Laila’s mind was screaming. Faces flashed through her thoughts: Ruslan’s stretched grin, Eva’s sorrowful eyes. But all of it constricted to one image before her: Séverin. He lay prone on the gondola, a slowpool of blood gathering around him. Laila could hardly breathe. Her fingers shook as she reached for him.
No…
No no no.
“Laila!” called Hypnos, more insistently this time.
Laila touched Séverin, moving the hair out from his forehead, as if he were merely sleeping. He had protected her… as he had always promised to do, and like always, even his protection managed to cut her to the quick.
“If you die,Majnun, then I cannot stay mad at you, and you at least owe me my anger. Let me keep that,” she said, her voice breaking. “Do you hear me? You have to live.”
Laila was convinced that his eyes would flutter open at the sound of her old name for him. She stared at him, willing him to stir.
But he didn’t move.
PART III
21
SÉVERIN
Séverin’s first father was Sloth.
Out of all the sins who fed him, clothed him, berated and cajoled him, it was Lucien Montagnet-Alarie’s oily mark he most wished to erase from his person. Lucien was lazy in the way of a venomous snake sunning its cold blood and colder skin on a rock. Deadliness was merely how he rewarded interruptions to his schedule of revelries and rest, fine food and finer women.
Lucien gave his son no more than what was expected of him: the family name, the sharp line of his jaw, and the pale hue of his skin. The last was an unexpected “gift,” for it let Séverin pass through the society of France as if he were fully one of them.
As a child, Séverin had been fascinated by his father, who seemed so powerful that the world anticipated his whims and supplied them without him ever asking. At the time, Séverin was too young to spot the difference between power and its pinch-mouthed cousin, privilege. He was especially entranced by the sigil of HouseVanth his father wore on the lapel of his jacket: the golden snake swallowing down its own tail.
“What does it mean?” Séverin had asked one day.
Lucien was attending to his correspondence in the main study, and he startled when Séverin spoke. He regarded his son like a dish he had not remembered ordering at a restaurant, with a mixture of faint curiosity and wariness of what might next be expected of him.
“The snake,” Séverin had said.
“Oh,” Lucien said, glancing down at the symbol. He tapped it once. “Infinity, I suppose. Or perhaps, entrapment of humanity. We can never escape ourselves, my boy. We are our own end and beginning, at the mercy of a past which cannot help but repeat itself. Which is why”—he paused to stroke the nose of an elephant statue recently acquired by House Vanth—“we must take what we can before the world has its way with us.”
Lucien had smiled. He looked young. And yet, some of his teeth were black, and loose skin gathered beneath his chin. It unsettled him.
“I don’t like that,” Séverin had said, staring at the ouroboros. Outside, he could hear the footsteps of someone coming to fetch him away.
“Nothing is new, child,” said Lucien. “Everything repeats. The sooner you know that, the happier you’ll be.”
Séverin had disliked his father’s summary. It felt weak and powerless. Surely, those were words of defeat. Surely, if he made a mistake he regretted and learned from… then history would not repeat itself.
And yet it had.
The moment the explosion ripped through Ruslan’s gondola…the moment a chunk of wood splintered the boat where he and Laila crouched and waited… it was like muscle memory. To go to her. To shield her body with his.
To protect her above all else.
In those seconds before he lost consciousness, Séverin felt a line drawn between this moment and the one in the Palais des Rêves, the moment where he’d flung himself over Laila and left Tristan’s throat at the mercy of a blade-brimmed hat.
That moment had been the floor on which his life pivoted sharply from what he had imagined. That moment had neatly sheared away all the things he thought he’d wanted, scraped clean the dreams he’d once held, and left room for something beyond imagination.
Perhaps his father was right in one way.
History had repeated itself, but it was a matter of perspective. The ouroboros was merely a serpent biting its own tail. Held far enough away, it became a lens through which to focus the world beyond it.
