Chapter 19

Chapter Nineteen

The Viper

I trudged 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.

In truth though, my magic curled like a hunting dog happily around its master’s feet as I began to carry Keera along. Letting her die would be a waste, just as Lord Einil’s and Oren’s deaths had been foolish. Magic filled Keera’s being to the brim, and even if she could not control it yet she could make a fearsome weapon.

If only I could convince her to help Lord Alasdar and me heal the desert, instead of blindly following Kelvadan’s folly.

I bit my tongue as my knee hit the ground with a painful thud. It wasn’t the first time I had stumbled in the past hour. The bolstering of my magic with pain seemed to have lost its effectiveness, my power more interested in the woman draped across my back than the ache of my muscles.

With a sigh of defeat, I lowered her to the ground, sitting heavily beside her. We hadn’t been lucky enough to happen upon another water source since we left the poison spring in our wake. I rubbed at the tunic where it stuck to my shoulders and my fingers came away wet with crimson.

Looking at Keera I found that the rivulets of blood dripping from her mouth and nose came faster now. Peering even closer, I spied the red shadow of blood in her ears as well. She wouldn’t make it much farther without the antidote, and neither of us would survive long without water.

I glanced around, but no signs of salvation lay in sight.

Then again, nobody was around to see me use my last resort. I chewed the inside of my cheek as I stared at my unconscious charge. As she inched closer to death, I doubted she would remember many of my actions when she woke. Still, I had decided to save her to ensure that my record in the Trials was spotless as it could be, considering I had already thrown Keera and myself into a pit of quicksand. Then again, she couldn’t very well say anything about that without admitting she had been attempting to sabotage her own team as well.

Despite all this, doubt gnawed at me at using my magic so dramatically in the Trials. I was supposed to overcome these challenges using the strength of my body alone.

If I didn’t though, I might fail, and the desert would continue to shred at the seams. And Keera would die.

Slowly, I pushed to my feet, letting my bare hands play through the sand as I levered myself up. For once, I was glad to be without my gloves, the unfettered connection to the earth helping awaken my connection to the desert around me. Standing now, I turned my face up to the sky and began unspooling the knot of power at the base of my skull .

The whispers of the desert in my mind, quiet as I had carried Keera, grew in volume until I could see them—taste their mad power. I grit my teeth to not get lost in the mad tangle of life and death intermingled in the desert around me, instead grasping on to the fabric of nature.

Holding my arms out before me, I clenched my fists and ripped , rending through the stillness of the air around me.

A crack of thunder. A flash of light behind closed eyelids.

I snapped my eyes open, not even realizing I had closed them, just as the first drops of rain began to fall. They pinged off my mask and were quickly soaked up by the dry sand at my feet. Within moments, fragile green tendrils pushed through the baked earth, long dead roots of plants awakening in sudden rearrangement of the universe.

But I stood frozen in place. The power still coursed through me, my sense of self having tangled in the loose fibers of the fabric I tore. The sound in my skull was not voices but a long, unending shriek, and I was helpless to fight against it.

I screamed along with them, staring up at the sky, paralyzed by the same storms that had taken hold of me as a child. If I just had my knife, I could stab it into my thigh to give myself a sensation to ground on to, but I had nothing.

I buckled to my knees and pitched forward dangerously. Then, my palms landed, and the world tipped sideways. The screaming was gone, although the rain still pattered around me. Whatever madness had held me hostage though had released me from its clutches.

Staring down at my hands, I jolted at the sight that greeted me. My left had unknowingly landed on Keera’s bare arm, her flesh fevered and soft under my fingers. Just as when I had tightened my hand at her throat, my magic zeroed in on the point of contact, shivering in still anticipation.

I stared for a long moment before coming back to myself. When the light rainfall began to soak through my hood to my hair, I yanked my hands away, reminded of my purpose.

Casting around me, I looked for a way to collect the water gently pattering from the sky, but I did not have a skin or a basin. There was only one thing on either of our persons that was not made of fabric.

