Page 3 of Scars Beneath a Serpent’s Scales

Emmeline’s heart clenched at the reminder. She may be a predator, but there were things with sharper teeth that would snap her neck if they knew she was hunting—if she was careless.

Not that she ever was. But caution required constant attention. While crime often went unpunished on Lyra, a gouged-out eye would be obvious.

Reluctantly, she stopped herself from digging her blade into his socket. The man’s breathing calmed as the pressure relieved.

Emmeline couldn’t allow that.

She moved the dagger to the side of his head, leaning in to whisper along the hilt. “Perhaps you didn’t hear me correctly.” With a sharp twist, she nicked the flesh inside his ear where the cut would barely be noticeable, but the blood gushed. The man squirmed, his face purpling from the pain. “Tell me what you know of the traders.”

“I know nothing,” he ground out as blood coated his ear, his neck. Sticky, hot, and tanging the air, despite the mask over her nose and mouth.

“You’re a useless piece of filth, then.” Her vision tunneled in, surroundings obscured by rage. “You brag all week about your past—stealing children from their families, using their developing magic, and how you left the business—but you can’t even report any names or locations?”

“It all shut down years ago.”

“That’s not what you said to your friends.” And she’d been on the balcony to hear it all. Fury flushed through her at the memory of his gloating, and she shoved her arm harder into his chest, the trellis quivering.

He hadn’t given any names or concrete details—which implied perhaps he did know less than he let on—but he’d used the knowledge to earn approval from the men he’d met with. That it worked confirmed one thing: There was still interest in the practice.

“Lying.” Sweat rolled down his temple, knees buckling as he tried to support himself.

That could be true. The former Chancellor of the Starsearcher Warrior Clan had unofficially outlawed the kidnapping for extraction and manipulation of magic years prior, but he had also overlooked where it was still occurring, lining his pockets with the coins the temples earned from the exploited magic.

With the Chancellor’s death a couple years ago, the faux guardrails he’d instituted had fallen away. Discussions of it starting back up were rumbling, even on Lyra.

Up-and-coming leaders in the capital were supposedly working to dismantle it for good this time, but that revolution required time to discover the rot at its roots.

And men like the one before her were steeped in the tainted soil and tended by those who headed the operations.

They fled to places like the Constellation Isles along the coast of Gallantia, a forgotten set of islands ignored by most Starsearchers on the continent. And the Isle of Lyra, where Emmeline had made her home, had been crawling with former traders in recent years as crime exploded across the jungle-laced drop of land in the sea.

No children were being kidnapped by the temples here—she would know with her position at the Academy—but drugs and vices were as common as fruit nowadays.

“I don’t care much for liars.” Emmeline tutted as she dug through the pouch slung around her shoulders.

“What’s that saying many people claim is about Valyrie?” She pretended to think, considering the Angel who founded the Starsearcher Warrior Clan, gifting them the magic to communicate with the Fates. “Behind a mask of beautiful innocence, all-knowing power births ruthlessness?” Emmeline removed a pinch of silky-soft blue petals from her pouch, holding them before the trembling man’s eyes and ensuring he saw exactly what they were. “I think they’re right. The most delicate poisons are often the most venomous, are they not?”

The scent of piss permeated the air.

“Now, you and I both know the trading has not truly ended.” She paused, but the man’s lips pressed together. “Tell me something”—she lifted his chin with her dagger—“or I will tell you all the ways I know to kill a man, beginning with my most creative.”

He swallowed, the bob of his throat pressing his skin into the tip of the blade. “I only ever spoke to the second-in-command, never the leader. And I never even saw his face.”

Second-in-command. That was higher up than she’d ever encountered. Elation jolted through her, but she stifled any show of it.

“Do you have a name?”

“No.”

She forced the dagger closer. “Something.”

The man panted, sweat cutting tracks through the blood splattering his cheek. “He was always very directly involved. Ran the cargo boats down the rivers between major cities on the mainland himself, checked every shipment.”

Cargo boats and shipments. Bile burned her throat at the inhumane methods and terms for children ripped from their homes and enslaved to the dirty temples to manipulate their magic.

“That’s all I know. No idea where he went when it was dismantled. He left the rest of us in the lurch.”

Based on the disgruntled offense in his voice, he was telling the truth.