The Serpent Prince

His first memory was of his mother, at the moment of his birth. When he was older, he would understand this was uncommon. As a child, soft-scaled and small enough to be carried draped over Ida’s shoulders, it had seemed quite natural.

He had been born. His mother had screamed. It was the first sound he ever heard, and so his second life experience, following birth, was ear pain. (He did have ears, though they were not visible like a human’s.)

Perhaps it was natural for a woman to scream, when she was giving birth. Ida had assured him many times that it was. But there are different types of screams.

Disoriented by the scream and by the impact of being dropped unceremoniously to the floor, he had slithered under the bed, and had watched from there as his younger brother was born.

The second child was as human as their shared mother, and her screams of pain were followed not by another scream of shock and horror, but by the baby being wiped off, handed to his mother, and hugged close.

Likely words were said, but Davey was born with the ability to form memories, not the ability to comprehend language. That, too, would develop sooner than a human’s, but it still took time and exposure.

He had emerged from under the bed, which triggered further screaming, and had slithered from there to a hole he’d spotted in the opposite wall.

Following the stone tunnel he’d found, he emerged eventually in bright sunlight, directly in front of a woman who bent and picked him up.

She cradled him just as the screaming woman had cradled the other baby, hands warm and gentle. And she took him home.

Ida was his mother in every way that mattered, but she didn't like the title, and as they lived largely in isolation, it didn't occur to him for years to use it. She was too old, she told him when he tried, to be anyone's mother.

"I could be your grandmother three times over," she said, "and your mother is a queen."

"And what does that matter," he'd asked, "when I am not a prince, and she screams at the sight of me?"

Davey's early years were a confusing jumble of boy and beast. Lindworms developed much more quickly than humans, and his lindworm body and human mind were often at odds. Immediately, he could move about independently, he could eat solid foods, he could catch his own food to eat. These things were instinct. But in matters that did not pertain to natural lindworms, his brain developed more as a boy's would. He took many months to begin understanding speech, and more to produce it.

This all seemed quite natural to him at the time, though he was sure, looking back, that it had driven Ida to distraction. A child capable of rushing out into the woods after a mouse, but not capable of understanding or responding to her warnings about large owls—well, he supposed it was rather like having a pet that one knew would eventually grow into a person.

When Davey was born, he'd been no larger than an adult grass snake, distinguishable from any other serpent only by the little black nubs on his back, which would eventually grow into wings.

(He had been able to fly from when he was about four to seven, before the growth of his body outpaced the growth of his wings, and he was grounded. He suspected those had been very difficult years for Ida.)

In adulthood, he was about twenty-five feet long. He went from eating beetles to eating full deer in a single swallow. And that was when deer still sufficed. The bloodlust had been...difficult.

It was the bloodlust that drove him first to the cage they’d built in the back of the cottage, and then to the palace.

“To seek your fortune,” Ida said.

“I don’t want a fortune. I just want not to hurt anyone.”

“The bloodlust will not resolve on its own. You will be always in danger of hurting someone, until we fix it.”

And so she had given him a mission and a script. She had asked a friend who was a hunter to bring a wild boar, which she cut into pieces and passed through the bars for him to eat, and which made scarcely a dent in his endless hunger.

They’d built the cage years ago, and he hadn’t left since. He had outgrown the door.

“You’ll have to break through the wall,” Ida said.

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

She didn’t understand. He couldn’t. If he could break the wall now, he could have broken the wall any time in the last few years, and he had never truly been locked safely away.

“Davey,” Ida said severely, and he broke the wall down, and started in the direction they’d planned.

"Remember your script!" Ida called out after him. He didn't dare to pause for an answer or a goodbye, terrified the bloodlust would catch up with him.

He found the spot, beneath the large beech tree with the letters carved into the side. It was a bit of a wait; he spent the time tracking the path of a fox, and eventually followed it back into the woods to catch and eat.

There was a good-sized party coming along when he returned, a few horses with riders, two wagons, a few horses with luggage, and then several more with riders.

He slithered out onto the road. He'd had a few growth spurts, since last he was able to leave the cottage, and was surprised by how small the people appeared.

The one on the horse in front wore a circlet—his brother, the prince. Davey remembered him, in the hazy way of early childhood. He had been dropped on the floor, and their mother had held the other baby.

His name was Harald. Their parents had named him. They had not bothered naming Davey.

None of that was Harald's fault. And Davey didn't even want to get married. But Ida didn't ask him what he wanted, anymore. And he understood it; his tastes could not be trusted.

He tried to remember his lines. He didn't understand why Ida wanted him to be so difficult, so demanding, so rude. It was all he could do to hold on to kindness, to be something like a good man, in the moments his instincts did not overwhelm him. And now Ida wanted him to throw all that effort away? And for the first impression he made on his birth family.

His lines were lost. He'd known he would be meeting his brother, but it had still taken him by surprise, had chased away everything Ida had drilled him on.

His sense of color was not as good as a human's, but better than an ordinary snake’s. He saw blue, and green, and white, and red. From what Ida had told him, yellow was a color that was part of green, and he thought therefore that he should be able to see yellow, too, but he could not. Things he was told were yellow looked to him a lighter shade of green.

Harald's circlet was a shade of green he suspected was actually the mysterious yellow. His clothing was blue. His hair was a very dark shade of muddy bluish-green, which Davey suspected was another of those colors he couldn't make out. Likely brown.

