The Village Fell, So the Serpent God Woke and Kept Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Song Stopped
The feast-night lullaby breaks off mid-line and the Iron Host walks in. Ellory flees into the Wold, pulls iron bolts from a dying serpent, and the red-eyed man who rises calls him by a dead man's name.
The singing stopped in the middle of a line.
Ellory Marl looked up from the boar with half a dried pear in his mouth.
Two hundred people had been singing the old lullaby in the feast hall, as they did every feast night.
Now there was only the fire popping in the grate.
At the head of the hall, the headman stood with his hands folded and did not look surprised.
The first arrow came through the east window and put out the big lantern.
Then the dark was full of shouting.
"Shields!" the captain roared. "Guards to the doors!"
Ellory dropped the pear, grabbed his sword off the bench, and ran with the others.
He had never fought anyone. He was the worst swordsman in Marrowdene, and everybody said so kindly.
The doors burst open before he reached them.
Riders in grey iron-studded coats poured in, and the guards went down in front of him one by one.
Ellory swung at the first rider and the blade stuck in a table leg.
The rider kicked him in the chest, and he went over a bench.
When he lifted his head, the captain was on his knees in the rushes with a bolt through his neck.
"Captain," Ellory said.
The captain caught his sleeve with a bloody hand.
"The Wold, boy," he whispered. "Kettle Gorge. Go."
"I can't leave you."
"Go."
His hand fell open.
Somebody seized Ellory by the collar and hauled him backward through the kitchen door.
It was Gwenith Loam, seventy-one years old and small as a child, with her clay pipe still in her teeth.
"Out the back," she hissed. "Don't look at them."
"Lowen's in there!"
Through the doorway Ellory could see his best friend on the floor with two riders sitting on his arms, yelling his name.
"Ellory! Ellory, run, you idiot!"
"I'll come back," Ellory shouted. "Lowen, I'll come back!"
"Not tonight you won't." Gwenith shoved a leather pouch into his hands.
"Kettle Gorge. Whatever you find down there, don't be afraid of it."
"What's down there?" Ellory asked.
"Run!"
He ran.
The forest took him in at once, black and wet.
He went through it with branches slapping his face and his heart hammering.
Behind him the village was burning. He could smell it.
Their village had stood in the heart of the Wold for three hundred years, and no army had ever found it.
Ellory did not know what had changed tonight. He only knew that the song had stopped.
He ran until his legs gave out and he fell down the last slope into Kettle Gorge.
There was a sound in the dark, wet and slow and enormous.
Breathing.
Ellory got to his knees.
Moonlight came through a gap in the pines.
He saw red scales, each as big as his hand, heaving up and down.
The creature filled the whole gorge.
It had wings folded against the rock and a head as long as a cart.
It was nailed to the stone wall by iron bolts as thick as his wrist.
There were eleven of them. Blood ran down the rock from every one.
One eye opened.
It was vermilion, and it looked at Ellory with such hate that his knees went weak.
The great jaws parted, and the heat of its breath washed over his face.
Ellory should have run.
Instead he heard himself say, in the voice he used on frightened goats, "That looks awful. Hold still."
The eye narrowed.
"I'm going to take these out," Ellory said. "It's going to hurt. I'm very sorry."
He wiped his hands on his tunic and took hold of the lowest bolt.
The iron was slick and burning hot. It skinned his palms at once, and he gritted his teeth and pulled.
The creature screamed.
The sound rolled up the gorge and shook the pines. Ellory did not let go.
The bolt came free, and he threw it behind him, and went to the next one.
He pulled them all.
His hands were raw by the ninth.
By the eleventh he was crying, and he was still saying "sorry, sorry, nearly done."
The last bolt left the stone with a crack.
The great body slid down the rock and shrank as it fell.
The red scales ran together, and what lay in the moss was a man.
A very tall man, naked and bloody, with black hair down to his waist.
Ellory started toward him. "Are you all right? You're not, you're bleeding. Let me see."
The man stood up.
He moved so quickly that Ellory never saw it.
One moment he was on the ground.
The next, his hand closed around Ellory's throat and slammed him back against the gorge wall.
His eyes were vermilion, and they burned with a rage that had been waiting a very long time.
"Who sang me down?" he said. His voice was rough from disuse. "Who bound me and left me to rot?"
"I don't," Ellory choked. "I don't know."
The man's grip tightened.
Then he went still. He leaned in, close enough that his nose brushed Ellory's jaw, and he breathed in.
All the fury went out of his face.
"Rain on warm stone," he whispered. "And pears."
His hand shook against Ellory's throat.
"Aldwyn," he said.
Ellory had never heard that name in his life.
He heard himself answer to it anyway.
"Yes?"
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