Chapter 8: The Serpent Wakes

Saren woke at dawn with a pear stem in his fist.

He did not remember falling asleep.

He had not slept in three hundred and twelve years, not truly. He had only lain under the Hush with his eyes shut.

The strangeness of it made him sit up fast.

He was in Gwenith's cave, on the dirt floor, with a blanket over his legs.

Someone had put it there.

Eleven villagers lay in a heap around the dead fire.

Lowen Pask slept across the doorway, snoring through a split lip.

The old witch sat on her stone by the cave mouth with her pipe unlit and her eyes closed, and Saren knew she was awake.

And Ellory slept against the wall, six feet away, with his curly head on his arm.

Saren looked at him for a long time.

He had a dozen explanations for the scent. He had spent half the night turning them over.

The first was that it was a trick, a witch's trick, and the pears were part of it.

The second was that the Wold had made a boy to torment him.

The third he refused to think about.

The boy was nothing like Aldwyn. That was the trouble.

Aldwyn had been sharp, quick, and hard to impress.

He had stood at the mouth of Saren's cave at nineteen with a spear he did not know how to hold, and told a god that his scales needed polishing.

He had laughed at everything.

He had been afraid of nothing, and made up for it in cheek.

Ellory apologized to goats.

Ellory had pulled eleven iron bolts out of a monster, bare-handed, crying, saying sorry.

Saren turned the pear stem over and over in his fingers.

Aldwyn would have lit the bolts on fire and thrown them back. He would not have knelt in the blood.

And still, the boy had a crescent mark under the hollow of his throat, where the neck of his shirt had slipped.

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