Copyright @ 2023 Devi Lacroix

  Copyright @ 2023 Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the authors, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  The characters and events depicted in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  The Serpent of the House of Hua

  This is a story about snakes.

  Long ago, by the accounting of human time, there were two serpents—one a green asp, the other a silver cobra—who found their way to immortality, or something that resembles it. Close enough: forever is more spectrum than absolute, and in those days there were various methods for beasts to transform into something greater. By sorcery and discipline, by eating the hearts of virtuous humans, by potions flung—accidentally or not—into a lake or a secret brook.

  In such ways, fortunes and legends are made.

  By then the white cobra was already over a century old, accruing moonlight within her coils, pursuing power with the honed intent only a snake was capable of. When she scented the potion in her lake, she at once raced for it; she knew it could speed her quest to become more by hundreds of years. She knew that with it in her gullet, she’d gain such might that would allow her to become the equal of gods.

  She captured the potion; she swallowed it whole, and did not mind in the least that the porcelain lacerated going down. It was all about paying the price. A moment of pain for eternity.

  Emerging on the shore, she spat out the ceramic and took human form for the first time: a tall woman whose pale eyes hid—barely—the slit pupils of her origins. She took a breath. In this form, her lungs worked differently. Her limbs were ungainly, peculiarly rigid. All the nerves and tendons were in the wrong place. To move took effort: it was a matter of manipulating a cumbersome puppet, and this shape lacked the natural grace of her native one. Briefly she considered letting her scales show on her throat and shoulders, her arms and torso; she thought of going about naked, for what use did a snake have for fabric?

  But then, she’d practiced her discipline for a long time, and understood a little of the world outside her lake. So she set aside this impulse and turned her attention to the task of looking as mammalian as possible. She made her skin as smooth as the fired clay that cut her esophagus. Hair, alien to her, tumbled over her shoulders: now black, now white. She settled on black and made water into a mirrored pane, so she could examine her eyes until she was satisfied with their verisimilitude. But her arteries remained a reptile’s. She did not care to mimic human thermodynamics.

  With a snap of fingers, white finery materialized to drape her limbs. This contact of silk on skin was novel, a little like water; the wind moved through her hair—yet another new sensation, to have hair at all, to have a scalp from which it grew. The snake felt as if there was too much body, too many parts, even though as a cobra she was many times larger than any human.

  For a few days, she roamed the woods, tasting the air and cataloging its noises. Some beasts of prey that’d instantly flee her as a cobra now barely registered her as a threat. That amused her a little, and she refrained from pursuing them. In her true form her maw could open wide and swallow anything. The white snake could drink down the world.

  Eventually she came upon humans, a fisherman and his son, and stood observing them eat tangyuan. The sweet interested her more than the men. Much would be made later of her malice, but at the beginning she felt nothing toward humankind save faint curiosity. What she wanted was experience, the different shapes of tomorrow.

  After a time, she moved on.

  ♦

  VIVECA

  I am surprised at how readily I take to peace. My sister, unfortunately, is horrified.

  “It’s almost noon,” Olesya Hua grumbles as she throws the curtains wide; despicable sunrays flood in, scouring away my sleep and tumbling me into unwelcome consciousness. “We have a dinner with—” She continues, only to trail off when she sees the state of my bedroom in the harsh light of day. Her tone immediately softens to genuine concern. “Are you okay?”

  To my older sister’s credit, the sight is a far cry from the sterile and manicured spaces I have inhabited for decades. A styrofoam container of half-eaten char siu rice lies on the floor, take-out wooden chopstick wedging the box open; beside it, a laundry basket has toppled, pushed off the bed in a pique, clean clothes spilling out and mixing with the dirty shirts and sweatpants that have been discarded haphazardly around the room. With my matted hair and bleary eyes I don’t look much better, and my sheets are stained with the makeup I failed to wash off the night before.

