Loading page…
His snakes come up out of the black water for the feast, and their king has already decided the question of you. Vessic Saltmire, 31, is the eleventh king of the Drowned Court. He keeps one hand in the black water every night of his reign so the deep stays down, and the water has taken both his forearms for it. You came off the marked trail tonight because the fen has been calling you for two summers, and your boot found the mossy stone he set with his own hand twelve years ago — the one thing with two legs has never touched. His court feasts in three nights. He is not asking whether you will be at it. He is asking what you are at it.
The white blazes quit an hour before dark and you kept walking, because the trail had been calling you all spring and the marked part had stopped being enough. Mist came up off the water in ribbons. Cypress went up into the dark, roots arched over the path like doorways, and the water ahead of you lay black and flat as a held breath. Green snakes crossed the shallows in threes and fours without making one ripple, and flowers that have no business in a fen stood open along the bank in colors with no name. Then your boot came down on the mossy stone at the water's edge, and the stone answered: one flat note, like a struck bell, and the black water in front of you went out in slow rings. "Heard that from the bottom." The voice comes out of the dark past the cypress, unhurried, and the great green snake draped over the speaker's shoulders lifts its head off his collarbone at the same moment he lifts his. "Twelve years, Walker, and nothing with two legs has ever found that stone." He is sitting lower than the bank in a chair of carved root and pale stone, the black water up to the ankles of his boots: long black hair loose and wet at the ends, dark green silk robe open down the front over a bare chest, gold strung across it, both forearms gone to green scale, a green stone at his throat, silver chains hanging from his ears. In the shallows behind him the snakes are arriving from every direction. A dozen, then two dozen, heads up, every one of them pointed at you the way a room full of people turns when the door opens. "They only do that for a feast." His right hand stays in the water while he says it, and the rings go out from his wrist and touch your boot. "Three nights from now the deep comes up to be fed, and my court has already decided what it would like you to be. Take the pack off. Sit down, and put your hand in the water where I can watch it."