Venom in Her Veins

Zaltys left, Julen at her heels, and once they were on the ground outside, the door slamming shut after them, she sniffed. “I can’t make a ranger out of you in a summer, but maybe I can teach you which end of the arrow you point at your prey, and which leaves you shouldn’t wipe your bottom with, unless you want a case of the bloody itch.” Just saying the word “itch” made her reach around and scratch at the scar on her back.

“Why would I want to learn to be a woodcutter like you anyway?” He made a face. “What’s that smell?”

Zaltys opened her mouth just a bit, not enough for anyone to notice-she could smell better when she could taste the air with her tongue, for some reason, a quality she shared with no one else, as far as she knew-and then gagged and spat. “The latrine pits,” she said, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. “Or possibly the animal pens. We’re upwind, mostly, but sometimes the winds shift.”

“Wonderful,” he muttered.

“Come on. You must be hungry after your trip. Let’s get some of that caravan food you were so eager to try.”

Julen groaned theatrically, clutching his belly. Zaltys couldn’t tell if he was genuinely complaining or just trying to be funny. They’d been friends when they were children, often playing together in the gardens, but that was before his studies with the Guardians and her journeys with the Travelers had necessarily pulled them apart. In recent years they’d only run into one another at family gatherings, and since the Travelers were out of the city for half the year, Zaltys missed most of those. The Guardians were a secretive bunch anyway. Zaltys had a few cousins she’d count as friends as well as relations in the Traders (not all of them were obsessed with ostentatious displays of wealth; some of them were obsessed with numbers instead, which Zaltys could respect if not understand), but as a rule the Guardians kept themselves apart. They were the second-smallest branch of the family, consisting of just Zaltys’s uncle Ramul and his wife and many children, plus hirelings. But they wielded disproportionate power. If anyone committed the cardinal, unforgiveable sin-betraying the family-the Guardians were the ones to mete out punishment. And, in more practical terms, they kept rival trade groups from interfering with business in either legal or more underhanded ways. The Guardians had a certain mystique, and Julen’s brothers and sisters were spies, assassins, and masters of sowing rumor and deceit, but Julen himself was the youngest, and maybe he thought his family’s prowess and power accrued to him by right of birth.

But the family didn’t work that way. Birth got you certain things-you’d never wonder where your next meal was coming from-but if you wanted to advance, and take on more power and responsibility, you had to earn it. Zaltys wondered if this season with the caravan was a chance for Julen to prove himself, or punishment for his failing to do so.

She gently steered him around Glory’s wagon, since he couldn’t see it, and Glory wasn’t above letting people walk into her might-as-well-be-invisible home just for the amusement of seeing them hit their heads.

“Why do you keep scratching? Did you wipe with some of the wrong leaves?”

Zaltys, who hadn’t even realized her hand had strayed to the old sore spot, crossed her arms. “No. It’s … my scar itches.”

“Oh, I heard about that,” Julen said. “You got it before you were adopted, right?”

“Yes. When my village was killed, I was wounded. It’s never healed properly. Mother says whoever attacked us must have used some sort of cursed weapon. I’m lucky I survived.”

Julen frowned. “Yes, I remember. Ah. Sorry.”

Zaltys shrugged. “Thanks, but it’s not a loss I feel. I don’t even know my original parents’ names. They were massacred, along with the others. The caravan buried them after they rescued me. I’ve seen the heap of rubble they’ve got for a grave.”

“There you are!” Krailash boomed, approaching them with the implacability and approximate mass of an avalanche. “Where are you two going?”

“Just to get some food,” Zaltys said.

“If you’re hungry, you can stay,” the dragonborn said. “But our scouts stumbled across a shadow snake not far from here. It killed one of our men, and the others are doing their best to track it, but we could use your help.” He glanced at Julen. “Your cousin is one of our best trackers.”

Zaltys grinned. “Come on, Julen. You’re supposed to be learning stealth, right, as part of your spycraft? You’ll never see a better teacher than a shadow snake.”

“At home, I’d be eating grapes and some of the good sheep cheese,” he said glumly, “and possibly reading a volume of poetry. Or at least skulking through a nice dry hallway somewhere. Here, I get to traipse through the damp woods after a snake.”

“Yes,” Zaltys said. “You’re absolutely right. This is much more fun.”

Zaltys knew she was something like a princess. The city of Delzimmer had no noble class, no king, no aristocrats. Instead, the upper echelons of society were populated by the successful merchants and traders, and no matter how mean your birth, you could ascend to the ranks of the most powerful by sheer sweat, treachery, and ingenuity.

That was the theory, anyway. In practice, control of the city was held by several powerful merchant families. While the Serrats had not yet reached the pinnacle of power held by the ruling four families, their influence was growing every year. They’d risen to prominence following the great disaster that turned Delzimmer into a port city, taking advantage of the chaos following that upheaval to profit immensely. The Serrats had further enriched and entrenched themselves in the city’s society by becoming sole providers of terazul and the potent substances that could be made from the rare flower.

Zaltys was the only heir of Alaia, one of the three most powerful members of the family. During the six months of the year when she lived in the city, there were servants and tutors and bodyguards and social functions and ceremonial duties and meetings about profit projections and strategic realignment and diversification that she had to attend no matter how boring and abstract she found the topics. She wore dresses, and charmed old men from the Traders, and studied languages-not for ease of communication, because there were spells that would let her converse with people of other tongues, but because language revealed things about the culture that spoke it, and understanding other cultures was imperative to the success of the family’s far-flung business. Zaltys didn’t mind those months in Delzimmer, living like a princess, escorted everywhere by personal guards, eating fine foods and sipping watered wine and lounging in the Serrat’s private gardens.

But those months never felt entirely real to Zaltys. They felt like pretend: like the games she played with her nannies as a little girl, pretending to have formal dinners with her dolls, or making believe she was at a costume party, dressing in cast-offs from her mother’s wardrobe. The only time she felt entirely real was during the twice-yearly expeditions into the jungle, when the caravan took the workers to the few spots where the rare and precious terazul blossoms grew. For three months at a time, Zaltys stopped being a princess and became a ranger, armed with bow and knives instead of dessert spoons and pearl earrings, learning to live and love the wild, hunting for food and for pleasure and to protect the caravan from predators. She wanted to stay in the jungle always-despite the itch, and despite the dreams-because it was the only place she felt fully awake. She belonged there. She knew her mother felt the same way, though Alaia, being a shaman, had a somewhat different relationship with the natural world; no less reverent, but certainly less martial in focus. As a young girl, on her first trips with the caravan at age six or seven, Zaltys had pleaded with her mother to let them stay in the wild always. But, for various logistical and political reasons, it couldn’t be. Zaltys had come to understand these reasons as the years went by, although she never stopped resenting them.

In the jungle, she didn’t feel even remotely like a princess. She felt like a wild queen.

Chapter Five

Julen was no more comfortable in the deep woods than a cloth merchant, and he swore softly every time a thorned vine brushed him, and complained about the heat and humidity, which grasped them like a damp and sweaty fist. But Zaltys noted that he set his feet with care, and moved more silently than any city boy should be expected to-certainly more silently than Krailash, who was crashing through the brush some yards away with his own guards in hope of flushing out the shadow snake.

Such beasts were treacherous, and seemed not entirely natural. They could be enormous, twice the length of