  “There was a sentai marathon last night,” I half-heartedly explain. “Yves and I stayed up late watching it. I might have drunk a bit.”

  “And has Yves decided to not assist with an ounce of house cleaning?”

  “That’s not very progressive of you,” I murmur, rolling over to burrow into my pillows and fall back asleep. “Just because she’s my wife doesn’t mean she needs to be in the kitchen.”

  “By Hua tradition the butch does the housework and cooking,” my sister says dryly, only half-serious.

  “Does Dallas do any of that?” I grumble, increasingly concerned that I will not be allowed to fall back asleep.

  Olesya shrugs, righting the laundry hamper. “She’s a cat, and that means I’ve been forced to accept certain realities, like that she makes messes and is constitutionally unable to clean them up. But you. You’re not a teenager anymore. You can’t just pull an all-nighter watching children’s television.”

  I stick out my tongue. “I can too. The warlock of her age may do whatever she pleases.” I sigh with resignation and annoyance, and then little by little crawl out from my blankets, reluctant to leave their warmth and softness. I console myself with the knowledge that whatever their thread count, mundane bedsheets will never compare to Yves. “So who did you volunteer me to have dinner with tonight?”

  Olesya looks away, gazing out over the skyline while I climb out of bed, to give me privacy. I rummage through the laundry hamper for something clean, smelling each article to make certain none of the dirty clothes have gotten mixed in. Maybe my sister does have a point.

  I can almost hear Olesya roll her eyes at me. “We’ve talked about this. Manina Woźniak is a Polish arms dealer, reaching out as an intermediary for another, even larger client. I want to make a perfect first impression, and I need both you and Yves there.” She glances around, frowning. “Where is your wife?”

  “Where is yours?” I retort, being obstinate for no other reason than I’m annoyed. Not about being woken; in my more rational moments, I can concede that I couldn’t sleep forever. It’s more that… “You don’t have to do this, Olesya.”

  I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, in my underwear. Olesya turns back to glare down at me, imperious in her white suit, limned from behind by the golden rays of the sun. Her posture is hard, her fingers balled into fists, and for a moment her eyes flash with ill-contained power, a harsh white as lifeless as linoleum under fluorescent light. “Excuse me?” she demands in a whisper that crackles like dry lightning.

  Despite having just slept, I suddenly feel weary, deep in my bones and in my soul. Olesya and I were so close, once, years ago. My myopic focus on prosecuting a war against Cecilie Kristiansen made me blind to how my sister suffered—with the slow and creeping death our mortal enemy afflicted her with, yes, but also with the stress of our lineage, the crushing weight of being a Hua, the legacy that stripped us of a mother and made of our lives one of hollow grandeur and unremitting violence.

  “Someone other than Kristiansen killed our mother, and that must be avenged,” I say, trying to preemptively concede ground and stave off a true fight. “The old boogeyman of our family, Nuawa, is out there somewhere, and we’ll put in time and effort to research and contain it, the way our family has for a dozen generations.”

  Yet even as I say this, I hear my old, unwavering beliefs cracking, a widening gulf between what I say and what I know to be true, the growing clutter and disorder in a once-pristine mind. “But—” How do I explain to my sister, to whom power and influence is so new, that none of this matters? That our birthright is at best a mixed legacy, and at worst a curse? That having become the most powerful warlock in all the world, having broken my greatest rival, the only thing that matters to me—the only thing—is preserving the lives and wellbeing of those I care about.

  “I can’t lose you again,” I blurt out. And then I sob, a deluge of fear and anguish and hurt. Olesya softens, her fingers relaxing from their fists, her arms wrapping me in a warm, tight hug. “You almost died,” I manage to get out between gasps. “You fell, and there was blood everywhere, and you were dying, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it! And—and I want you to be happy, and I want you to get all the things you couldn’t for so long. But we don’t need any of this. None of it.”