"Where are you going?" Davey asked him, which was not exactly his line, but he thought it was similar.

Several horses reared when Davey approached. He had waited politely for a moment before speaking, to allow people time to control them. But when he spoke, many of them reared again.

That, he thought, was rather an overreaction. He didn't have a particularly frightening voice.

He was the only lindworm he knew of that could speak like a man. He suspected a horse would not pick up on that, but a horse could pick up on its rider's distress, if the riders were alarmed by his ability to speak.

Likely it complicated things. One wasn't supposed to kill intelligent creatures unprovoked, and he had not yet provoked them.

"I go to seek a bride," Harald said.

"I am your elder brother, and I must be married first." That, he was almost sure, was the correct line.

"My brother," Harald repeated, clearly skeptical.

"Yes. She bore me first. She dropped me on the ground to embrace you." Ida hadn't given him that line.

One of the other riders urged his horse forward, leaning close to speak with Harald more quietly than Davey could hear. Harald waved him away.

"How is it that I have never heard of you, if we are brothers?"

For this, too, he abandoned the planned dialogue. He had thought much about the topic, for he had long doubted his brother knew of him, though this was his first confirmation. "Am I the sort of mistake one would admit to a beloved son? Am I the sort of mistake one would admit to one's country, when the oldest son is to inherit? I am older, and I must be married first."

"I will consult with my parents."

"With our parents. I will accompany you."

Harald looked back at the man who'd whispered to him. The other man lifted his shoulders.

"Very well," Harald agreed. Davey was clearly magical, allegedly the eldest prince, and fully capable of taking out the whole party with one sweeping motion of his tail. What could he do but agree?

The bloodlust was quiet so far, today. He had eaten well, and his serpent body would not need feeding for weeks, not matter how hungry he might feel. He still dreaded time spent with a crowd of humans. It had been so long since he'd seen anyone but Ida.

𓆙𓆙𓆙

When Davey was very small—too large to be carried far twined around Ida's wrist, but small enough still to be carried in her apron pocket—they left her cottage and set out, for the first of several times, into the wider world. There were enough trips that they all blurred together, and he could not remember if they had made that first journey by land or by sea.

There would have been travelling companions, either way, fellow passengers on the ship or the cart or caravan, because even Ida, hale as she was, did not wish to cross three kingdoms on foot, for reasons of time management if nothing else. These people had not bothered him, for in those days, at that size, he slept through most of the day, curled warm and safe in Ida's pocket. If they had a private room on a ship, she would let him loose to catch mice, but otherwise she would drop things into the pocket to feed him.

He remembered reaching their destination for the first time, if not how they'd done so. Ida had walked through a thick copse of trees, and then across a few rolling hills, until they reached a small thatched cottage at the top of the largest hill. Davey, not aware enough yet to be anxious, had snoozed through most of the walk, lifting his head occasionally to find his surroundings had changed completely. His field of vision was not large in those days.

When Ida knocked on the door of the cottage, Davey uncurled himself enough to emerge partly from the pocket.

“Oh, he’s absolutely precious,” said the woman who opened the door, noticing him in the pocket immediately. He ducked down again. People never noticed him. And they definitely never called him “precious.”

Ida entered the cottage, and reached into her pocket to pull him out; he twisted anxiously around her wrist. There were several people inside, all of them looking at him.

“Say hello, sweetheart,” Ida told him.

“Hello,” he whispered, as much as his anatomy allowed whispering.

It was then that Davey met the women he would think of, collectively, as the aunties. Aunt Kate, who lived in the cottage with her husband, children, and several other people Davey struggled to keep track of. Auntie Anya, who lived in the apartment above her bakery in the city, also with her husband, but came to the cottage frequently when Davey and Ida were there. And Jane, who objected strenuously to being his aunt.

"You're Ida's son," she'd told him once, "and Kurt is Ida's nephew, so if anything, we're cousins."

Kurt was her husband, and the local minister. He seldom came to the cottage, but Ida often left Davey there and went to visit him at home.

There were others in the cottage, usually, other Auntie-aged women who visited, often many young women and many geese who came and went, and children who were accustomed enough to magic that they were happy to play with another child who happened to be a serpent.

On that first day, Ida introduced him to the children that were about, set him on the floor among them, and went to speak privately with the adults.

“Why are you a snake?” asked one little girl.

He didn’t know, so he didn’t answer.

“We’re going to go outside and catch a unicorn. You should come with; we can use you as a rope to wrap around her neck.”

Davey followed them outside. There were no unicorns to be seen anywhere about, but the children kept talking as if there were. He had pretended, of course, in the privacy of his own head, but he had never participated in group pretending, and found it strange and disorienting. Mostly he just watched the others.

“Your talking snake doesn’t talk much,” one of the children reported to Ida, later.

He didn’t know what to say; he’d never had anyone but Ida to speak with. Besides, at this age he had a significant lisp, caused by his forked tongue. Around other people for the first time, he found it suddenly embarrassing. Ida assured him it was adorable, but this assurance had limited impact on his feelings.

𓆙𓆙𓆙

Davey slithered after Harald's party. He had met his brother. Within the hour, he would meet his mother and father.

Would they see him as anything but a monster?

Their group stopped at the gate. They had come through the city, down the main street, and had consequently collected many observers. Davey had never had so many eyes on him, and the stress of it, conveniently, was enough to kill any hunger he might have felt.

He ought not to have been hungry, a few scant hours after a full hog, but no food seemed ever enough, these days.

