Page 9 of A Drop of Venom

But to my surprise, the one thing I did not want to do was run away.

“What’s your name?” I asked. If my voice was a little breathless, perhaps it could be blamed on having only just woken up.

“I am Terolon,” he said, giving me an elegant bow. “Long ago, I lived in Izaelon, but now I make my home here. I am of no clan.”

He watched me closely as if expecting scorn. But I was certainly in no position to mock or look down upon a male with no family, since I had no family either—at least, none I cared to claim.

“I am Hazel Fain,” I said, and raised up on my knees to give him a wobbly curtsy. “I am also of no clan. I’m most pleased to meet you, Terolon.”

To my surprise, he caught my hand in both of his enormous ones and pressed my palm to his chest, where I felt the rapid twin beating of his hearts.

“I’m most pleased as well, lovely Hazel,” he said, his amber eyes bright. “It has been difficult this past day and half not knowing your name.”

I chose to ignore his claims of my supposed loveliness. Even without a mirror, I was quite aware of not only my plainness but how thin and listless I’d become after nearly eighteen lunars of mistreatment by my cousins.

“Is that why you called me shelshi?” I asked. “Is that a familiar name among your people? A nickname, perhaps? Like the other word, athava?”

“They are,” he said, his expression cautious. “But both have a very specific use.”

I frowned. “Which is…?”

“Athava means my sweetness,” he said, his tongue flicking out to taste the air between us. “There is no direct translation of shelshi to your tongue. But you may say shelshi means my light. For the serpentae, it is how we address our mates.”

The shock of finding myself in the company of a beautiful serpent-man gave way to an even greater sense of an upended world. I pulled my hand free of his grasp, well aware that I could only do so because he allowed it, and sat down hard. My bottom, despite Terolon’s healing venom, was somehow still a bit sore from my rough ride on Cibran’s apple cart.

“Your mate?” I managed to say, clutching the hem of my shift.

“Yes, my sweetness.” He sank down on his coils until his head was level with my own, as if trying to make himself seem smaller—or at least less enormous. “I scented you from my garden and found you where you’d fallen, or been thrown, and left to die.”

His eyes blazed in anger and he let out a hiss that sent chills down my spine, not all of them from fear. When his tongue flicked the air, I pressed my thighs together to hide my very inexplicable reaction.

Perhaps noticing or scenting my uneasiness, his features smoothed and his fury faded. “It is the way of my people to feel in our bones when the goddesses have brought us together with the one whose soul will find comfort and home with our own,” he said. “Never in all my years have I felt like this.” With his fist, he rubbed his chest over his hearts, his expression one of both pain and rapture.

I found myself caught between disbelief and awe. I believed in the Goddess, of course. I saw her workings every moment of every day, and carried her blessing of magic in my blood. Her threads wove through all lives, forging paths and guiding her children, bringing some together and separating others according to her great wisdom.

Had my desperate flight from the misery of servitude at my cousins’ home been meant to bring me here to Terolon’s cave rather than the Coldspell riverfront? It was just so difficult to believe.

“You are far from your homeland,” I said carefully. “You must keep yourself hidden, because I’ve never heard even rumors of a serpent-man in this forest. Perhaps because you’re so isolated, you have seen few women—few females. I may not be…this might not…”

“I lived for many, many years among my own kind, surrounded by females,” he said, interrupting gently and with patience rather than in anger. “And for one who keeps to the shadows, I have still seen and scented many human women. And never have I felt such knowing.” He rubbed his chest again. “I’ve heard it described, of course, but I never imagined such a blessing for myself. I believed…I believed the goddesses had forgotten me.”

My breath caught in my chest.

Had I not felt the same in my darkest days, on my knees scrubbing the floors of my cousins’ house, my face or my back aching from a slap or a beating? Had I not felt abandoned by the Goddess the day my family’s longtime landlord arrived on the doorstep of our home not two weeks after my parents’ death demanding I lie with him as part of my rent?

Had I not sobbed myself to sleep the night my mother whipped me for using my magic to coax our garden into producing a robust harvest despite the drought so we might have good food to sell, only to see the vegetables thrown into the woods so no one would suspect someone in our family of having magic?

The Goddess had healed my heart and kept me strong through all those despairing moments even when my future seemed grim, and I’d always found my way back to the warmth and love of her light.

Terolon looked at me as if there could be no doubt the Goddess—or his trinity of goddesses, who were aspects of the same nurturing Divine—had brought us together. And I couldn’t say with any certainty it wasn’t true when there was something warm and settled in my chest that could well be the Goddess’s own reassuring touch.

Perhaps there was one way to know for certain…

If this was the will of the Goddess, she wouldn’t guide me to a male who’d curse or condemn me for my magic. So before I made any kind of choice—to stay, to go, to do or feel anything at all—I must know one fundamental truth.

“Terolon…” I began, then hesitated.

He leaned close, his gaze searching my face for some hint of my thoughts or intentions. “Yes, my…yes, Hazel?”