Page 5 of A Drop of Venom

The impact of hitting the mossy stone at the bottom knocked the wind out of me. I lay still, my battered body blessedly numb.

A chorus of angry voices drifted down from above, echoing in the ravine. “Lord Vedast, your wound—” someone began.

“I’ll live,” Vedast snapped. He sounded breathless and in pain, though I was too dazed or too close to death to enjoy it much. “We’ll take the weapons we found and go directly to Coldspell, to a healer sympathetic to the king. It’s only a short ride.”

“Should we carry up the witch’s body to be burned?” another of the guards asked.

“Let her rot where she fell,” Vedast spat. “Some creature will eat her and scatter her bones. There will be no decent burial for the likes of her.”

“Then we should at least fetch your manacles⁠—”

“I don't give a damn about those manacles,” Vedast shouted, then grunted as if yelling had hurt. “I’m bleeding, you idiot!”

Finally, their voices faded as the men headed back to their horses and left me to my fate. The forest fell quiet, the only sounds the wind in the leaves and a few birds.

I didn’t open my eyes. I couldn’t. My eyelids were much too heavy.

Maybe I was dying. My body felt like a bruised and broken wreck, but the pain was distant. That was a mercy, at least. And I lay in the forest’s embrace, where my magic made me feel most at home. That was a mercy too.

One of the few sensations that registered in my clouded mind was the weight of the enchanted manacle circling my wrist. The pain was little more than a throbbing, burning ache now. I didn’t want to die with a witch’s irons binding me, but I couldn’t move. And even if I could, I had no key with which to free myself.

If it weren’t for these irons, I might not have minded so much that this ravine would be my place of final repose.

Hot tears—unbidden and unwanted—slid from under my lids. They trickled down my temples and into my hair.

Gradually, through my numbness and grief, I became aware the forest had fallen silent. No bird song, no rustling of little animals in the underbrush, not even leaves fluttering in the breeze. Had I lost my sense of hearing in my last moments?

No, a soft sound reached my ears from somewhere nearby—a gentle susurration of something large and heavy sliding across mossy stone.

The quiet movement was the very last sound I heard before I faded away.

CHAPTER THREE

TEROLON

My tongue flicked out, tasting the warm midday air.

An unfamiliar sweetness teased my senses and slid down the entire long length of my spine, making my fangs ache and the tip of my tail vibrate.

What is this?

The breeze seldom found its way through the thick forest and high stone walls surrounding my basking garden. And yet this honeyed scent drifted in the single arched doorway and swirled around me like a gift from the very goddesses I’d long since believed had turned their backs on me.

Warm and sleepy under the midday sun, I opened my eyes and blinked drowsily up at the cloudless blue sky. I spent all my daytime hours here, soaking up warmth during these waning autumn days before the chill of winter drove me deep inside my cave to the hot springs and it would be months until I saw the sky again.

The scent grew stronger, bringing with it a strange new kind of energy that soaked through my scales and coursed through my veins. It roused me from my half-asleep basking state to alertness more quickly than even the sharpest pangs of hunger. But it wasn’t lack of food that made me draw my thick coils beneath me and straighten my upper body until my head was nearly level with the top of the surrounding walls.

The scent was…ambrosia. It was perfection. It was mine.

Tracking the source of the entrancing scent with flicks of my tongue, I undulated through the garden doorway and across the sun-dappled forest floor, following a path I often took toward the hidden mouth of a cold spring near a rocky ravine. It was closer to a well-traveled road than I preferred to go in daylight, but I’d never seen or scented a human there. Creatures of the forest often came to the spring to drink, especially during the summer months, making it a good place to lie in wait for prey.

Perhaps this was a new kind of creature, one that would be delicious to eat. That didn’t seem quite right, though, as the stronger the scent became, the more my sartras stirred within my slit and my seed pouch heated with anticipation. The tip of my tail vibrated, stirring the thick layer of autumn leaves on the forest floor until I stilled it for the sake of stealth.

As I approached the spring, I discovered the honeyed fragrance wasn’t coming from the direction of the water—rather, it originated from within the ravine. And it had an unpleasant, bitter edge to it now, one that made my fangs ache to envenomate something. While I killed to eat regularly, I hadn’t experienced the drive to kill in anger in many years. Not since I’d left my parents’ court and began my exile.

And yet in this moment I felt quite compelled to sink my fangs into a throat and enjoy the death throes that followed.

Every sense on alert for danger, I entered the ravine at its mouth, gliding almost soundlessly over the mossy stones and damp earth.