The Village Fell, So the Serpent God Woke and Kept Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Pears

Saren's rage fills Kettle Gorge, but Ellory feeds him a dried pear and the rage cracks. Saren says the song did not stop by accident.

The name hung between them in the cold.

The man's hand came off Ellory's throat.

"No," he said. "No. You are not."

"I'm not," Ellory agreed, rubbing his neck. "I'm Ellory. I don't know why I said yes. It just came out."

The man stared at him. His chest heaved, and the blood on it ran faster.

"Do not speak to me in his voice."

"It's the only voice I've got."

For a moment Ellory thought he would be thrown into the rock again.

Then the tall man's knees gave way, and he went down into the moss on all fours, shaking.

Ellory crouched next to him at once.

"You need a blanket. You need a lot of things."

He pulled off his tunic, which was all he had, and draped it over the man's shoulders.

It reached his ribs.

"Sorry," Ellory said. "Village size."

"I am the Serpent of the Wold," the man said through his teeth.

"Nine hundred years I have flown above these trees. You will not put a child's shirt on me."

"You're cold," Ellory said.

"I am not cold."

His teeth were chattering.

Ellory kept the tunic where it was and sat back on his heels.

"What should I call you?"

The man looked at him for a long time, with the vermilion eyes that had gone dim from pain.

"Saren," he said at last.

"Saren. Good. I'm going to look at your side."

"You will do no such thing."

Ellory did it anyway.

He opened Gwenith's pouch and found a wad of green moss poultice and a flint.

He began to press the moss against the worst of the bolt holes.

Saren hissed through his teeth but did not stop him.

The poultice turned red and then black.

"Your hands," Saren said abruptly.

Ellory looked down. The palms were raw and weeping, and the iron had left a pattern of burns across them.

"They're fine."

Saren took them in his own, turned them over and breathed across them, long and slow.

The pain faded to a warm itch.

Ellory made a small sound. "Oh. That's nice."

"I was nailed to a wall for three nights," Saren said, still looking at the burns.

"Nobody has touched me in three hundred and twelve years," Saren said. "The first to do so was a goat boy in a village shirt."

"I'm a guard."

"You are a nuisance."

"I'm a guard," Ellory said again. "I'm just not a good one."

Saren's stomach growled.

It was a deep, terrible sound that echoed down the gorge.

Saren looked offended by his own belly.

Ellory dug in his pockets.

He kept dried pears in every one of them.

He had since he was small, and it was a village joke.

He held one out.

Saren looked at it and did not take it.

"Poison?"

Ellory bit the pear in half and chewed, then held out the other half.

"See? Pear. They're good."

Saren took it, sniffed, and put it in his mouth.

He stopped chewing.

Ellory watched the god's face go through something terrible and slow. The vermilion eyes closed.

When they opened again, they were wet.

"Sweet," Saren said in a thin voice.

"Do you want another? I've got six."

"Yes."

Ellory handed him the whole pocket.

Saren ate every pear in it, one after another, with great formal care.

Ellory sat in the moss and tried not to stare.

At the end he licked his fingers.

"There was a boy," he said. "He smelled like this. He carried these in his pockets too."

"Lots of people carry pears."

"No. Nobody else was that stupid."

He sounded so bitter that Ellory said nothing.

Saren leaned his head back against the rock. The night wind lifted the black hair off his neck.

"I should kill you," he said.

"I should burn this gorge, and everyone who has ever walked in it. I have wanted to for three hundred years."

"All right," Ellory said.

"All right?"

"I mean, I'd rather you didn't. But you can't, can you? Not tonight."

Saren's mouth twisted. "No."

He lifted a hand and a small flame sputtered on his palm and went out.

"Something is wrong," he said.

"The Hush used to press on me every night. Tonight it has holes in it, and that is how I came awake."

"The song stopped," Ellory said. "At the feast. Right in the middle. Then the riders came."

Saren's head turned slowly.

"In the middle of a line?"

"The line before the last," Ellory said. "Everyone just went quiet."

"Everyone."

"Well." Ellory frowned. He saw the headman again, with his hands folded and his face quite calm. "Almost everyone."

"Songs do not stop in the middle of a line," Saren said. "Not that one. Somebody stopped it on purpose."

The thought made Ellory's stomach turn over.

Far away on the ridge a dog barked, and then another, and then a whole pack of them, high and eager.

Saren was on his feet before Ellory could stand.

"Iron collars," he said, tasting the air. "They have brought hounds that smell gods."

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