The Serpent's Shadow
by Mercedes Lackey
Maya Witherspoon had lived most of the first twenty-five years of
her life in her native India. As the daughter of a prominent British
physician and a Brahmin woman of the highest caste, she had known
only luxury. Trained by her father in the medical arts since she
was old enough to read, she graduated from the University of
Delhi as a Doctor of Medicine by the age of twenty-two. Welcomed
into her father's lucrative practice, she treated many of the
wives and daughters of the British military personnel who made
up a large percentage of their patients in the colonial India of
1909.
But the science of medicine was not Maya's only heritage. For Maya's
aristocratic mother Surya had not just defied her family, friends
and religion to marry Maya's father, she had turned her back
on her family's powerful magical traditions as well. For her mother
was a sorceress -- a former priestess of the mystical magics
fueled by the powerful and fearsome pantheon of Indian gods.
Though Maya felt the stirring of magic in her blood, her mother
had repeatedly refused to train her. 'I cannot,' she had said, her
eyes dark with distress, whenever Maya asked. 'Yours is the magic
of your father's blood, not mine...' Surya had never had the chance
to explain this enigmatic statement to her daughter, before cholera
claimed her life. Yet Maya suspected that something far more sinister
than the virulent disease had overcome her powerful mother.
But it was Maya's father's death shortly thereafter which confirmed her
darkest suspicions. For her father was killed by the bite of a
krait, a tiny venomous snake. In the last hours of her mother's
life, in the seeming delirium of her final fever, Surya had repeatedly
warned Maya to beware 'the serpent's shadow.' With the sudden loss
of her father, Maya knew she must flee the land of her birth or face
the same fate as her parents.
In self-imposed exile in London, Maya surrounded herself with every
protection possible. All the magic Maya knew had been learned by covertly
observing her mother, and by cobbling this knowledge together with
the street-magic gleaned from a few genuine fakirs. Her workings were
a mixture of instinct, extrapolation, and trial-and-error. Crude, but
somewhat effective, her spells let Maya hide her household behind a wall
of secrecy in a poorer section of the city. Here, in a small but adequate
house, she lived with only the most loyal of her mother's servants and
her mother's seven unusual 'pets' -- if you could use such a word for
creatures who seemed far more like friends. For Charan, the little
monkey, Rajah, the peacock, Mala, the falcon, Sia and Singhe, the
mongooses, Rhadi, the parrot, and Nisha, the owl, seemed far too
sentient to be ordinary animals. Maya knew that these seven unusual
and loving companions had been in some way special to her mother,
but their secrets were hidden from her, perhaps forever.
In her new home she fought the dual prejudices against her sex and her
race to continue in her medical profession. Only her high scholastic
abilities and her extreme determination enabled her to meet with
any succss, She managed to place herself in a minor position at
a prestigious hospital while she pursued her own medical passions:
helping the poor at a tiny clinic where they welcomed any doctor, and
setting up a small, controversial practice which specialized in 'female
complains' and offered 'absolute discretion.'
But Maya knew she could not hide forever from the vindictive power
which had murdered her parents. She knew in her heart that even
a vast ocean couldn't protect her from 'the serpent's shadow' which
had so terrified her mother. Her only hope was to find a way to master
her own magic: the magic of her father's blood. But who would teach
her? And could she learn enough to save her life by the time her
relentless pursuers caught up with their prey?
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
Back To Main Page