The Village Fell, So the Serpent God Woke and Kept Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Two Rules

Iron-collared dogs hunt them through the Wold. Ellory sets two rules for the god, and Saren burns a bridge on his word. Gwenith waits at her cave.

"Which way?" Ellory said.

"North. The hounds are south." Saren turned a full circle and frowned. "No. The trees have moved."

"The trees haven't moved. You've been asleep three hundred years."

"Then they have moved."

Ellory grabbed his sleeve and pulled him up the gorge path.

Saren came, because his legs still shook and the tunic hung off one shoulder.

Nobody had pulled him anywhere in so long that he forgot to refuse.

They climbed through the roots with the barking coming up fast behind them.

"Stop," Ellory panted.

"The dogs will not stop."

"I don't mean stop running. I mean stop, I need to say something."

Ellory ducked under a branch.

"Two rules," he said. "If you're coming with me."

"I am not coming with you. You are coming with me."

"Fine. Two rules."

Saren made an unhappy noise in his throat.

"Number one," Ellory said. "Don't call me Aldwyn."

"I'm not him, and I'm not going to pretend I am to make you feel better."

The god's stride faltered for the length of a heartbeat.

"And two. No fire unless I say."

"You would dictate to a god where his fire falls?" Saren said.

"You'll burn the forest down with us in it. And there are people in those chains."

Ellory glanced back.

"Besides, you ate all my pears. You owe me."

"I owe you nothing," Saren said.

"You owe me six pears. I counted."

Saren opened his mouth, shut it, and glared at the path ahead.

"Rule one," he said stiffly. "I will try."

"And two?"

"I will consider it," Saren said.

"That's a start."

The barking changed pitch. It came from above them now, from the ridge.

"There," a man's voice shouted. "Two of them. One of them's big."

Ellory looked up.

Six riders had come out along the ridge with torches.

The dogs ran ahead of them, iron collars glinting at their throats.

One rider leveled a short, wide bow at Ellory. It had a steel arm and a crank.

"What is that?" Saren said, interested.

"A crossbow. Get down."

"It is a toy."

The bolt hissed over Ellory's head and buried itself in a pine with a crack.

"It is not a toy," Saren said after a moment.

"Run!"

They ran.

The forest here was old and thick.

Ellory knew it better than the riders did, because he had walked it every day for two years as a guard.

He took them down a deer track and over a mossy log, and splashed through a stream.

Saren followed with the tunic flapping around his thighs.

"Do you always wear clothes that do this?" he demanded.

"You're the one who flew in without any."

"I did not fly in. I was nailed to a wall."

They came out on the edge of a small ravine.

Over it hung a rope bridge, old and grey, with a sag in the middle.

It was the only crossing for a mile in either direction.

Ellory ran onto it, and the planks bounced.

Saren stopped at the foot of it and looked at the drop with fresh dislike. "I do not like this."

"You can fly."

"My wings are in the stone," Saren said. "They will not come out for another night."

"Then walk. Quick."

They got across with the rope groaning, and the riders reached the near side as Ellory's boots hit solid ground.

Two of the dogs sprang onto the bridge. A rider set his foot on the first plank.

"Now?" Saren said.

He had stopped beside Ellory and turned to face the bridge.

His hand was already open, and a thread of flame wound between his fingers.

He was looking at Ellory.

He was waiting.

Ellory's heart slammed.

"Is that a question?"

"It is a courtesy. You made a rule."

Ellory looked at the riders, and the dogs, and the crossbow.

He thought of the captain on his knees with a bolt in his neck.

"Now," he said.

The flame leaped from Saren's hand.

It struck the bridge at the near anchor, and the old hemp went up white and roaring.

The planks burned from the middle outward.

The dogs scrabbled and fell, yelping, into the dark.

The riders flung themselves back from the edge.

The bridge came down into the ravine in a rain of sparks.

For a moment the two of them stood in the light of it, and nobody on the far side moved.

"That was extremely satisfying," Saren said.

"They'll find another way."

"It will take them until sunrise."

"We'll be gone by then." Ellory wiped his face with the heel of his hand. "Come on. I know where we're going."

"Do you?"

"I think so." He started up the hill. "Gwenith said Kettle Gorge, and I think she meant her cave on the Whinbank."

He frowned.

"She can't have meant anything else."

"Who is Gwenith?" Saren asked.

"The hedge-witch."

"A witch," Saren said. His voice went flat. "Of course there is a witch."

They climbed for an hour, and the moon went behind the cloud.

Near the top a thread of pipe smoke curled out of a crack in the hillside, smelling of cherry bark.

Ellory ran toward it.

In the mouth of the cave, an old woman sat on a stone with a clay pipe between her teeth.

A blanket was wrapped around her shoulders.

She did not look surprised either.

"There you are," Gwenith said.

She looked at Ellory's bare chest, and then at the six-and-a-half-foot man in his tunic beside him, and nodded.

"You woke him. Good boy." She took the pipe out of her mouth. "Now we are all in trouble."

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