In the Serpent's Wake Read online

  Also by Rachel Hartman

  Seraphina

  Shadow Scale

  Tess of the Road

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2022 by Rachel Hartman

  Cover art copyright © 2022 by Simon Prades

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! GetUnderlined.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hartman, Rachel, author.

  Title: In the serpent’s wake / Rachel Hartman.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Random House Children’s Books, [2022] | Summary: “Tess Dombegh sails south as a spy, hunting for evidence of politically motivated crimes while also hunting for the last World Serpent that could save her friend Pathka”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021016138 (print) | LCCN 2021016139 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-101-93132-5 (trade) | ISBN 978-1-101-93133-2 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 978-0-593-48720-4 (int’l) | ISBN 978-1-101-93134-9 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Fantasy. | Spies—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.H26736 In 2022 (print) | LCC PZ7.H26736 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9781101931349

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  Penguin Random House LLC supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to publish books for every reader.

  ep_prh_6.0_139089996_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Rachel Hartman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Cast of Characters

  Glossary

  About the Author

  For Karen New:

  It was the least I could do.

  Prologue

  Once there was a girl named Tess,

  Who’d got herself in a wretched mess.

  She’d sneaked out late and been quite wild.

  She’d finally borne a bastard child.

  In consequence of all her sin,

  She became a servant to her twin.

  She kept her hopes and dreams tamped down

  Until the wedding day rolled around.

  Sweet Jeanne, so innocent, wed a duke,

  While Tess got drunk and fought and puked

  And brought the evening to a close

  By breaking the duke’s brother’s nose.

  The road, the road, the beckoning road

  (Seraphina her boots bestowed).

  Tess ran off, ashamed and bowed,

  Along the endless road.

  In Trowebridge she found a workshop

  Where quigutl toiled on thniks nonstop.

  Her old friend Pathka was there in chains

  And forced to work for worldly gains.

  Tess helped him escape that nest,

  So he told her of his mystical quest:

  Deep underground in a cavern vast

  A huge World Serpent was said to exist.

  Pathka hoped to join dreams with it,

  For that would constitute quigutl bliss.

  Tess didn’t quite believe, but knew

  That Pathka’s purpose could be hers, too.

  The road, the road, the endless road,

  Tess took clothes from a hapless clod.

  Pathka taught her to steal her food,

  Along the wondrous road.

  From dawn to dusk, they walked all day,

  And met strange folk along their way:

  Two louts and an old man on the run,

  Some shepherdesses and a singing nun.

  They went spelunking for the serpent’s trail,

  Pathka’s child, Kikiu, on their tail.

  And as she walked, Tess understood

  That walking on was a definite good.

  She let herself look back and feel,

  Process her grief and begin to heal.

  Her child, long dead, she learned to mourn,

  And now looked forward to each new dawn.

  The road, the road, the wondrous road!

  These are the gifts that it bestowed:

  Perspective, forgiveness, a lightened load,

  Along the healing road.

  Tess joined a road crew and got to work,

  Tamping roadbed and moving dirt.

  Pathka searched in the caverns deep,

  But of the serpent there was no peep.

  Tess doubted that the monster was real,

  And that’s when she fell down a hole.

  The tunnel led to a cavern huge

  Beneath the monastery of St. Prue’s.

  The monks above knew about the snake

  That lived underground and made the earth shake.

  Tess made a friend, one Frai Moldi,

  Took him underground, the serpent to see.

  The road, the road, the healing road.

  They saw the serpent; the serpent glowed.

  Comfort and joy is what it showed:

  The end o
f an endless road.

  Pathka stayed and dreamed with it,

  But Tess couldn’t quite bring herself to quit

  The road that long had been her home.

  She carried on south, continued to roam.

  She helped a maid escape a priest,

  Arrived in Segosh, and decided to rest.

  She spent the winter with Josquin dear,

  Who helped her grapple with one last fear.

  Her former lover, Will by name,

  Had forced himself on her without shame.

  She’d blamed herself for not being strong,

  Rather than the man who’d done her wrong.

