Beastward Academy: Reborn, I Claimed My Sister's Serpent novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: How Many Times

I put my hand on the last black band.

The tail twitched under my palm.

The huge head lifted out of the water at the other end of the cave, and one sea-green eye opened.

He knew from my face.

He poured back up into a man in the shallows, kneeling, the casts dripping.

"Elowen."

"Eight," I said.

He closed his eyes.

"How many times, Morvran?"

He didn't pretend. I'll give him that.

"Eight," he said.

"Eight times you swallowed this year."

"Yes."

"And I died."

"Every time." His voice was very even, the way you talk to a horse that might bolt. "On the altar. On Rift Night. Every time."

I sat down on a rock because my legs wouldn't hold me.

The water dripped. The lamp hissed.

"Tell me," I said. "All of it. You promised me every word."

He came up out of the water and sat on the sand across from me, not close.

"The first time, I didn't wake to you," he said. "I went to the pits. I was a fighting beast in a collar for nine months. I heard on midsummer night that a feeder had died on the headland. A Tremayne girl. I broke the collar and got there at dawn."

He looked at his hands.

"You were already cold."

I couldn't speak.

"So I swallowed the year. And I woke in my stone on Waking morning, and your sister refused me again, and I went to the pits again. That time I broke out in spring. I reached the headland an hour too late."

"And the next time?"

"Halfway up the cliff. He burned me off it." He touched the white band at his temple. "Five more times after that. Closer every year. Never close enough."

"And the last time?"

"The last time I got to the altar while you were still breathing. I held your face. That's the life you remember."

"Why don't I remember the others?"

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