I turned away from Keera and raised my trembling fingers to my face. With slow, even motions, I pulled the mask off and turned the metal contraption up to the sky. It could only hold a small amount of rain before the water began leaking out the eye and mouth holes, but it was enough.

Again and again, I let it fill with a few mouthfuls of water before gulping them down. Once my throat no longer felt glued shut and my lips stopped threatening to crack with dryness, I hesitated.

Keera needed to drink too, and she needed the antidote to the poison.

I shifted on my knees, turning toward her, and reminding myself that she could not see me, unconscious as she was. Shuffling forward, I tipped a few drops of water from my mask into her open lips. Her tongue darted out to lap at them eagerly, despite her blindness to all else around her.

The light rain had rinsed away some of the blood clinging to her, but the odd red rash and the rasping of her breath remained. Already, the rain began to slow, even the magically induced storm as short as the ephemeral showers of the rainy season.

Quickly, I raised my mask to the sky one last time, letting as much water as I could pool in the recesses. Setting it carefully on the ground, I cast around for the plants I had felt shivering life beneath my feet minutes earlier.

Sure enough, one of them was adenium, one of the few flowering plants that dotted the occasional green area of the desert. I plucked the petals, rubbing them between my fingers before dropping them into the small amount of water.

While the pit viper poison destroyed the essence of your blood that allowed it to scab a cut and prevent bleeding, the petals of this flower could restore it.

With as steady a hand as I could manage, I tipped the paste of crushed flowers and water into Keera’s parted lips. I watched her throat work as she struggled to swallow the antidote, but as thirsty as her body was, it complied. Even her tongue darted out to lick at the last drops clinging to her bloody lips.

Normally, the antidote was to eat a whole flower, but I doubted I could persuade Keera to chew in her current state. This would have to do. I would find out in a few hours whether the antidote had taken hold. For now, I hoisted Keera onto my back again and continued to march on.

The sun was low in the sky, inching toward the mountains I could now see in the distance, when Keera shifted on my back. It was the first sign of life besides shallow breaths and a light cough.

I paused, lowering her to the ground. Something tight in my gut loosened when I saw that no more blood leaked from her nose and mouth. The adenium had worked. She would survive, which meant it was time to part ways. I had saved her from the foul play of another rider to save my own name, but she was still my competitor.

Staring down at her, I took a moment to contemplate what I had done. She still might not make it back to Kelvadan, but if I had ever owed her any sort of debt for my life (a tally I did not like to keep), it was now repaid. She could simply be my enemy once more, even if she was a nuisance that pulled at my magic.

Her eyelids fluttered as if waking were not far off, and I jumped. I had lingered too long. With long strides, I walked off toward the mountains and the city at their base, away from the woman sprawled in the sands.

I tried not to dwell on why I chose to sit on the fence at the edge of the horse’s enclosure on the outskirts of the encampment as I sharpened my saber. After all, Alza had missed me as we had been separated for the better part of three days, and I wanted to make sure she was well. I preferred to take care of my own mount, and something about the Royal horse master being charged with Alza while I trekked through the wilderness irked me. Although I knew all too well that the Royal horse master cared for horses better than almost any other.

My lingering at the edges of the encampment had nothing to do with the slow trickle of competitors limping toward the gates of Kelvadan as they made their way back from the wilderness.

Once night fell, riders would set out and sweep the sands for any competitors that remained lost, although they would be eliminated from the tournament. Still, some would not return at all.

My saber was so sharp I could have used it to shave by the time a familiar figure crested the horizon. Although all the riders were crusted in sand and slumped with exhaustion, a certain stubbornness in her stumbling gate gave her away.

Keera had made it.

Before she could reach the city gates, I turned and made my way back to my tent. Zephyr fluttered to my shoulder as I walked, apparently pleased to have company again.

Meanwhile, I needed to prepare for the next event. I could not afford any more distractions. No matter how far that feral sand cat made it, I would defeat her in the duels and be crowned Champion of the Desert.