head like a bell.

Welcome home, poison child.