Harald and the soldiers and the observers stood all outside the palace gates, a careful distance from him, while one man went inside, presumably to alert the king and queen.

His parents.

After some time they were led inside, Davey slithering carefully through narrow hallways, only knocking over a little of the décor. Everything was cold stone, untouched by the sun.

They stopped in a large room with a high ceiling. There were several more soldiers than had accompanied Harald originally. He looked around, trying to decide if any of them were much of a threat. Swords and spears and arrows could all do damage, but he wasn’t sure how many stabs it would take to bring him down.

It depended, probably, on how much he fought back. He wasn’t sure whether he would fight back or not; he didn’t want to hurt anyone, but if his desires could overcome his instincts, he would still be safe at home with Ida.

The king and queen both looked upset. In fact, everyone looked upset. Davey wasn’t much enjoying himself, either.

“The prince tells us you claim to be our son,” the king said.

“Yes. And as your son I wish to be married.” He wasn’t entirely certain why he should want this; maybe it would break the spell? Ida had not explained any specifics. But he had always been a lindworm. He didn’t want to stop being a lindworm; he just wanted to stop having the dietary preferences of a lindworm.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this,” the king said to the queen.

“Maybe if you had been present while I was giving birth—”

“There was a war! Did you want me to lose the war?”

Davey wondered if this argument was as uncomfortable for the many soldiers standing about as it was for him.

“I’d have told you if I thought it mattered at all. The thing disappeared right after Harald was born. I convinced myself I’d imagined it.”

“If you do not find me a wife, I shall eat you all,” Davey said, finally remembering his lines.

The king sighed heavily. “Very well. If you are our son, a wife is the least we owe you. Someone find a room for the creature.”

Someone did, a room which required him twining his way up several staircases. It had a window, at least. He didn’t like the cold, indoor stone.

No one, he realized when he was alone, had even asked his name.

𓆙𓆙𓆙

Davey laid in the underbrush, waiting for Ida to get her dinner. He'd already had his—several mice. A single rabbit would have been enough food, and easier to catch than several mice, but he didn't much like eating larger animals, which would remain visible as a large bump halfway down his body for several hours. Ida laughed about this, and called him vain, and maybe he was, a little, but it felt funny, slithering around with a bump in his middle. Besides, he liked rabbits. They were cute.

Ida's dinner was more complicated. She hardly ever packed a meal. So far she had asked two young men passing by to share their food, and they had both refused. Usually the third young man would share, if there was one. Sometimes it took days for a third young man to pass by.

The ones who refused would be punished, and the ones who shared were rewarded. Not directly by Ida, though. It had to do with stories and traditions and balance, and Davey didn't understand all that—he was only almost nine.

He'd asked once why the ones who didn't share had to be punished; they didn't have very much food, and they didn't know when they could get more, and Ida could have packed her own meal. Davey could have caught a rabbit for her, even.

"This is my role in the ecosystem. You eat vermin, and I test the kindness of those who would be heroes."

"Ecosystem," Davey had repeated, savoring the new word, the way his serpent tongue drew out the center of it. Then he'd asked, "Does everyone you ask for lunch really want to be heroes? That's an awful lot of heroes."

"Which is why only perhaps one in three of them succeeds. Your great-grandfather—your father's father's father—once shared a meal with me, and helped me carry a pack through the woods, too, unasked. He was the poor son of a farmer, and he wasn't looking to be a hero at all, only to get a job in the city. We had just reached the cottage when a gigantic troll ran past, carrying a screaming princess in one massive fist. Well, I hadn't expected that, but I gave young Kristian an old pair of seven league boots, and off he went after them. Six weeks later he was married to your lovely great-grandmother Bridget, and six months after that he was king."

Davey knew his family didn't want him, but he still loved stories of them. Especially of the dead ones, because he could never meet them, and was therefore free to pretend that they would want him, if he did.

"You see," Ida had continued, "if he hadn't been kind, he wouldn't have been at my cottage, where the boots were kept, and so he would never have caught the troll. I didn't plan it, but it was how things worked out. These things always work out, and my duty is to give young men the chance to prove their worth."

It was at this point that Davey had spotted a large, brightly colored fish in the pond they sat beside, and had slipped into the water to catch it, ending the conversation.

It was ages before the third young man appeared. He sat and split his meat and cheese with Ida, and then Davey had to wait ages more for them to finish eating, and for Ida to wish him luck on his journey.

"Now can we go home?" Davey asked, when he was finally out of hearing range.

"Yes, sweetheart. Now we can go home."

𓆙𓆙𓆙

It had come upon him very suddenly, when he was thirteen years old.

He was hungry, craving not rabbit or deer, not squirrel or fish or cow, but person. He looked at Ida, and she seemed more meal than mother.

It made no sense. It would not stop.

He’d met another lindworm only once, about two years ago, on a journey with Ida. That lindworm had told him that someday he would crave real food, but Davey had not believed him. That other lindworm’s real food were Davey’s friends and family.

It wasn’t just hunger. He sunk himself into the mud of the creek near their cottage, hiding from Ida, trying to think of the word.

Lust, he remembered. A wanting beyond reason.

Ida came and dug him out of the mud, and told him that what he wanted, or what his body wanted; didn’t matter. Only what he did was important. But they only went on one more journey together, and the year he was sixteen they started building his cage into the back of the cottage.

Increasingly, he felt trapped in his own body, watching helpless through eyes he could not control as they catalogued all the wonderful meals he could make.