  The road, the road, the endless road,

  The past never ended; on it flowed.

  Will that villain get what he’s owed,

  Upon the winding road?

  Tess had abandoned one last dream:

  To make a splash on the scholarly scene.

  At the Academy she gave a talk

  On what she’d found on her long walk.

  The masters lauded her telling and showing,

  Then sought the serpent without her knowing.

  They killed the creature for science’s sake;

  Pathka, bound to it, felt his mind break.

  Kikiu rushed in to save her kin,

  Blaming Tess for all, to Tess’s chagrin.

  To save Pathka’s life, Tess offered her arm,

  Which Pathka bit, transferring the harm.

  The road, the road, the winding road,

  We try our best, but our best is flawed.

  Pathka’s mind wasn’t quite restored,

  There on the striving road.

  Seraphina then came to town,

  And gave Tess a mission from the Crown.

  Tess didn’t like to leave Josquin,

  But the time had come for her to move on.

  She went to the port town of Mardou

  To find a countess and join her crew.

  Young Jacomo, he found her there.

  He told her her twin was pregnant and scared.

  But Tess wasn’t ready to go along;

  As far as she’d come, she didn’t feel strong.

  She asked Jacomo to come away;

  They’d travel the road for one more day.

  The road, the road, the striving road,

  The past and future ebbed and flowed.

  On the horizon adventure glowed,

  The never-ending road.

  One

  Remember, Worthy One:

  The world knew nothing at first. Then it gave birth to plants, who noticed what sunlight tasted like, and worms, who reveled in the luxuriant touch of soil. Soon the world’s bright birds were perceiving the color of sound, its playful quigutl discerned the shapes of smells, and myriad eyes of every kind discovered sight and saw differently.

  Behind these senses were minds—so many! The world was too vast to fit into just one mind; it needed millions of them to consider itself from every possible angle.

  The difficulty with minds is that each perceives itself as a separate thing, alone. And so the minds spin stories to bridge the gaps between them, like a spider’s web. There are a million stories, and yet they are all one.

  But come, Mind of the World. Open your eyes.

  We have teased apart one filament, which might be a beginning.

  * * *

  Once upon a time (the world always starts with time), a dragon scholar climbed the stairs of an inn in the bustling port city of Mardou.

  There were fifty-six stairs. It only felt like twice as many as yesterday.

  The dragon was in human form, a saarantras; they wouldn’t have fit in the stairwell otherwise. They paused on each landing, leaning on a hooked cane. Dragons shouldn’t feel irritated or bitter, but Scholar Spira was usually in enough pain to feel a bit of both.

  Today their irritation was directed at Professor the dragon Ondir, who seemed determined to meddle endlessly with Spira’s expedition. Their bitterness was for their knees, which gritted and stabbed with every step as if they were full of broken glass.

  At the top of the stairs, muffled voices were audible behind the professor’s door. Spira couldn’t discern the words, but a sniff at the doorknob answered their most pertinent question. The person they’d come to complain about—the person Ondir had foisted onto Spira at the last minute, whose hundred barrels of pyria were even now being loaded onto the Sweet Jessia—had arrived before them. This was going to be awkward.

  Spira feared no awkwardness, however. Spira was born awkward.

  They flung wide the door without knocking.

  “Enter,” said Professor the dragon Ondir, rather too late.

  The room was large and well appointed, with a view of the sea. A four-poster bed loomed at the end, curtains drawn (like a market stall, Spira thought). The right wall was dominated by windows, the left by a broad, roaring hearth.

  Ondir, whose chair faced the door, was tall and gaunt like a proper saarantras (and utterly unlike Spira). His guest, facing him, looked to be much shorter. Spira could see only tightly curled hair, so fair as to be almost white.

  “Lord Hamish, have you met Scholar Spira, leader of our expedition?” said Ondir.

  “We weren’t properly introduced,” said the pale man, leaping up to perform the elaborate genuflections Southlanders called courtesy.

