The Rebel (2 page)

Reese's brash acceptance of his own disastrous skill had made her own inadequacies seem more bearable. They were both able to laugh at their own folly. Winter had turned to spring, and for the first time since she had been taken away from home, Kadee felt that things might be okay.

Until today.

“He kissed me,” she said, and then bit her lip, thinking,
Stupid!
She sounded petulant, and Aaron looked amused.

To his credit, the serpiente prince seemed to realize after a moment that this wasn't a grinning matter. “This really has you upset, doesn't it?” he asked, obviously unclear
why,
but willing to grant that she
was.

Kadee had been in such a good mood, giddy with May energy as she and Reese walked through the market. His arm had gone around her waist, holding her against his side so they walked like drunken fools, only able to avoid bumping into others because most serpents were graceful enough to avoid collisions. Then suddenly she had realized they were in a secluded corner, and Reese was leaning against her. She was pinned against the wall. She froze like a startled rabbit, and it took a moment for Reese to look up, ocean-blue eyes drilling into hers as he registered her distress.

“What's wrong?” he had asked.

Tears, hated tears, rose in her eyes. “I thought we were
friends,
” she whispered stupidly, because she knew enough about serpents to know what Reese would say.

He frowned, puzzled, and said, “We are.” And he tried to kiss her again.

She didn't want to confide in Aaron, because she suspected he would say the same thing, but he had started to frown and she realized he was thinking the worst. “Did you not want him to?” he asked.

“Of course I didn't!” she shouted back, frustrated.
I'm twelve!
she thought, but didn't say, because she knew that Aaron had stolen kisses from other girls when he was younger. Dancers loved to gossip, especially about the royal family. His gaze went murderous, protective, so she added quickly, “I told him to stop and he stopped.”

“Oh,” Aaron said. “Kadee, it's all right. I know you're a little…shi
er…than many serpiente girls. Reese is a good kid. If you're not ready, I'm sure he'll give you space.”

He already
had.
When she had seen him a few minutes ago, only an hour after their intimate debacle, he had hooked up with a group of dancers. He greeted her politely, but his tone was distant. He wasn't trying to be mean, but by refusing his kiss, she had put herself into the “kid” category. She had declared herself too young to be a lover, and therefore, too young to be a friend, because serpiente—
especially adolescent serpiente—
didn't really draw a distinction between the two.

I
am
a kid,
she thought, but that wasn't the problem. Even when she was fifteen, sixteen, twenty,
thirty,
she never intended to casually flaunt herself the way serpiente men and women did. As a little girl, she had listened to her mother's stories of her father's courtship and dreamed that one day she would be swept off her feet by a romantic gentleman—not ambushed in an alley by a giddy boy.

“Like I said,” she told Aaron, “I'm just being stupid.” Knowing he would accept the excuse, she added, “It's the heat.” For spring, it had been unusually warm.

Aaron meant well. They just came from different worlds, even if they resided in the same building.

He gave a sympathetic half smile. “Try the library,” he suggested. “In the summertime my father has all his meetings in there because it's always cool. It should help you settle.”

“Thank you,” she said.

She took his advice, because the library was also fairly private if Diente Julian wasn't using it.

Like his children, Julian wasn't
mean,
just…distant. He was used to children running and tumbling and getting in and out of trouble essentially on their own. When he tried to check in with her, he attributed all her issues to shyness, which was a word the serpiente seemed to have in their vocabulary without really understanding it.

The best thing Julian had done for her was offer to talk with the shepherds about her joining them as an apprentice. The shepherds, who tended the flocks that provided the wool that was the serpiente's main trade good, were relatively subdued, stable individuals. At first, Julian hadn't wanted to believe that a girl Kadee's age would willingly join them, especially since as a ward of the royal house she had no need for gainful employment or useful skills. However, Kadee already knew a little about spinning and weaving from her mother—a
very
little. Julian literally knew nothing about her past, so she had been able to exaggerate convincingly, and he had eventually relented and offered to follow up with the shepherds.

She hadn't heard anything about the matter since, but this incident with Reese made her even more desperate to get away.

