Page 49 of Storm of Blood and Shadow

“I’ll keep you warm.” Varex grins, teeth white in the dim starlight. Then his face changes and he leaps aside with a sharp cry.

“What?” I exclaim. “What happened?”

“There’s something in the grass,” he gasps. “It crawled over my foot.”

I part the grass where he was standing and peer at the ground. There’s a centipede slithering away from the spot—a rather large one, about the length of my hand.

“It’s only an insect,” I tell him. “And it’s leaving.”

He swallows hard, clearly unsettled. “I didn’t like the way that felt.”

I’m about to reply when a large moth flutters between us, near Varex’s face. He jumps backward with a yelp, waving his hands wildly.

“It’s amoth!” I exclaim, half-laughing. He’s unsteady on his legs, so I grab his arms to keep him from falling over. “It’s harmless. Surely you’ve seen moths before.”

“Yes, but they were tiny, barely worth noticing. These are enormous.” He pulls away from me and heads toward the forest. “I think we need shelter. Perhaps there won’t be such creatures among the trees.”

I follow, tempted to inform him otherwise, but I decide to let him learn on his own—which happens sooner than I expect, as he steps beneath the trees and comes face to face with a spider as big as my splayed hand.

“The fuck?” he yells and takes off running across the meadow.

I can’t help laughing. “Where are you going?”

“Away from these monsters!” he calls back.

But the clearing is surrounded by forest, and he quickly realizes there’s nowhere to go. He ends up crouching atop the only rock in the meadow, with his legs tucked up and his chin on his knees, his pale hair glimmering in the starlight.

When I approach him, he notes the smirk on my face.

“My misery amuses you,” he says.

“Yes it does. I find it wonderfully funny that the brave black dragon who captured me is scared of bugs and crawly things.”

“They’re so much larger when I’m in this form,” he protests. “Coming here was a bad idea. I thought you and I could enjoy some time together, and now I’m going to be tormented by these creatures for eight hours. I don’t think I can bear it.”

“They are large,” I admit. “I don’t remember noticing any bugs last time. Maybe your dragon form scared them off before. Scoot over.”

He shifts his position, and I sit on the rock with him, back to back.

“At home there are bugs in our tenement building,” I murmur. “They come out at night despite all my attempts to keep everything spotless. The other apartments in the building are not so clean, and the bugs come through the cracks in the walls. I have to seal our food to keep them from getting into it. Sometimes there are rats, too. I’m used to waking up with unpleasant bedfellows.”

“I don’t understand much about the human way of life,” he admits. “You will have to teach me how to keep things clean for you, so you can have a pleasant life here.”

“I’m not staying, Varex.”

He falls silent. Since we’re back to back, I can’t see his face.

“You can’t understand what it is to be poor, in human terms,” I say quietly. “I grew up in poverty, with parents who drank heavily, smoked mind-altering herbs, and were cruel to me and my siblings. My brother became a drunk and a gambler, vicious and greedy just like them.”

I don’t know why I’m telling him this. Maybe I’m nurturing the hope that if he comprehends my family situation better, he’ll understand why I have to go back.

“My sister married young to escape the beatings, but she ended up marrying a shiftless, lazy drunk like our father. I ran away from home and left her there, trapped in that marriage, in that town. I’d learned to dance from a woman who worked at the local dice hall. She told me I had talent, so I went to the capital city to join a theater troupe. I was thirteen.”

“Thirteen is very young,” Varex murmurs.

“Yes. My breasts developed early, so people thought I was older. When I was fourteen, I encountered a man who served at the palace as a steward. He’d seen me perform in several shows, and he promised to get me an audition for the palace dance troupe, as long as I gave him something in exchange.”

“What did he want?” Varex asks.

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