Free Venom in Her Veins by Tim Pratt Page B

just lucky I have a new family to call my own.”
    “We’re happy to have you, Cousin,” Julen said, a little awkwardly. Then he sighed. “Even if you do have a bizarre fondness for sleeping without a roof overhead.”
    “You’ll get used to it,” Zaltys said.
    “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Julen replied.

    The caravan proceeded. Julen was in no danger of surpassing Zaltys’s skill as a ranger, but she had to admit that, interbranch family rivalry aside, the Guardians knew how to train their operatives. He pinned a platter-sized spider to a tree with a throwing knife—smirking at Zaltys and saying, “See, I have ranged weapons too,”—and helped her and the other forward scouts slash down a carnivorous vine that had grown across the barely-visible caravan path, showing no hesitation even when the bloodlike sap sprayed everywhere. He was clearly better suited to creeping through alleys, but he was adapting fairly well to the jungle environment.
    “It’s not so different from the city in terms of sight-lines,” he mused as they ranged off to one side of the path to make sure there were no lurking hazards waiting to ambush the caravan. The trees there weren’t as big as elsewhere in the jungle, but that meant more sunlight could filter down, and as a result the jungle’s fecundity was explosive, with smaller trees and plants growing so close together Zaltys sometimes had to turn sideways to slip between the trunks. “Down in the oldest part of the city especially, the houses are built so close together the alleyways are too tiny for grown humans to pass through at all, and the streets curve and twist, limiting your sight-lines. There are places where the roofs overlap, blocking out the sun.” He glanced up at the green canopy above. “Of course, in the alleys, the worst you have to worry about is a mugger, not—I don’t know—giant flesh-devouring beetles.”
    “The beetles aren’t so bad,” Zaltys said, pushing aside a low hanging branch and its freight of poisonous white flowers.
    “Oh? So what’s the worst thing you’ve ever had to face out here, then?” Julen said.
    Zaltys considered. “It’s hard to say. Deeper in the jungle you’ll want to keep an eye on the trees above you as well as the ground below. There are apes who’ll drop down from above and start pummeling you—we’ve even seen a few wearing fragments of old armor, guards of some abandoned ruin or another, I guess. They killed four of our scouts a few years ago. Krailash says there used to be yuan-ti near the prime terazul harvesting location, but he hasn’t seen any of them in years, and I’ve never seen one, myself. Lots of snakes, but no snake people. I’m sure there are worse things farther from the caravan path—chokers, drakes, trolls and goblins, who knows, maybe even a dragon—but most thinking creatures learned to avoid this route long before I was born. Between mother, Krailash, Quelamia, and Glory, we’re a lot more formidable than just about anything we’re likely to encounter among the trees. All we get are the mindless creatures, blood-sucking vines and giant spiders and the like. It’s a shame. It would be nice to have a challenge.”
    “Really?” he said, hacking at a thorn-encrusted vine. “And I was just thinking it would be nice to have a hot bath.” He paused. “Who’s Glory?”

    The next tenday proceeded well, with Julen’s presence the only notable difference from the previous year’s excursion. Zaltys did her best to ignore the guards that followed her whenever she went into the woods, and rotated through the various scout groups, paying close attention to what the more experienced rangers and huntsmen and reconnaissance experts did, picking up a few fine points of tracking and teaching the basics to Julen, who continued to complain in a relatively good-natured way. One night after dinner—eaten with the guards, fortunately, as mother had given up her attempts at formal dining after