Finding the Way and Other Tales of Valdemar by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online

between them.
    In the distance, just after a roll of thunder, the roar from the Mire sounded again. Sherra’s danger-sensing Gift nudged her, and she climbed down quickly to rejoin Vesily and the stricken woman. The Companion was resting her head against the woman’s forehead, as if trying to push strength into her. “We’ll get her up into saddle. It will just take time.” And again, she spotted movement in the water. If it had just been a dark shape, she wouldn’t have the sense of terror with it—no, this shape displaced so much water that the surface swelled upward, and the hertasi had a dreadful feeling of what was coming. Stepping back up on the root, Sherra dug out the vial of repellant oil and slung the liquid in a wide arc, on woman, Companion, water, and tree alike. “That will buy us some time,” she snapped, and looped the rope on Vesily’s pommel. “Step in, yes, there. There,” Sherra directed, until Vesily was in position, and then the hertasi pulled, hoisting the barely conscious woman up. She was heavy. In a few more tugs they understood why.
    She was very much pregnant.
    :My Chosen—: Vesily said in astonishment.
    There was no time left to say more before the water around them opened up.
    What had been an ominous swell finally broke the surface, and it was a snake beyond the measure of any that Sherra had seen before. To Vesily’s eyes it was an image of death itself. Lighting cracked all around them, further reinforcing the snake’s demonic appearance. Translucent fins and frills, some bitten through, cut, or marred by unknown decades of combat for Mire supremacy, were backlit by a roll of lightning that all but blinded Sherra. It projected not just a sense of fear, but also of great age, and tremendous weight. Sherra sensed, as it reared up farther into the rain-streaked air, that a hundred Companions couldn’t match the sheer mass of even the part of the great snake that was exposed outside the water. Its eyes weren’t even discernable, among the complex of scars, scales and plates of its head, and that somehow made its visage even worse. Its head was wider than Vesily was tall, and Sherra wouldn’t even be a snack to it.
    No rescue was going to come for them. No gryphons from the sky, no Hawkbrothers from the ground—here there was only terrain that wanted to kill them, storm that wanted to blind them, and this implacable, ancient creature that wanted to eat them. There was no escaping any of it, and they knew it.
    The three of them could only stand there, paralyzed. Sherra’s danger-sensing Gift went quiet. Her Pathfinding Gift took over. And it told her— stay here .
    The snake opened its mouth. It gaped upward at the rain, as if gathering the downpour to drink, and extended its tongue. Its tongue was easily as wide as Sherra’s entire body, and ended in flexible, spike-like points half a horse length long. As the titanic monster lowered its head again, it closed its mouth, leaving the tongue extended to whip up and down, taking in the air. Thunder boomed closer than ever before, and the snake weaved its head side to side. Sherra pulled on the rope, getting the pregnant woman onto Vesily’s back, but the whole time the hertasi watched the demon snake. Her limbs just worked on their own. Vesily was rooted in place, and Sherra could sense Mindspeech screaming, but not directed toward her. She wrenched her attention away from the snake and looped her rope here and there in Vesily’s tack, cinching the woman to the saddle. It was as well, because Sherra could see what was left of the woman’s legs. It was best that there was little light here. The bandages the woman had made covered only a few of the gouges in her lower legs, and Sherra could—
    —could not taste or smell the wounds at all. In fact, she could not taste or smell anything at all.
    If it had been possible for Gifts to be independent of her and exude an aura of smugness, they would have. They had led her here, to the