The Serpent Bride. Sara Douglass

gave a small shrug. “Why should I know?”

      Aziel sighed. Because everyone else in the damned world knows. “Sit down,” he said, “and I shall tell you of Maximilian Persimius.”

      He waited until Ishbel had sat herself, her back rigid, her face expressionless, before he spoke.

      “I shall be brief, as I am certain you shall have ample opportunity to hear this story from Maximilian himself.”

      Ishbel’s face tightened, but Aziel ignored it.

      “Eight years ago there was uproar when the presumed long-dead heir to the Escatorian throne, Maximilian, suddenly reappeared. He told an astounding tale: stolen at the age of fourteen, thrown into the gloam mines — known as the Veins — to labour in darkness and pain for a full seventeen years until he was rescued by a youthful apprentice physician and a marsh witch. Yes, I know, stranger than myth, but sometimes it happens. It transpired that Maximilian’s ‘death’ had been staged by his older cousin Cavor, who wanted the throne. Once free of the Veins Maximilian challenged Cavor for the throne, won, and … well, there you have it. Maximilian has since led a fairly blameless life running Escator and, as luck would have it, looking for a wife. I have never seen him, nor met him, but I have heard good of him. He is respected both as a man and as a king.”

      “He was imprisoned in the gloam mines for seventeen years?”

      “Yes.”

      “Then I hope he has since managed to scrub the dirt of the grave from under his fingernails.”

      “That was ungenerous, Ishbel.”

      “Don’t lecture me,” she snapped. “Maximilian may be of the noblest character, and patently has endurance beyond most other men, but I have no wish to be his wife. I do not wish to leave Serpent’s Nest.”

      “Ishbel … the Great Serpent has said that —”

      “Perhaps the Great Serpent is mistaken,” Ishbel said, and with that she rose, snatched up her cloak, and left the chamber.

4

       SERPENT’S NEST, THE OUTLANDS

      Wrapping the cloak tightly about herself, Ishbel walked quickly through the corridors until she came to the stairwell leading up to a small balcony high in Serpent’s Nest. She was grateful she met no one, partly because she could not at the moment contemplate questions or small talk, but mostly because she felt deeply ashamed of her behaviour and manner with Aziel.

      Her shock and horror at the vision the Great Serpent had showed her — and then at the solution he had suggested — could not excuse her behaviour towards Aziel. Ishbel owed the Great Serpent, the Coil and even Serpent’s Nest itself a great deal, but she owed Aziel so much more. He had been the one to rescue her. His had been the hand extended to lift her from the horror that assailed her. His had been the gentle smile, the soft encouragement, the friendship, over all of these years, which had helped her to put that frightful time behind her.

      He hadn’t deserved that face she had just shown him.

      Ishbel sighed and began to climb the stairs. The eastern balcony was her favourite spot in Serpent’s Nest, and she often came here to think, or simply to stand and allow the salt breeze from the Infinity Sea to wash over her face and through her hair.

      The climb was a long one, and, as it progressed, the stone stairs became ever rougher and a little steeper. The increasing difficulty of the way did not bother Ishbel; rather, it comforted her, because it meant she approached the older part of Serpent’s Nest.

      The more mysterious part.

      Serpent’s Nest was a mystery in itself. Ishbel had begun to explore the structure in the first months after she had arrived as a child, completely fascinated by her new home. Serpents Nest was not a town, nor even a building, but a series of interconnecting chambers and corridors hewn out of what Ional, the old archpriestess Ishbel had replaced, told her was the largest mountain in the world.

      Inhabited once by giants among men, Ional had said, and a legendary warrior-king who wielded magic beyond comprehension, but now left with only us to keep its empty spaces company.

      Ishbel could well believe that giants had once lived here. Well, many people, at the very least. The Coil only occupied a hundredth of the chambers that had been thus far explored, and there were yet more corridors and tunnels that led deep into the mountain through which no one had yet dared venture. No one knew who or what had once lived here. Ional had told Ishbel that the Coil had lived here for twenty-three generations, but that the mountain stronghold had been long empty when the Coil had first arrived.

      The stairs suddenly broadened, and Ishbel felt the first breath of sea air wash over her face. She smiled, relaxing, and stepped onto the eastern balcony. Ishbel had found this place in her tenth year, and had come here regularly ever since. No one else ever used the balcony, and Ishbel was not sure that anyone else even knew how to reach it.

      Perhaps, among the myriad stairwells and corridors and possibilities that Serpent’s Nest offered, no one else had ever found this particular stairwell.

      Ishbel leaned back against the stone face of the mountain, the semicircular balustrade of the balcony wall two paces before her, and looked out over the Infinity Sea.

       By the Great Serpent, was there ever a more beautiful view?

      The mountain that Ishbel knew as Serpent’s Nest rose directly above the vast Infinity Sea, its eastern face, where Ishbel now relaxed on her balcony, plunging almost a thousand paces into the grey-blue waters of the sea. Ishbel loved the great vastness of the ocean stretching out before her, with its wildness, its unpredictability, its strangeness and its unknowable secrets. Behind her rose the comforting solidity of the mountain, almost warm against her back.

      Ishbel took a deep breath, forcing herself to think about what had happened today. The horror of the Great Serpent’s vision … she shuddered as she replayed in her mind the sight of the ice wraiths with their huge silvery orbs for eyes and their oversized teeth, swarming over the mountain.

      And the solution …

      Ishbel shuddered again. Leave Serpent’s Nest? Marriage? Marriage? Ishbel could almost not comprehend it. She struggled to remember household life in her parents’ home. Her mother had been bound to the house, supervising the servants, the mending of linens, deciding what food should be served to her father for his dinner, being pleasant and hospitable to visitors. Her parents had been wealthy and important people, but Ishbel could remember that faint touch of servitude in her mother’s manner to her husband — how the entire household revolved about his wants and needs — and even to those visitors that her husband needed to impress. She remembered how tired her mother had constantly appeared, worn down by the responsibilities of the house and her large family.

      True, marriage to a king would be different, but not so greatly. Ishbel would still be his inferior, and would still need to subject herself to him, as would any wife.

      Here she was Aziel’s equal, respected by all other members of the Coil, and feared by those who came to the Coil seeking their visionary aid.

      Even worse, Ishbel would need to subject herself physically to the man. Ishbel had led an utterly chaste life since her arrival at Serpent’s Nest. She did not even think of any of the male members (or any of the female members, for that matter) in sexual terms. She could not imagine a man thinking he had the right to touch her, and to use her body in the most intimate sense. She could not imagine having to subject herself to such intrusion.

      And to lose all the support she had at Serpent’s Nest in the doing. To lose everything she held dear, and which kept her safe, for such a life.

      “The Great Serpent must be mistaken,”