It was getting worse, at the palace. He didn’t know how much time had passed, or when he could expect to meet the promised wife, or what exactly was the point of her.

It was all he could do, all day, every day, to be anything but a monster. He was granted a wide berth, mostly, which helped. It would be for the best, he was sure, if he just stayed always in his room, but he had spent years already staying always in one room, and he couldn't bear it any longer. So he slithered through mostly abandoned hallways, and ached with hunger, and longed for blood, and hated himself at every moment.

He did not see his mother and father. He did not see his brother. No one asked for his name.

One day he was summoned to a new room in the palace, which turned out to be something like a church. There was a great crowd of people there, and he was sent to the front, to be near the priest. Someone put a crown on his head. A woman in blue silk joined them, weeping. It was not until the priest began reading vows that Davey realized he was getting married.

Davey didn’t think that the bride ought to be weeping. But of course no one would actually want to marry a lindworm.

It would be fine. Whatever Ida intended would happen, and then somehow she would have no reason to cry. Ida wouldn’t consign some girl to a lifetime of misery even for Davey’s sake.

There was the wedding ceremony, and then a wedding feast, at which Davey was too nervous to eat. He had eaten nothing since that last wild boar, fed to him piece by piece through the bars of his cage.

When the feast was over, neither the bride nor the groom having eaten a single bite, they were escorted by procession back to Davey’s room.

Davey thought this was rather cruel, really. The young woman was obviously distressed, and the audience couldn’t be helping.

When they were alone in the room, the girl stood there, staring at him, still weeping. Davey realized he didn’t know her name; he hadn’t yet worked out what they were doing, when that part of the vows was read.

He had—he had a line, here. The last line Ida had given him. He was to ask his wife to undress herself. He was to ask, and he was then to do whatever she asked in return, until her clothes had come off.

Ida had not told him what would happen after that, which did worry him. Still, he said his line.

It was the scent of her, he would think later, no longer dampened and disguised by layers of clothing. As blood in the water drew a sea serpent in, so the scent pulled out the monster that was in Davey, never as suppressed as he tried to pretend, and for the first time he tasted human flesh.

Davey looked down at the puddled silk dress which was that was left of his wife. It occurred to him that he must have eaten her shoes and fancy headdress, and he was stricken with a bout of hysteria.

He sobered quickly. His head felt clearer than it had in weeks—possibly months. Possibly years. It was the first time in so long that he had not been hungry, no matter how much he ate.

Perhaps she needn't stay dead. He had raised the dead once before. Perhaps he could do it again.

𓆙𓆙𓆙

They had been visiting the cottage on the hill for several weeks, and Davey'd had an argument with the other children, out in the back garden, the source of disagreement long since forgotten. He had decided to leave, and had gone not west toward the city, where Auntie Anya's sister was queen, but south, where he and Ida had not yet travelled.

He had gone for a long time, upset with the other children, distracted enough by a new adventure not to think of how Ida would worry. By the time night had fallen, he was too tired to think of slithering all the way home, so he had curled up beneath a pile of dead leaves and slept.

In the morning he'd felt itchy and off, in the way that generally meant he had a molt coming. He'd never molted away from Ida—he'd never really been away from Ida—and he had thought he should probably go home. But first he needed breakfast.

He caught two squirrels. He hated squirrels; their bushy tails tickled his throat going down. But it was all he could find.

By the time both squirrels were caught and eaten, he was itchy enough he knew the molt would come before he made it home. He continued onward, looking for some rough stones or bark to rub against.

He had scratched his way through a patch of brambles, and had slithered through a patch of herbs, leaves catching on his rough, peeling skin. He had scratched his way beneath a pile of stones, and down a tunnel, emerging eventually in a large cavern. There was a man there, and a body—he could smell the death on it.

Pulled forward by instinct, not the same instinct that sent him chasing through the underbrush after vermin, but something new and deep, he approached the body.

The man pulled a sword and moved to bring it down on him, and Davey darted out of the way; he was long enough by then that moving up over an obstacle was sometimes the easiest, and he found himself on top of the uncovered coffin where the dead body lay.

He shed his skin on the way back down, leaving a mess of dead skin and leaves on the woman's face.

The man forgot to chase him further, for the dead woman sat, and opened her eyes, dead no more.

Fascinated, Davey had huddled in the dark corner of the room, watching their reunion, and their summoning of some guard to open the door. When the people were gone, he’d travelled back through his tunnel, moving slowly in the direction he thought was north. He wasn’t entirely certain how to get home.

It wasn’t until the next morning that a large white goose touched down in front of him. Davey resisted the urge to dart forward and devour it; geese were not for eating. After a moment, the goose became Jane-who-was-not-his-aunt. Nearly every goose of his acquaintance was also a woman of his acquaintance.

“Your mother is worried sick. Thank goodness we’re near enough to home now; you’re far too large to carry in bird form.”

He was too large to be carried at all, at least for any significant distance. They continued on together, Jane informing him of all the search parties that had been sent out, human and goose alike.

“I didn’t mean to go so far away.”

“I know you didn’t. And Sophie didn’t mean—whatever it was she said. I’ll admit I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to the children.”

They didn’t talk much more, Davey thinking still of the woman who had been dead.

Ida met them at the bottom of the hill where the cottage sat, and he stretched himself upwards to rest his head on her shoulder, for ease of hugging.

