Sirath
She’s at the workbench before dawn, all the retained sample vials lined up on the shelf, the assay stone in front of her, her notebook open to a page covered in numbers.
She did something with them while I slept. I can tell by the way the vials are arranged, out of their usual order, the labels angled where she pulled them fast.
I uncurl and watch her from across the cave. She’s staring at the notebook, not writing, just staring, and the glow-stone catches her face and the expression on it is one I haven’t seen from her before.
Confusion. I’ve never seen that on her.
“Something’s wrong,” I say.
She looks up. “My tolerances are declining. All of them.”
I sit up. “What does that mean?”
“It means the samples I’ve been carrying for years, the ones that represent every venom I’ve built immunity to, are reacting differently when I test my blood against them. The reactions are weaker. My immunity is eroding.”
“From my bites?”
“I don’t know.” She picks up the assay stone and turns it in her hands. “Maybe. Probably. The blue-ringed compounds are declining fastest, and those are the closest structural match to your venom. That can’t be coincidence. But I don’t understand the mechanism.”
I do.
The understanding arrives in my body before it arrives in my mind, a cold recognition in my glands, in the need that has been surging toward her for weeks.
Every bite I’ve given her has been doing this, every small dose, every morning. Her body accepts my venom quietly, systematically replacing everything else in her blood.
I’ve been eating her a little more every day.
“It’s the bonding,” I say.
She looks at me. “What?”
“The bonding in the venom. The gold fraction on your stone.” My voice sounds wrong in my own ears, flat, the way I talk when something is too big and I make it small to hold it.
“It’s designed to reorganize a mate’s body around the Ophidian’s chemistry.
That’s what bonding is. The mate’s immune system rebuilds, and other tolerances get displaced. ”
She’s very still. “You know this,” she says. “You’ve known this.”
“Every Ophidian knows. The elders teach it.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t think doses this small would be enough to start the process. I thought it required a full bonding bite. I was wrong.”
The silence in the cave is heavy.
“Every bite,” she says, her voice controlled in the way it gets when she’s holding something back. “Every morning. Your venom has been reorganizing my immune system. And you knew this was possible.”
“I knew bonding does this. I didn’t know small doses would trigger it.”
“But you knew it was a risk.”
I don’t answer, because the answer is yes.
She stands and walks to the workbench, putting her hands flat on the surface the way she does when she needs to hold something solid. “How fast?” she says.
“I don’t know. I’ve never bonded. My father died the year I was born. The only time I’ve ever seen it was once, when I was eleven.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
The words come out of a place thirty years deep. “His name was Thassren. He was old. His human mate slept at the back of their cave. He said her body rebuilt entirely around his venom.”
Ruelle doesn’t move. She’s listening with her whole body.
“I was eleven. Passing through. He let me stay a night. I watched his mate sleep. Her breathing was shallow. I asked him if she was happy.”
“What did he say?”
“He said: I eat her a little more every day. Every bite takes a piece of what she was and replaces it with what I need her to be.”
The cave is quiet.
“One night,” Ruelle says. “You stayed one night.”
“One night.”
“And he told you this. An old male, dying, describing his own bond to an eleven-year-old.”
“Yes.”
“Did she say anything? The mate. Did you hear her speak?”
“She was asleep the whole time.”
“So you have his words. Not hers.”
“I have what I saw.”
Ruelle throws her hands up.
“Then we find another way. I fix the gland damage directly, stop the overproduction at the source. Your body stops overproducing, my tolerances stabilize.”
“You don’t know how to do that.”
“I don’t know how to do that YET.” She turns to face me. “I am not going to stop treating you. Stopping means you die. And I’m not going to let you die because of a story an old male told you when you were eleven.”
“It’s not a story. It’s what’s happening to your blood right now.”
“What’s happening to my blood is a problem I can solve if you give me time. I’m a poisoner. This is what I do. I find the mechanism and I fix it.”
“And if you can’t fix it? If the displacement keeps going? If you lose everything?”
“Then I lose it solving a problem. Not running from one.”
“I need to go outside,” I say.
I stand and walk past her, through the main chamber, through the gap in the rock, and the cold air hits my scales and I keep walking. Down the switchback, past the vent, into the scrub at the tree line where the hares run and the frostbark grows and nobody can see me.
I sit on a rock in the cold and press my palms against my face and breathe.
Every bite I’ve given her. Every morning. Every time she tilted her head and bared her throat and made that low noise and I bit down and delivered the dose and pulled back and told myself it was treatment.
It was treatment. It was also bonding, both at the same time, and I knew what bonding does and I did it anyway, because the alternative was dying and she was right there and her body was saying yes and mine was saying finish it, and I held back and held back and held back and it wasn’t enough.
The small doses were enough. The holding back was enough. The bonding started anyway, quiet, incremental, each bite taking a piece of what she was and replacing it with me.
I hear Thassren’s voice. I hear my own.
I sit in the cold until the anger at myself burns low enough to walk back.