Gilded Serpent by Danielle Jensen (top 10 novels txt) 📕

“All dead, I’m afraid,” Rufina answered. “Revenge is a thing best savored, and I could risk no interruptions.”

“Camilla, run!” the man shouted, and then steel rang against steel. “Run!”

The woman sobbed, but then she was running, and Lydia realized with a start she was seeing through the eyes of the child. The child that was wailing in terror for her father.

“Run, run, run,” Rufina sang from behind. “There is no escape!”

Terror filled Lydia, her body turning to ice, and she muttered, “It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real.” But it felt real, as though she were truly the child in the woman’s arms, father dead and the murderer chasing them through the hallway and into other rooms, nowhere to go and no time to hide.

“Would you like to die first or wait as I strip the life from your get?” Rufina called, her voice closer.

“You will not touch her!” the woman screamed. “You will not have her!”

A door latch clicked, and Lydia stared out over the ocean before being turned back to face Rufina, who prowled closer, eyes midnight and flame. “You stole my life,” Rufina hissed. “You took everything that was supposed to be mine.”

“It was never yours,” the woman said, her voice steady as she backed up, climbed on a balustrade. “And it never will be.”

“You’ll kill her yourself instead?” Rufina laughed. “How noble of you.”

“I will save her.”

“There’s nowhere to go. Nowhere that I won’t find you.”

“Yes, there is,” the woman answered, and then Lydia was falling.

She screamed, grasping at the air around her, wind whistling in her ears, a hand closing over her mouth just before they struck.

Cold, frigid water surrounded her, everything black and disorienting.

“Hold on, love! Please hold on!”

They were flung forward, and Lydia sobbed as something scraped along her leg, tears flooding down her face to join the seawater. She was dragged onto rock, then up again in the woman’s arms, and they moved through total darkness.

“Shssh, love,” the woman whispered. “They must not hear us.”

Voices and thundering boots reverberated through the dark tunnels beneath the palace, growing light coming toward them, but the woman turned away and into another tunnel.

More darkness, the only sounds the woman’s feet shuffling over rock and the child’s muffled sobs. And then a glow filled her eyes, a crystal xenthier stem appearing, illuminating the blackness. Holding tight to the child, the woman reached out and touched it.

White light.

Lydia wept as the light cleared, the sounds and visions fractured and strange, but also painfully familiar. She knew where the woman and the child had escaped to.

The woman was faltering, falling over and over, each time struggling harder to rise. “Walk, my love,” she finally whispered. “We are so close. Here, she cannot harm you. Here, you will be safe.”

The remembered scent of flowers filled Lydia’s nose, the drone of insects in the foliage and distant sound of waves crashing in her ears. Higher, they climbed, and she was so tired. So afraid.

Then the woman fell.

Lydia pulled on her arm, pleading at her to get up, but the woman’s eyelids only fluttered, so she started to scream. A clang of a gate and voices speaking over top of her, shouting, “Get the senator!”

And then a man was kneeling next to her and the woman, her father but not the father she’d left behind. And the woman caught his wrist, speaking in Cel. “Care for her, Appius. Keep her safe.”

“Where is the physician?” Lydia’s father shouted, and she saw the tears on his face. “Get someone! Knock on every door!”

“It’s too late,” the woman whispered. “Her name is Princess Kitaryia Falorn. Tell her that her mother loved her.”

And then the spark faded from her eyes and she went still.

“Mother!” Lydia screamed, grabbing at her body, hands coming away covered in blood. “Mother!”

And then hands were shaking her, Agrippa’s face inches from hers. “Gertrude!” he shouted. “Snap out of it. It’s only the mimics playing with your head.”

Only it wasn’t the mimics. It was real. It was her memory.

“Let her go!” Killian shoved Agrippa away and knelt before her, still swaying from the effect of the smoke. “Are you all right?”

All the connections clicked in her head, a thousand realizations, and an awful mix of grief and bitterness and loss welled up in her chest. I know who I am, she thought, staring into his eyes. But all she said was, “Dawn will come soon enough. Everyone should get some rest.”

 87TERIANA

They left the village at dawn, backs weighed down with the supplies Marcus had purchased with silver taken from her hair.

It was the last time they slept in a proper bed, neither of them willing to risk encountering a legion patrol. Their nights were spent huddling together in a tent. When they needed supplies, Marcus went into the markets alone, leaving her to worry until he reappeared. And to continue to worry as he silently brooded, even more sparing on conversation than he normally was.

As much as the events in the village had grieved her, they seemed to have a more lasting impact on Marcus, despite them being no revelation to him. But no matter how much she pressed him, he refused to say anything beyond that all individuals living within the Empire were subject to its laws, just as they were subject to the punishments for breaking them. But though he said the words with conviction, the way he’d go silent for hours afterwards, his eyes distant, made her certain that he was questioning those laws.

Or perhaps his own role in enforcing them.

Except what choice did he have? Grand title he might possess, but she knew he was nothing more than an indentured servant to the Senate, doomed to work off the debt that had been forced upon him as a child, his freedom withheld for another twenty-five years, if he lived that long. To defy the Senate’s orders meant punishment—if the offense were great enough, he’d be hanged for treason.