The library was empty when Kadee reached it, so she slipped inside. For a while, she examined the spines of books she couldn't read, remembering a life far away and long ago when she had sat with her father as he tried to teach her letters. These days, writing swam when she looked at it. Too much effort with a text tended to bring on one of her seizures, so the reading lessons Julian had arranged had gradually fallen by the wayside. Sheep didn't care if she could read.

There was a narrow gap between the shelves and the wall, from which cool air seeped. She reached a hand behind the shelf—at the rate she was growing, in another year she wouldn't be able to do even that—and felt the breeze more strongly. Images of secret rooms filled her mind.

A glance over her shoulder confirmed that she was alone. Centering her mind and focusing on her breathing, she flipped that internal switch that allowed her body to shift into its serpent form. She didn't like the sensation, but her curiosity had been piqued, and her human form was too big to fit.

She wriggled behind the shelf and discovered a break in the wooden wall paneling, which revealed a short, water-etched chamber. The floor was too steeply sloped to be a comfortable place to relax in, and spiders and other creatures had made the space their home. This hadn't been crafted but must have been a natural cave that the room was built into.

Just this one? Or were there others? How many secret spaces did this palace have?

Kadee, determined to erase her frustrations with Aaron and Reese and every other oblivious serpent from her mind, set out to explore.

A
FEW MONTHS LATER

The dog days of summer had arrived, and settled in to stay for a while. In the cold, serpiente slowed down; they became thoughtful, calm, sometimes dreamy. Spring could make serpiente moody; it had made Reese impulsive. At the peak of summer, however, when even the underground palace was hot, tempers flew.

Merchants argued with customers in the marketplace. The always-rowdy crowd turned beastly and ready to mutate into a mob at any moment. The serpiente marketplace sold odds and ends, items necessary for daily life, a few luxury goods, but mostly grain and other food staples.

That was where Kadee first heard about Midnight, the empire that ruled even the serpiente king. Merchants selling food and luxury goods traded for in
their
market were reviled, but everyone had to shop from them or face starvation. Another reason Kadee wanted to join the shepherds was that they mostly relied on their own labor for food, which meant they rarely traded with the merchants from Midnight.

This summer however, Kadee stayed away from
everyone.
Julian and the shepherds had agreed that Kadee's apprenticeship would start in the winter, when the flocks were kept near the palace and needed to be tended and protected from the snows and bitter cold, instead of in the summer, when she would be taken far away with the roaming flocks to deal with the worst weather conditions the serpiente had to offer. That way, Kadee could start to learn her trade while still being able to give up and return to the palace if—as Julian expected—she decided
work
was too menial or taxing for her.

Merchants weren't the only ones in high temper in the summer. The serpiente royals picked fights with their friends, their lovers, and their guards—som
etimes, those were one and the same. Aaron was sporting a black eye from a scuffle with Hara that morning.

The guards were the worst.
It's my job to keep the princess safe,
one of them, named Paulin, had snapped at Kadee.
How am I supposed to do that if I'm with you?

Kadee was only twelve, but thanks to her time with the serpiente, she was worldly enough to know what he
really
meant. Paulin was one of the young men competing for Hara's attentions. How could he seduce the princess if he had to guard her adopted, half-human little brat of a sister? But Julian insisted that even an adopted child needed to have guards to protect her honor.

What honor?
She had been shoved and insulted more often by her guards than she had been by whatever threat Julian imagined. Given she had recently watched Hara get into a full-scale, fists-knees-and-elbows-flying tussle with one of her own guards, Kadee hadn't found the courage to try to articulate why a few snide words or occasional “accidental” bumps in the hallway made her uncomfortable.

Only a few more months until winter.

In the meantime, she was hiding in one of the many nooks she had discovered over the past few months. The palace had been constructed around a natural system of caves, and not all the walls were flush against the rock. Most of the passages she found went nowhere, but Kadee had discovered two that led out of the palace into the forest beyond.

Those secret halls were her salvation. They gave her a place to go when she couldn't stand to be with others of her so-called own kind, when she needed to be anywhere but inside this underground serpiente's palace.

She had fallen asleep in the cool, dark chamber she had discovered not far from the entrance to the marketplace. The nook wasn't large, but it was comfortable enough for one person. The blanket she had smuggled up here covered the entire floor. Come winter, she might need to bring a second blanket, but for now it was fine.