Girl, Serpent, Thorn Read Online Free PDF Page A

understand.”
----
    Soraya woke with a ragged gasp in the middle of the night. She’d had another dream about the Shahmar.
    The dreams were different each time, but they always ended the same. The Shahmar would appear to her and raise one gnarled, scaled finger to point at her hands. Soraya would look down and see the veins on her hands turn dark green, but this time she couldn’t stop them as they spread over her whole body in a final, irreversible transformation. A terrible pressure built inside of her, like something was about to burst out of her skin, but just when she couldn’t bear it anymore, she would wake, the Shahmar’s laughter still echoing in her ears.
    The first story Soraya had ever heard was her own—the story of the div who had cursed her mother’s future child. The first story Soraya had read for herself in a book stolen from the palace library was the story of the Shahmar: the prince who had become so twisted by his crimes that he had transformed into a serpentine div.
    Soraya had looked in horror at the illustration of green scales growing along the young man’s arms, and then her eyes had shifted to the green lines running down her wrist. She had slammed the book closed, promising herself that if she was very good and kept bad thoughts away, her curse would never warp her mind or transform her body any more than it already had.
    There were other divs that may have been more frightening toa child—wrathful Aeshma with his bloody club, or corpse-like Nasu, who spread corruption wherever she went—but the Shahmar was the one she had revisited over and over again, horrified and yet unable to keep away. But soon she didn’t need to seek out the Shahmar, because he began to visit her dreams, standing over her and laughing as his past became her future.
    Soraya sat up, trying to erase the images from her dream and that feeling of pressure building under her skin. She had never told anyone about her fear of transformation, not even her mother. And maybe that was why Tahmineh couldn’t understand Soraya’s urgent need to find a way to lift this curse, or why it seemed so pointless to be afraid of a div. Soraya was far more afraid of herself and of what she might become.
    In one hasty motion, Soraya rose from the bed and opened the doors to the golestan. The moon was a sliver tonight, but the embers of the fire on the roof still burned, giving the normally vivid and varied colors of her garden the same orange hue. The grass was cold, wet, and prickly against her bare feet as she padded across the garden to the door in the wall. She felt like a sleepwalker, taking one step and then the next as if compelled by something outside herself. She didn’t care that it was the middle of the night. She didn’t care that she was in her nightdress, her feet bare. All she cared about was the monster waiting for her in the dungeon beneath the palace.
    There was no passageway that would take her down into the dungeon—that path had been blocked off before Soraya was born. Instead, she had to walk along the edge of the palace wall, moving down toward the far corner, where she knew she would find a small, unassuming doorway that opened onto a set of stairs leading down.
    She was being completely careless, and not just because her hands and feet were bare, or her clothing inappropriate. She had no idea what she would do once she reached the dungeon. There would be guards, wouldn’t there? How would she sneak past them?And yet, she couldn’t keep herself away from that shadowed doorway yawning before her. And as she reached it, as she stood at the head of the steps and stared down into the void below, she knew she would find a way—she had to find a way. Nothing else mattered to her, nothing else existed, nothing could stop her—
    A harsh ringing sound to her right interrupted her thoughts, and she felt the bite of metal along the base of her