“You’ve molted,” she said as they went back up to the cottage, and he thought of all his previous molts, every bit of shed skin carefully collected.

“Is my skin magic?” he asked.

“It has healing properties, yes.”

“There was—there was a dead woman. And then I molted on her. And she wasn’t anymore.”

They had reached the cottage by this time. Aunt Kate’s husband fetched a chair, and Ida sat heavily.

“Tell me everything that happened,” Ida said, and Davey did.

"You must promise me never to do this again."

“Why not?”

“I suspect that was the princess. She died nearly a week ago. If a resurrection is done very quickly, it may work out, but it’s always risky. And a person so thoroughly dead as that will never be quite right. Her soul is long gone, and what’s come back to her body is not meant to be there without it.”

“What does it mean, not to have a soul?”

“It means lust without love, humor without kindness, hunger without moderation.”

Davey considered this. “What is lust?”

"Lust is a wanting beyond reason,” said Jane.

"Lust is nothing you need worry about at your age," said Kate.

“We will have to see,” Ida said quietly, “what comes next. This may be quite a mess.”

“I’m sorry,” Davey said. He hadn’t meant to cause trouble. He’d thought he helped, but even that he hadn’t meant to do. He was just trying not to get sliced up.

"Well, whatever comes next, we can't put all the blame on her healing," Anya said. "She always was an odd one."

"And it's hardly only her," Kate added. "It doesn't matter how odd one is, if one doesn't have parents and all the court humoring one. My father had more faults than the sky has stars, but he certainly wouldn't have allowed me to demand my husband be buried alive in my tomb when I passed."

"Is that why that man was down there?" Davey asked.

"Yes, dear," Kate said, and stroked his head. "So whatever comes of the princess, at least you can know you saved his life."

It had taken over a year for the full results of the resurrection to come clear, and several months after that for Davey to hear of them, at their next visit. The princess had, among other things, taken a lover, and they had conspired together to kill her husband. But he had known she had come back wrong, and had prepared. He had kept on his person some of Davey’s shed skin and the same leaves Davey had dropped on the woman’s body, and his servant had used these things to resurrect him. He had then returned home in time to prevent the princess from committing treason against her father.

"Will he be bad now, too?"

"Probably not. He was so freshly dead, his soul was likely still near at hand, to be called back."

And Davey had never heard more about it, so he supposed Ida was right.

𓆙𓆙𓆙

Davey’s wife had not been dead for very long. Perhaps her soul was still near at hand.

He swallowed his meals whole, as all serpents did, so as long as she had not been too much digested—

He had promised Ida he would never do it again.

He'd also promised himself he'd never eat human flesh, so perhaps today was the day for broken promises.

Except that Davey had never induced vomiting before, and had no idea how to go about it.

Surely, now that he had eaten a woman, his family would tolerate him no longer. Perhaps he could explain to Harald that if he were to cut open his stomach after killing him, and preserve his skin, the princess might still be saved. He hadn't any of the leaves, though. He could try to describe them, but he wasn't completely confident that his vision was like enough to a man's for sure success.

It had felt so right, eating the princess. As if he was doing exactly what he was meant to do, for the very first time. She had tasted so much better than boars and deer and rabbits and mice. She had been the first meal in years to truly sooth that gnawing hunger that existed not in his stomach but somewhere in the back of his skull.

He was planning his approach, how to gain the time to explain what must be done to save the princess before he was slain, when there was a hesitant knock on the door.

"Prince Lindworm?" a woman called from the other side. "Princess? Are you awake?"

"I am awake," Davey said.

"And—and the princess?"

"The princess is gone."

"Oh."

She said nothing more. It was some time before another voice came, asking him to attend the king and queen in the throne room.

He had noticed, by this time, that he did not feel as he generally did just after eating, when the meal sat whole and undigested inside of him.

"How long has it been since the wedding?" he asked the voice outside the door.

"Three days, my lord Lindworm."

Three days. That, he was sure, was far too long to wait, not just because of the matter of the soul, but because the body would be too much digested to restore.

"Keep trying," Ida had said to him before he left. "Prince Harald must not seek his own bride unless you have a wife standing at your side. If something should happen to your first bride—"

"If I eat her," Davey had interrupted.

"If you eat her, if she dies of fright, if she runs off into the night," Ida said, dismissive and rhyming, both signs she was more in her role as wise woman than her role as Davey's mother. "Whatever the case may be, if you lose the first bride, you must demand a second, and a third, and so on. Prince Harald cannot marry until you have a wife to keep."

He had trusted Ida all his life, and he would not stop now. He made his way to the throne room, knowing what he had done and what he would do next, and hating himself for all of it, and obeying Ida still.

"Lindworm," said the queen. "Where is your bride?"

"I have eaten her, Mother."

She flinched a little, as she always did when he called her that, and Davey felt a little vindictive thrill and a little pang of despair, as he always did when she flinched.

"A shame," said the king. "I don't know what I will tell her father."

They were both taking it very calmly, but he thought they were more bothered than they appeared, and only didn't want him to see it.

Harald did not appear calm at all.

"Well," said the queen, "your demand has been met. Harald, you may resume your search for a bride tomorrow."

"No," Davey said, because Ida had told him to. "I have had a wedding, but I have no wife. I am the eldest, and must be wed first."

"You have been wed," said the king. "We will not continue feeding you princesses."

"I will eat as I please, and if you wish to stop me you may kill me." Please kill me, he thought. Why hadn't they? They hardly seemed the type to be sentimental fools.