  Dragons generally ignored such performative nonsense and never bothered learning to distinguish one degree of courtesy from another. Spira had bothered. Spira had Tathlann’s syndrome; their egg had been ripped from the maternal oviduct before the last, crucial hormonal infusions. Spira had no maternal memories, none of the basic knowledge other dragons hatched with: language; flight; who was likely to eat you. Ondir had once calculated that a dragon with Tathlann’s syndrome must study four times harder just to make up for that congenital deficit.

  Spira had taken it upon themself to study 6.3 times harder. It paid off in surprising ways.

  Lord Hamish gave five-sixteenths courtesy—the tiniest increment more than they deserved. Either the man was insulting them, or he had an idiosyncratic sense of humor. Spira didn’t care which; the fact got filed away for later.

  His lordship, pale and petite, was dressed head to toe in cream-colored wool. His doublet and breeches were expensively cut but almost aggressively unadorned. His soft boots were the color of parchment, and his earrings (four per ear, very unusual) looked like little woolly cocoons. The only contrasting darkness on his person was a pair of smoked-glass spectacles.

  He finished his manner-dance, saying, “Thank you for agreeing to take me along.”

  Spira had agreed to no such thing. Given a choice, Spira wouldn’t be on this expedition themself. The risks outweighed the benefits by more than sixty-eight to one. The scholars in the high towers of the Mootseye had calculated the precise ratio out to twenty decimal places and concluded thereby that the expedition should be led by their most expendable researcher, the one who made everyone uncomfortable.

  Spira considered disconcerting others a cultivated skill, in fact. They aimed their most off-putting stare at Lord Hamish and said, “Are those your hundred barrels of pyria cluttering up my hold and endangering my expedition?”

  Lord Hamish’s face fell in confusion. “One hundred? I requested half that amount.”

  “Only half are yours,” Professor the dragon Ondir cut in. “The rest are ours.”

  “What do we want with pyria?” said Spira. Even without maternal memories, they had a reflexive horror of the stuff. It had been the Goreddi knights’ most potent dragon-slaying weapon for centuries. In this era of peace with humankind, it was appalling to think the oily substance still existed in great enough quantity to fi
ll barrels.

  “I expect it will have nautical applications,” said Ondir. “It burns underwater. You could douse the Polar Serpent with it, unless you’ve formulated some better plan to kill it?”

  Lord Hamish was physically incapable of turning paler, and yet Spira could smell that the blood had drained from his face. That was a sign of upset; Spira filed it away.

  “I’ve made no such plan,” said Spira, eyes widening ingenuously for Lord Hamish’s benefit; Ondir wouldn’t notice. “I must have misunderstood your orders.”

  This was a lie; they’d understood the professor perfectly well. Spira kept one eye on Lord Hamish, however, and noted his look of relief and gratitude.

  It was a map to where a wedge could be driven.

  “How else are we to study the serpent?” said Ondir slowly, as if explaining to a hatchling. “It gets too cold at the pole for us to live there for any extended period. Did you hope to bring it home alive? I don’t see how. Perhaps you’d send in a team of hardy quigutl to observe it in its natural environment? They’re unreliable; they’d forget to report back.”

  Ondir had another reason for wanting the serpent dead. If Spira could goad the professor into saying it aloud, Lord Hamish might become upset enough to quit the expedition. The pyria would still be aboard—it seemed to be Ondir’s pyria, ultimately—but at least Spira wouldn’t have to babysit an irritating human stranger for the entire voyage.

  “The serpents are reputed to be sentient beings,” said Spira. “Surely I should try to find a way to communicate with it. Wouldn’t we learn more by talking to it than by cutting it up?”

  “These serpents should not exist,” cried Ondir. “We’ve run the equations; they’re impossible. Unless and until we understand how they work, none of us can call ourselves knowledgeable. None of us are safe. If nature makes exceptions to its own rules, then what can we rely on? Unless you think this animal has a grasp of higher mathematics and can explain itself on that level—and why would it have language at all? Whom does it have to talk to?—we’re much better off studying it in pieces.”