Brigid Jorvik's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Brigid Jorvik had one night to feed her serpent a god's meal, and nothing in her larder would do. The snake coiled on the packed-earth floor of her willow lodge, thicker than her thigh, its scales dulled to the color of wet ash. She had spent three years starving it on frog hearts and heron blood, whispering the old names into its mouth until it began to answer back. Tonight it would either swallow a divine spark and rise as the swamp's new god, or it would wake hungry inside a ritual circle with her as the nearest warm thing. She checked her offerings again on the floorboards. A jar of bog-water thick with tadpoles. A knot of her own hair. A heron's skull she had boiled clean last winter. She knew, looking at them, that none of it was enough. A fledgling god ate belief, not meat. She needed something a living creature had already worshipped. She pressed her palm to the serpent's flank and felt the slow tremor under the scales, the hunger already turning inward. If the ritual began without a true offering, it would finish with her bones. She pulled her cloak on and walked out into the reeds. A quarter mile from the lodge stood the little mud-brick shrine the shell-gatherers kept, its walls hung with crab shells painted in cheap dyes. The people who tended it were gone by dark, but their bird was not. A rose-pink flamingo stood inside the archway on one leg, still as a carved thing, its neck curved above the offering bowl. The shell-gatherers fed it scraps and called it lucky. They had prayed at that shrine every dawn for as long as Brigid had lived in the marsh. The bird had stood in the smoke of their prayers and eaten from their hands. It was soaked in worship the way a rag is soaked in oil. She caught the flamingo by the neck before it could unfold its wings. It did not fight her. She carried it back through the reeds while it watched her with one flat black eye, and she laid it inside the circle at the serpent's head. The snake lifted, tasted the air, and knew. Brigid cut the bird's throat with a clam-shell blade, and the blood ran hot over the scales. The serpent drank. She felt the change begin under her hand: the body swelling, the dull scales brightening to something that hurt to look at, a second pulse starting inside the first. It did not turn on her. It knew her now. But when it opened its eyes, they were not the eyes of her familiar anymore, and the shell-gatherers would come looking for their bird by morning.