Harald stood, reaching for the hilt of his sword, in a scabbard around his waist. Davey wondered, distantly, if he typically carried a sword all about his home, or if it was only because Davey was a monster.

"We will do no such thing," said the queen. "You are our son."

But you hate me, Davey thought, and didn't say. Harald sat again, fuming. Harald, clearly, was the only reasonable one in the family.

"We will discuss this," the king said. "You are dismissed."

𓆙𓆙𓆙

Davey had a great fondness for reading, a trial when one did not have hands. Ida was often too busy to read to him, or even to turn the pages so that he could read to himself. She told stories, constantly, as she worked, which was also lovely in its own way, but not at all the same.

When they visited the cottage on the hill, Aunt Kate and her husband would often read aloud to the children. It was Aunt Kate who had taught him to read, during one of the many long months when he was small, and Ida had to leave him behind in order to carry out her duties as a wise woman.

After they built the cage, Ida brought him the gift of several scrolls, sourced carefully from a variety of old friends. Scrolls were not in common use, and had not been in multiple centuries, which meant that all of these were historical documents, and an absurdly valuable gift for an imprisoned snake child who felt less a person and more a creature every day.

He passed long, peaceful hours in his cage, nudging the scrolls opened and closed with head or tail, reading the words himself with no tiresome interruptions, as he had never been able to do before.

Immersed fully in the text for the first time, he needn’t miss the people he would never see again, across an ocean he could not safely cross. He needn’t worry about anything but the words in front of him. It was far more magical than anything he’d seen Ida do.

In the palace, after the king had agreed that he would be married a second time, before the second bride had been arranged, he haunted the halls in search of something to read. Reading would help. Reading would make him feel a man again. If his eyes were on a page, it wouldn’t matter whose eyes were on him.

Some exploring, any people he met darting immediately away down hallways too narrow for him to traverse, led to what he believed was a library.

Ida had taken him to a grand library in a large city across the sea, once. He had not learned to read, then, being still small enough to fit in her apron pocket, but he remembered the smell of it, leather and vellum and ink, and the great skylight that washed the room in golden warmth.

He poked his head through the door, now, but dared not to enter fully, for there were many shelves packed close together, and he worried he would knock them down.

As far as he could see there were books and books and more books, with not a scroll to be found. Granted, his eyesight was not as good as a man’s, but he couldn’t venture deep enough in to be sure.

Possibly—likely, even—someone in the palace could be compelled to turn pages for him. People would do quite a lot for you if the alternative was being eaten. But he would not be able to focus and enjoy the reading if there was some person right beside him stinking of terror. He shouldn’t spend much time so close to any person, anyway. The best way to avoid eating people was to avoid being within mouth’s reach of them.

He needed some distraction from what a monster he was, and none had ever been better than reading.

When next he encountered someone in a hallway, without a narrower passage conveniently at hand to slip away, he asked if there might be scrolls anywhere in the palace.

He promised to find out. Davey never saw him again.

𓆙𓆙𓆙

The second wedding, when it came, was much like the first. When they were alone in his chamber, Davey introduced himself, as no one in the palace had yet learned his name, and they called him simply Prince Lindworm in the marriage vows.

“Are you going to eat me now?” she asked, after the introduction.

“I—I don’t want to. I’m supposed to ask you to take your dress off.”

She stared at him for a moment, trembling, and took off her dress. She was wearing an underlayer beneath it.

He tilted his head to study this. Presumably it must also come off.

“And that one as well?”

She hesitated. “I—I—you are very large, aren’t you, Lord Lindworm?”

“I suppose so,” he conceded. For a lindworm he was on the smaller end, but few had the misfortune of meeting a lindworm. Or, if they did, the good fortune to survive the encounter and later make size comparisons.

“I cannot see what good it would do me to make you larger,” she said, bafflingly, and proceeded to remove her undergarment.

Davey tried very hard to be a man and not a beast. He did not understand what Ida had hoped to accomplish, beyond embarrassing him, by making young women undress in his presence. He averted his eyes, going to stare out the window. The scent of her grew steadily stronger, but he was able to open the window, which helped.

It was winter, then, which helped too. The cold weakened him.

He thought it might have been fine, if only she hadn’t touched him. Later, he would play that moment over in his head again and again, trying to understand what had compelled her to do such a foolish thing. He had been looking out the open window, hoping the cool breeze would slow his blood and dull his senses enough to get them through the night. And then there was her hand on his scales, a lovely spot of heat, and then there was nothing in his mind but the warm rushing of her blood.

And then it was over.

He slithered over to the little pile of clothing she’d discarded, wondering again what magic Ida had thought would be cast by an undressing. He pushed at the door, and found that it had been locked.

Davey could easily reduce a wooden door to splinters, and everyone in this palace knew it. They hadn’t locked the door to keep him in. They’d locked the door to keep the girl in.

He was suddenly and incandescently angry. What on earth was wrong with these people, locking innocent girls up with a monster just because one of them had given birth to it? They had sat there dithering for weeks about whether to get him the second bride he’d asked for—why would they even consider it?

He was a monster, and he wanted slaying.

(He did rather wish that Ida had summoned one of the heroes she'd helped to do the slaying, rather than sending him to commit atrocities first. He wouldn't have minded being slain at home. It sounded rather peaceful.)

The door, as expected, splintered with ease. He slithered down the hall and down the stairs and through countless corridors, flicking his tongue to catch the scent of his parents. When he reached the door that smelled most strongly of them, he broke that one down too.

