Page 60 of Blood of the Sands

I glanced down to find tiny red dots adorning my bare skin. It was as if I had been pricked my hundreds of pins across the entire surface of my chest. I frowned as I scratched at it again, but the sight didn’t change except maybe to get even redder.

Perhaps I was sensitive to the shrubs, although it seemed an awfully inconvenient time to find out. I had lived among this flora and fauna my whole life and had never had such a reaction. I would just have to be careful to touch as little of my skin as possible to the leaves.

I turned to my work again, and the branch fractured further, hanging on to the main plant by the barest splinter. Before I could fully detach it, the itching came again, now spreading down my arms. I unwrapped my vest from my hands, finding the same odd red markings on my palms.

Heat flushed through my body as if I were suffering from dehydration even though I had just drunk my fill. More worrying though, was the taste of copper that coated my tongue. I brought my fingers to my mouth, bringing them away to find them coated in blood. I was bleeding from my gums.

Dizziness followed the heat, and I swayed. I would have toppled if not for the bush, which I grabbed as gravity threatened to bring me to the ground. Unfortunately, my hand closed around the branch I had been working on and it snapped after just a few moments of supporting my weight.

My breath came in short, frantic pants as I lay at the edge of the spring. Try as I might, I couldn’t slow it down to clear my head and figure out what could possibly be happening to me. Maybe it was a delayed reaction to the drug in my dinner the night before. No matter what had happened though, the outcome was the same. Unless I could recover quickly, I would die out here.

I needed a plan. My eyes slid shut. Maybe if I just rested for a moment and gathered myself, I could figure out what to do.

Chapter Nineteen

The Viper

Itrudged doggedly up the side of another dune, the sun hot on my back. Sweat dripped down my temples, pooling at the edges of my mask and soaking my tunic. I was without my leather pauldrons as I hadn’t been wearing them when I slept last night, although I was glad I had left my mask on despite the privacy of my tent. If I had gone without it, I might be facing this challenge bare faced—a thought that made my stomach churn uncomfortably.

Still, the heaviness of my clothes, damp with perspiration, reminded me of my most pressing issue. The constant need that plagued all who called the desert home.

Water.

I might have an option if the situation got too dire, but for now I would suffer on, hoping to find an oasis or a spring. I trudged on for what felt like hours. Cramps began rippling through my thighs and I gritted my teeth against them.

As they spread up toward my back, I paused, taking a deep breath in. On the exhale, I focused on all that pain, trying to think back on Lord Alasdar’s lessons on accepting agony and letting it strengthen me.

The pain crashed through my body as I turned my attention to it, like one of the waves of the distant sea. I refused to let it pull me under. My magic responded in the way I had hoped, focusing in my skull to a hard a lethal thing.

That is what would carry me through to survival.

Bolstered by the hard edges of my power, I soldiered on. Finally, a splotch of green on the horizon ignited my hope that water was imminent. I hurried toward it only to hesitate as I grew close enough to pick out individual shapes.

Huddled among the smallest patch of greenery was a human form. I crouched down quickly, not wanting to draw attention to myself if it was another rider in the Trials. While it was forbidden to kill another competitor in the Trials, nothing was stopping any of the other riders from trying to hinder me. If they stood against me, I couldn’t guarantee that they wouldn’t get hurt by my resistance, and I couldn’t afford a misstep.

After a minute of tense stillness, the slumped form hadn’t moved. I inched closer, curious. Perhaps they had not yet awoken from their drug-induced slumber, although it seemed unlikely given how long I had been alert.

Drawing closer, moving with less caution as it was clear the person was numb to my presence, my stomach did an odd lurch. Eyes closed, face tipped to the side, I stared full into Keera’s face.

“Sands,” I spat, wondering how we had managed to find each other in the vast expanse of the wilderness once more. Even as I said it though, I frowned at her appearance. Blood trickled sluggishly from one nostril and an odd rash decorated her skin. The rise and fall of her chest was rapid, indicating that she was alive and unwell.

I fell to my knees beside her. At least if I found out what had befallen her, I could be sure to avoid it myself. Looking closer, my gaze caught on where more rivulets of blood leaked from cracks at the corner of her mouth and coated her teeth. My breath hissed out harshly through my teeth.

I had seen this before.

Such uncontrollable bleeding was a symptom of a poison made from the distilled venom of pit vipers. It was a horrible death, blood leaking slowly from more and more orifices until the victim was completely exsanguinated or suffocated on the fluid filling their lungs over a course of days.

It was a favorite poison of Lord Alasdar’s—a slow and horrible death for those who stood against him or a torture as he withheld the antidote until somebody acquiesced to his requests. Even though I had stood stoically at his side as these sentences were carried out, even hunted the vipers needed for the poison, the sight of the bleeding victims haunted me more than I cared to admit.

Now, they wore Keera’s face. But how had she been poisoned?

I looked around, but the only notable features of our surroundings were a bubbling spring and a handful of stubborn bushes clinging around the edge. I approached the spring and leaned in cautiously. Instead of the slightly mineral scent of fresh well water, a stronger, sharper scent of sulfur wafted over my face. I pulled back with a grimace. I wouldn’t be drinking here.

My attention drew back to Keera as a weak cough shuddered through her. I scowled. Once again, she was complicating what was once the straight-forward task of winning the Trials.

Maybe if I left her here to die, she would stop visiting my dreams. Or maybe her face would still fill my sleeping hours, but now with blood dripping from her mouth and eyes. After all, she had not left me behind when it would have been all too easy to do nothing. Besides, somebody had clearly tried to poison her, and given my reputation, it would be all too easy to pin such foul play on me, which I couldn’t afford.

These were the reasons I repeated to myself as I bent down and hoisted her off the ground and draped her over my shoulders. I grunted—she weighed noticeably more than when I’d once slung her over Alza’s hindquarters.