Venom in Her Veins Read Free Page A

route, he knew the likeliest dangers well, and broke his trail with confidence, sweeping aside branches and vines with his axe. He paused whenever the child cried out, adjusting his direction as necessary. Sound carried strangely in thejungle, bouncing off the towering trees and occasional overgrown ruins of old halfling settlements and yuan-ti temples.
    The wall of green parted before his axe, and a clearing was revealed: a broad courtyard of once neatly-jointed stones, long since jostled out of true by the slow motions of the earth and the growth of tree roots underneath. A squalling, naked child with skin the rich brown of new leather lay in the shadow of a pillar. The stone was carved with the likeness of some extinct jungle beast, eroded into a shape of vague menace by the weather of centuries. Fresh blood spotted the stones nearby, and there were other signs of recent violence: broken bits of weaponry, shreds of torn cloth, a few teeth scattered on cobblestones.
    The child was naked, tipped on its back, limbs waving like an overturned turtle. Female. Krailash had always found the sight of human infants vaguely alarming. They were so helpless and needy—unlike dragonborn, who could walk and feed soon after emerging from the shell. They became self-sufficient in a few years. When Krailash’s shadow fell across the girl child, shielding her from the sun, she quieted, and gazed up at him with wide eyes the same rich green as terazul leaves. If she found the sight of a seven-foot-tall rust-scaled humanoid dragon frightening, it didn’t show—but for a child so young, everything was new, and most things were probably more interesting than frightening.
    Rainer walked the perimeter of the courtyard, looking at the signs of battle, while Marley just swallowed and stared at the scattered teeth, which were not human ordragonborn: they were long, needle shaped, and bloody at the roots.
    “The blood’s not dried yet,” Rainer said, crouching to examine the stones. “You can see the undergrowth is broken there, people were dragged away.” He shook his head. “The yuan-ti must be better organized than you thought. Either they missed the child or didn’t think she was worth eating, or raising to be a slave, or sacrificing to their anathemas. The monsters left a trail as broad as a boulevard in Delzimmer, easy to follow … Did you want to investigate?”
    Krailash considered. He was philosophically opposed to slavery and the sacrifice of sentient creatures, and besides, this had happened rather too close to the trade route for his liking. Assessing potential dangers to the family trade was part of his job as head of security. If there were unusually bold yuan-ti—or something worse—operating here, it would be good for him to know. “I do.”
    Rainer nodded. “What about the girl?”
    “Marley will take her to Alaia. You and I will follow this trail.”
    “Just us? Alone?”
    Krailash showed his teeth. He’d been around humans long enough to learn how to smile. “Alone? Not at all. I’ll have my axe, and you’ll have me.”
    Rainer picked up the child and thrust her at Marley, who took her as if she might be venomous. The infant squalled at first, then clutched at the front of the guard’s shirt and tried to gnaw one of his buttons. “She’s a tiny thing,” Rainer said. “Amazing she survived whatever happened here. I’d never want one of my own, ofcourse, but I can see the appeal. Cute.” Rainer was almost as tall as Krailash and not far short of his weight, all of it battle-hardened muscle, so he could afford to speak sentimentally, whereas someone scrawny like Marley had to make a far greater show of toughness. Rainer touched the girl’s cheek. “She makes you feel … protective, doesn’t she?”
    Krailash nodded, though he knew his protective instinct sprang from a different source—he didn’t find tiny apes cute , exactly, but he hated to see the harmless and the innocent endangered. “Step