The queen screamed. The king yelped. Davey loomed over their bed.

He had no concrete plan beyond the looming. He was very angry, but he wasn’t very good at being angry. Generally he lashed his tail, or ate something that would be particularly crunchy. Words didn’t come easily in anger.

“May I ask,” the queen said when she had composed herself, “what you are doing in our bed chamber on your wedding night? Have you left your bride alone?”

“I’ve eaten my bride.”

“Of course you have,” the queen said. Exasperated, not surprised.

“What are you going to do about it?” he asked.

“Are you going to demand another?” the king asked in return.

“Are you going to give me one? Why don’t you cut her out of my stomach and send her back to her parents with an apology?”

“Ah, yes, I’m certain the partially digested corpse could only improve our international relations.”

This distracted him for a moment from his anger. “How quickly do you think I digest?”

A terrible, wonderful thought occurred to him, and he ceased to loom, sinking down to instead rest his head at the foot of their bed. They did not appear to find this position any less alarming.

“She may still be alive in there.”

The queen gasped. The king wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.

“For God’s sake, Olaf,” she said after a moment.

“What would you have me do?” the king asked her.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Davey offered the obvious solution: “You could cut her out of me.”

“Return to your room, please,” the king said. “We’ll discuss this further in the morning.”

“She won’t be alive in the morning. If you are going to cut me open, you need to do it now.”

The king leaned forward.

“Olaf,” the queen said again, sounding more distraught now than she’d been by the eating of the bride.

“In the morning,” the king repeated.

Davey didn’t return to his room. He roamed the halls, sending many early risers shrieking away. At last he found the prince.

“Will you not kill me?” he asked.

“Not against my father’s command. He wants you in the throne room.”

There was no further talk of slicing him open, when he followed Harald there. The king asked, as soon as they entered, “Will you allow your brother to be married, now?”

Ida would not steer him wrong. She wouldn’t. She must have a plan.

“I must have a wife, not just a bride who makes it not even through a night.”

“If Harald cannot marry,” the queen said, “he cannot produce an heir, and our line will die out.”

“And what should I care for your line? It’s never been my line, has it? You dropped me on the floor, and spared not a thought for me until I grew large enough to press the issue.”

“Must she be a princess?” the king asked.

“Father!” the prince said.

“It doesn’t matter what she is,” Davey said, and slithered away.

“Mother,” he heard the prince say as he left.

“He’s your brother.”

“He’s a monster.”

“If he is a monster it is my fault for making him so, and I’ll not see him slain for my sins, and I’ll not see his blood on your hands.”

He retreated to his room at the top of the tower, and coiled up in the corner. The room was never warm enough, and especially not since winter had come. Only the relief of the meal his body was meant to eat had cut through his cold-blooded misery.

He shouldn’t have done it. But it would make the next few weeks, at least, a bit more bearable. He coiled, and dozed, and ignored the men come to repair his door, and the soldiers come to guard them.

𓆙𓆙𓆙

The last time he’d felt truly, fully himself, outside the escape of reading a scroll, had been in the beautiful summer months spent building his cage.

It had been a long winter, bitterly cold, and he had spent it, as he always did, curled as small as he could make himself, close by the fire, sluggish and exhausted and never warm enough. This climate was not meant for reptiles. He suspected the others hibernated, but the instinct for hibernation seemed to be one of those things cut out by his wavering fragments of humanity.

For once he was glad of winter, for he was certain only the slowing of his blood had kept him from eating Ida, those long months trapped together in their one room cottage, far too small for an adult woman and a still growing lindworm. Far too often he had found himself snapping at her as she walked past, with no thought behind the motion, just as he darted out to catch small vermin crossing his path on summer days.

Fortunately he was not up for much snapping, and she had always stepped easily out of the way, and swatted his snout to bring him back to himself.

When it warmed, he would move too quickly to catch himself or be caught before it was too late.

And so, when it was safe enough for him to venture away from the ever-roaring fire, to be out beneath the sun again, Ida traded potions and poultices with woodsmen of her acquaintance for large quantities of lumber.

Davey knocked out the back wall of their cottage with an axe in his tail, which expended enough energy that he didn’t worry for several days about being overcome by instinct. One of the woodsmen helped build a new frame, which would extend the cottage by many feet, and a blacksmith—not the local one, for Ida didn’t want too many locals knowing of Davey, but a friend from several towns away—built the iron bars that would separate Davey’s part of the cottage from Ida’s. He was aided by Ida’s magic, but it was still the work of many days. During the time when these men worked, Davey went deep into the woods. He sunned himself, and swam, and ran down an elk, which he brought home to Ida, and a wolf, which he ate himself.

Wolves weren’t his favorite, being far too hairy, but Ida refused to eat them at all, so better for her to have the elk.

So determined was he to avoid the men helping Ida that he ventured deeper into the woods than he ever had before, reaching for the first time another cottage. He saw two girls there, with hair a muddy color his eyes could not interpret, and a cow.

He hungered, and turned, and fled.

It was his last jaunt through the woods. As soon as the bars and the frame were done, he and Ida set about the work of building up the new, larger back half of the cottage.

They took turns holding beams in place and nailing them to the frame. If Davey positioned himself just right, the weight of his body could hold the wood in place while his tail operated the hammer, and Ida could be spared the labor. But even then, Davey nearly grown and growing rapidly into a true monster, Ida could seldom be convinced to let him take on her share of work.

