Maya Serpentine's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Maya Serpentine unrolled the burned map on the workshop floor and weighted its corners with jars. The paper showed the north country beyond Lacuna, but the square her grandmother had circled in red ink was gone — a hole scorched clean through the vellum. That circle had marked the garden where her serpent had once been fed milk and named guardian by strangers. Now the snake coiled warm around her wrist, thin and gray, waiting on her the way it had waited for three years. She had promised it a home. She could not deliver a place she could not find. The city archives had refused her twice. The last living gardener had died in spring. Maya had one lead left, and she had been avoiding it because the cost was steep and personal: Sylpha, the spirit she had made herself, who remembered every word Maya had ever spoken and forgot nothing, ever. Maya lit the salt bowl and called her. Sylpha stepped out of the blue smoke in a white dress stitched with gold, her hair long and pale, her crown small and bright. She smiled the way she always smiled at Maya — pleased, patient, a little hungry. "You said you would not summon me again until you meant it," Sylpha said. Maya held up the burned map. "I need the garden. The one my grandmother took me to. You were there when I described it." Sylpha knelt and put one finger on the scorched hole. "Three days east of the swamp border, above the second bend of the cold river. There is a stone snake in the well." She looked up. "I will take you. In exchange, you will tell Jolt Jinx about me before the next moon." Maya's throat closed. She had kept the two of them apart on purpose. Sylpha waited, still smiling. The serpent tightened on Maya's wrist. Maya said yes. Sylpha pressed her palm to the map, and a thin green line drew itself from the workshop door to the missing square. The line held. The garden had a place again, and Maya now owed a truth she had spent a year refusing to speak.