Ruelle
Ihear them before I see them.
Boots on the ridge above me, not from the approaches we prepared but from behind, from the back side of the mountain.
Three of them, moving fast along the ridgeline, coming down toward the cave from above, and they’ve bypassed every compound I placed, every deterrent, every treated surface.
I have three vials in my belt: one frostbark irritant, one contact paralytic, one diluted venom extract. Enough for three people if I’m precise. Not enough if I’m not.
The first one comes over the rock shelf above the cave mouth.
He sees me and doesn’t hesitate; he’s been told what I am, told I’m worth taking alive.
I throw the frostbark vial, and it shatters on the rock at his feet, the compound blooming in a cloud of irritant that hits his face and hands.
He screams and drops to his knees, clawing at his eyes.
The second comes from the left, faster. He’s seen what happened to the first and he’s keeping his hands covered, cloth wrapped around his fists, his face tucked into his collar. Smart. He came prepared for a poisoner.
I throw the paralytic vial, and it hits his chest and shatters, but the cloth absorbs most of the contact and he only stumbles, slows, doesn’t go down.
He reaches me before the compound takes full effect, his cloth-wrapped hand closing on my arm and yanking me forward, and I go with the motion instead of resisting, pulling the frostbark knife from my belt and cutting a line across the back of his hand through the cloth.
He lets go. The frostbark in the cut does its work, and he drops.
The third one is already behind me.
I don’t see the blade. I feel it, a line of heat across my left side, below the ribs, not deep, deep enough to bleed.
I twist away from the second cut, my foot slips on the loose shale, and I go down hard on one knee.
The knife is in my hand, but my left side is wet and the pain hasn’t arrived yet, which means it’s about to arrive all at once.
The third soldier stands over me, bigger than the other two, a short sword in one hand and a coil of rope in the other. The rope is for me. They came to take me, not kill me.
“Easy,” he says. “Gereth pays well. You’ll have a workshop. A lab. Everything you need.”
“I have everything I need.”
“You have a cave and a dying snake.”
The pain arrives. My side lights up, hot and sharp, and I press my hand against the cut and feel the blood between my fingers. Below, on the switchbacks, I hear Sirath. Not words. A noise. The noise of a creature who smells blood on the mountain and knows whose blood it is.
The man hears it too, and he turns.
Sirath comes up the ridge like something out of the old stories, not the careful, controlled creature who measures his bites and holds his venom and burns hares, but something else, something that moves the way the mountain moves when it decides to shed a rock face.
Fast, low, covering the ground between the cave mouth and the ridge faster than I’ve ever seen him move, his claws tearing the shale, his scales fully flushed, every dull patch blazing with color.
The third soldier raises his sword. Sirath doesn’t slow down.
He hits the enemy with his full body weight, and the sword goes spinning off the ridge and the man goes down under nine feet of Ophidian, and the noise Sirath makes is not one I’ve heard from him before, low, sustained, vibrating through the rock under my knees.
Fury. Not the controlled anger of the argument, not the restrained intensity of the anger-sex, but the raw, unprocessed rage of a creature whose person is bleeding on his mountain.
The soldier is pinned, Sirath’s hand around his throat, claws dimpling the leather armor, his fangs an inch from the man’s face.
“Sirath,” I say. “Don’t kill him.”
He doesn’t look at me. He’s vibrating, the venom surging; I can see it in his scales, the color shifting in waves.
“Sirath. Don’t.”
His jaw works. The claws tighten on the soldier’s throat. The man’s eyes are wide. He has stopped struggling.
“Embarrassed soldiers go home,” I say. My voice is steady. My side is bleeding. “Dead soldiers get investigated.”
The moment stretches: his hand on the soldier’s throat, my blood on the snow, the mountain quiet.
He lets go.
The soldier scrambles backward, gasping, and half-runs, half-falls down the ridge. The other two are already gone, the frostbark and the paralytic wearing off enough for them to crawl away.
Sirath turns to me. The rage drops out of his face and what replaces it is worse.
Fear.
He crosses to me in two strides and drops to his knees on the shale, his hands, enormous, scaled, trembling, finding my side, pressing over the cut, his palm covering the entire wound.
“It’s not deep,” I say. “It’s not deep, Sirath.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I know. It’s a cut, not a killing blow. I need to clean it and close it, and I need you to stop shaking because you’re pressing too hard.”
He eases the pressure, his hand staying, his other hand finding my face and tilting it up.
“I smelled your blood,” he says. “From the switchbacks. I smelled it on the wind.”
“I know.”
“If I hadn’t...”
“But you did. You got to me in time.”
His forehead drops against mine, his breath rough, his hand on my side, the blood slowing under his palm.
The mountain is empty. Nine soldiers, all retreating or immobilized: three blistered and screaming on the western slope, two paralyzed on the eastern ledge, two crawling off the ridge, one gone down the switchbacks, one running with bruises on his throat. Nobody dead.
My side hurts. His hands are shaking again. The rage is fading, and what’s underneath is what drove him up the ridge when he smelled my blood.
He hasn’t said it since the cave. He doesn’t need to. His body said it when it cleared thirty feet of ridge faster than I could take a breath.