It was a good summer. Construction took the bulk of it, a sufficient distraction for now, and when the weather cooled, Davey slid through the barred iron door, and Ida locked it shut behind him, and he worried not at all about devouring her.

Over the next year he was still himself enough to be let out when he had been just fed, and the year after that, he stayed locked up always, but Ida trusted him enough still to arrange that large game would be delivered to him, while she went alone on one last journey.

He had never felt as trapped in his cage as he did in this massive palace.

𓆙𓆙𓆙

The third wedding was the only one he was warned of in advance. The prince appeared at his repaired door to tell him, “Father has found your bride. The wedding shall be in six days. Her name is Marit, and she has a father and sister to mourn her.”

“Then don’t feed her to me.”

“Then stop demanding brides.”

“I can’t stop demanding. You can stop acquiescing.”

“It’s hardly my choice, is it? I’m only the second son, of parents who apparently have qualms about slaying monsters who happen to be relations.”

“In six days, then,” Davey said, and Harald left.

He didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand these people at all. He scarcely understood Ida, these days. But he trusted her, still.

Things come in threes, Ida had told him more times than he could count. Good and evil, nature and magic, everything always in threes. This was the third bride, so probably she would kill him and avenge the others, and then marry Harald, and all would be well.

Of course, in threes didn’t always mean three exactly. It could mean six, or nine, or three hundred. It could even mean a year and a day, which Davey had always found deeply frustrating because a year and a day was only divisible by three in three years out of every four, and no one was planning their year and a day magic correctly around the leap years.

(Whenever he brought this up to Ida, she told him to stop overthinking. He thought that everyone else should stop underthinking; perhaps the timing of the leap year in relation to their spells was the reason magic went wrong.)

But he couldn’t imagine that even the king and queen would allow him to eat six or nine or three hundred brides, so either the third would be the last, or it would be a year and a day. He’d lost count of the days long ago, and had no idea when a year and a day might come to pass. Hopefully it was the third bride.

The stone of the palace warmed much more slowly that the wood of the cottage, and so he still felt the chill deep in his bones, even now all the snow he saw out the windows had melted. Since eating the second bride, he had ventured from his own room hardly at all, days at a time passing more asleep than not.

Perhaps he could have hibernated after all, if Ida hadn’t built their fires so high.

He passed the six days until his third wedding in much the same state. Cold and miserable, hoping desperately for it to end. He thought of the lindworm he’d met the summer he was eleven, deep in the mountains to the north, where Ida had taken him so that she could collect rare, powerful plants and set some budding young hero on the right track.

Davey had wandered, as he was safe to do still in those days, leaving Ida to her business, scarcely seeing her except at bedtime for the better part of a week.

The lindworm had emerged from a deep cavern. He had been well over fifty feet long, with deep, craggy scales so thick they nearly obscured the shrivelled nubbins of his wings. He must have been ancient, possibly old enough to breathe fire. Davey had read once, in a book lent to Auntie Anya by her sister the queen, Anya patiently turning the pages for him while they waited for her breads to bake, that lindworms had no true lifespan, living as long as it took for something fiercer to kill them, and that they grew all their lives, and that when they were three hundred years old they could breathe fire.

“Little brother,” he had said, and Davey had not heard the words; he had felt them. The lindworm hissed at the same time, and Davey was certain for no true reason that the hissing was all any human would take in. The words were for him alone.

Davey had tried to answer, but his words had come out in a human tongue, clearly incomprehensible to the other lindworm.

“Focus,” he had advised. “Find the speech inside yourself. Do not be distracted by the trappings of humanity.”

“Hello,” Davey had managed, in the same fashion, not at all certain how he was doing it.

“You’re that witch woman’s pet.”

“Not a pet.”

“Foolish, to attempt to tame such a thing as we are. You will eat her, someday.”

“I will not.”

“You will. The time will come when the shackles of humanity are nothing to you, when no flesh but human will satisfy your hunger.”

“No.”

“Stay here with me. It has been so long since there has been another here. Stay with me, and I will free you from the witch.”

“No,” he’d said again, and turned, and fled.

He’d stayed close to Ida the rest of their time there, even when it meant hiding behind a pile of rocks, and waiting for long hours as she worked. Three days later the hero she’d been mentoring had slain the other lindworm. He’d cut out its tongue, and brought it to the city as proof of his worth. He’d married a princess, and within a year he’d been king.

Davey had followed Ida home in a daze, confused and frightened, mourning for no good reason. He had never considered the other lindworm’s offer. But watching that man carry off his tongue had felt not unlike having his own tongue cut out.

He had been right, in the end. Davey was always going to be a monster.

𓆙𓆙𓆙

Some guards came to rouse him, on the wedding day. It was the same as all the others: the crown, the crowded hall, the priest, the girl walking slowly across the room.

The others had both cried. This girl looked angry.

Good. Someone ought to be angry. Maybe she would be angry enough to chop off his head.

Not that his would be an easy head to chop off, and he doubted his instincts would let him lie down and take it. But there must be a plan. Ida must have sent him here for some other reason than to kill an endless stream of brides.

Please, please, please, he said to the part of himself that was a monster. I don't want to hurt anyone.

Let this be the one. Let this be the one who stopped him.

𓆙𓆙𓆙𓆙𓆙𓆙𓆙

Find out what happens next in Jenny Prater’s debut novel, Lindworm!