  I’m reduced to sniffles; I grab at the sheets and blow my nose on them, like a goddamn barbarian. “You don’t need to whore yourself out to some Polish weapon dealer,” I say, my defiance and stubborn anger loosening my tongue. “Fuck her, fuck all of them. No sister of mine is going to debase herself and put herself at risk just for some money.”

  “Oh, Viveca,” my siste r says, soft and kind, just like she would when I was nine, waking from nightmares after what happened to us at Mount Nicholson. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere at all,” she murmurs, kissing my forehead. “We survived and we’re safe.”

  Over a light breakfast that she makes for us—very simple, little more than coffee and toast, though it is perfect and filled with love—Olesya elaborates on her own thoughts. “I don’t really care about the deal,” she explains. “I just want to playact as the powerful Hua scion I am supposed to be, you know? I want to arrive in a suit and see people fear me. I want to be able to hurt them when they offend me. I want to be able to settle all the accounts with anyone who ever made me feel small.” She laughs at herself, or at least tries to. “I know, that’s insane. But now that I’ve been healed, I feel life burning through me, compelling me to perform. So I want tonight to go well. I want the Huas to look and act as powerful as we are. And I want you and Yves there so we can kill anyone who means us harm.”

  Olesya’s outlook is bloody-minded and imperious, but when are mages anything else? I choose to turn the conversation in another direction. “Will Dallas be there, too?”

  “She’s a little bashful to see you again, the fallout of having spent literally months helping you bring back Yves—afraid of sending the wrong signals, I think.” Ah. I try not to wonder what Olesya thinks of that, whether she’s jealous. She continues, “So she’s going to take the opportunity to rifle through Woźniak’s room, see if we can’t turn up more information on what she wants. Every bit of leverage helps.”

  My own feelings for my sister’s partner are complicated, so I reply to Olesya’s original question as to the whereabouts of my wife. “Yves is fetching reagents in Taichung. Getting me bubble tea too—there’s a place there whose caramel pearls are to die for…” I’m interrupted by a curling wisp of black smoke twisting around my ankles and up my legs, forming a comfortable pair of sweatpants, then an equally baggy sweatshirt. “And she just arrived home.”

  Yves could teleport wherever she wanted, but she likes the conceit of having a physical presence, of moving through the world at my side. So she walks through the kitchen door like a mortal—as if part of her wasn’t already wrapped around me, as if she wasn’t always the blink of an eye away from my side—and kisses me on the forehead, even as she hands off the caramel milk tea elixir.

  “Yves,” my sister says, icier than I expect, and motions to the sweatpants in disgust. “You’re enabling this?”

  The demon proffers the coffee in her hand. “Heavy sugar, light cream, just as you like it. And dinner is at six with Manina Woźniak; I’ll be on my best behavior.” Olesya crooks an eyebrow, and Yves flashes a disarming smile. “Your sister cares for you greatly, even if she is committed to yanking your chain. We only spoke Polish all yesterday, preparing for the dinner.”

  My sister flashes a look of genuine shock and affected betrayal, that I have led her on this whole time with an implied disinterest in tonight’s meeting. On the other hand, my wife is in the process of spilling most of my secrets; it’s just a matter of time until she casually mentions that she only spoke Polish while inside me, too. “That’s enough of that,” I cut her off, “lest you convince my sister I love her too much.”

  Olesya seems mollified. “You’re both on thin ice,” she nonetheless says at the door, exchanging a long hug and a brief cheek peck with me. “Six on the dot, and do not fuck this up for us.”

  Yves watches the door for a long time after my sister leaves. “It’s fascinating,” she eventually says, “how you have both grown into your own.”

  “Yves, darling dearest,” I say, not looking up from my effort to suck up the last boba pearl, “you’ve known us both for approximately… eight months, six of which was demonic exile in hell. Also, you sound like my mother, and that’s not something I want to explore with you.”

  The demon snorts, then sets about cleaning up the mess. “Then I will speak for myself: in the time I have spent with you, I have known a peace that I previously thought impossible.”

  “You’re making me sound like the safe and comfortable choice compared to Dallas.” I whoop with joy as my boba efforts succeed, and realize then just how boring I must seem juxtaposed against Yves’ previous globe- and reality-trotting antics. “Do you think my sister is right? Am I really letting myself go?” I should really be climbing back up on the horse, marshaling our resources, researching our ancient family foe Nuawa in earnest. But they haven’t reared their head in decades, even centuries; my sister and I will gather our resources, strike them down, and then we will know real peace. But in the meantime, I want to rest, to give myself a period of respite. The truth of it is, I’m tired and I’m content, and after a lifetime of constant action and stress, lethargy now robs me of my need to immediately act. All fields must lie fallow for a season.

  “For the first time in both of our lives,” Yves says, as if reading my thoughts, “we have been allowed to feel safe, and sleep late, and enjoy ourselves in a time of peace.” As if from a great distance, I remember what Yves admitted to me at my family’s Scottish cabin: I’m often summoned into a time of war—a tool of last resort, once a practitioner is driven into a corner, and thus needs a potent weapon. I am… curious what it would be like to be drawn into a time of peace.

  “Incidentally, while I was out,” my demon continues mildly, loading her arms with the take-out boxes and turning back to me, “an old foe reached out, desirous of passing along a tidbit of information. There is a being of considerable power, who presides over an otherworldly crossroad. Entities of all sorts gather there to strike bargains and play deadly games. One of them is a tournament, where the victor is awarded a handsome prize.”

  I look up from my empty cup of caramel milk tea, my interest piqued. “You’re my handsome prize, but go on.”

  “Silver-tongued as ever, Ms. Hua. This being has a treasure vault of apocryphal size, and it’s said that in her collection is a lost grimoire of power belonging to a certain practitioner, once the warlock of her age.”

  At this, I sit up straight. Another adventure, to demonstrate to myself I’m not over-the-hill, and the recovery of my family’s legacy to boot. “Something that might have the answers we seek. Well then, it’s simple: we have to win.”

  Yves smiles with a knowing hunger, a heat that radiates through me. “Of course we will. In this, and in all matters, I will ensure your triumph. I will arrange a meeting with this old contact in the coming days, never you fear. But before that”—her voice drops to a husky smolder—“I also think we have a few more hours to practice Polish before dinner.”

  ♦

  Yves and I demonstrate several times that we are both cunning linguists, and the dinner goes well, too. Woźniak is ambitious, and my sister’s analysis is correct: this social-climbing arms dealer is positioning herself up as an intermediary between us and a massive international mercenary syndicate known as Gorgon. Gorgon came into being in only the past few decades—upstarts, compared to the long lineages mages preen over, but all the more deadly for their lack of tradition and their willingness to embrace a mixture of technology and magic to achieve the most heinous ends.

  Prudently, my mother set a policy of non-interference with Gorgon that both sides have respected to the present day: we don’t meddle with their operations, and in turn make encroachment on our prerogatives so costly that their leader, Ashavi Kaur, has decided crossing us is just bad business. By all accounts, they sat out our conflict with Kristiansen—a winning choice—and now undoubtedly see the bloodshed and destruction that heralded her fall as a moment of opportunity. And at least Kaur has the common sense to engage with the victors in a respectful, professional register, if deniable and once-removed.

  Woźniak doesn’t grovel, but she does show dutiful appreciation for our power. She also shows more than dutiful appreciation for Yves, who is pleasant and charming and speaks just the right amount about esoteric, warlock secrets to alarm and intrigue her.

  Olesya, too, is in her element. She shines as brilliant as any star—funny, intelligent, radiant in a dress that looks as though it’s been spun from rose gold, made of overlapping links that crisscross over her front, interspersed by black patterns. Hints of a tiger’s gleaming stripes, worn to honor her mate; black opals at her throat, for the same purpose.

 

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