The next morning, I awoke to the sensation of something warm and heavy sliding along my leg. At first, I thought it was simply Iannis rubbing his foot against my calf, but the something began to wrap around my leg in a way that a human leg definitely wasn’t capable of.
“What the…” I mumbled blearily as I pulled the blanket aside. My eyes widened as a bright yellow snake lifted his massive triangular head and flicked his forked tongue at me. “Fuck!” I yelled, trying to leap to my feet, but the snake squeezed harder, preventing me from getting up.
“What is it?” Iannis shouted, jolting upright. He swore at the sight of the boa, who was rapidly winding itself around my body, though luckily my arms were still free. The giant reptile was halfway up my torso when my brain finally kicked in, and I pulled one of my crescent knives, then grabbed the snake by the throat and impaled him with the long end of the weapon.
“Eww,” I groaned as black blood splashed all over my face. I gagged as I accidentally got some in my mouth, and turned my head to spit it out.
“Well, that was quite a scare,” Iannis said as he pulled the now limp snake off my body. The reptile was very heavy, a good twelve feet long and six inches around, and I shuddered in disgust as I watched Iannis drag the carcass out of the tent. “Do you think we should have it for breakfast?” he called over his shoulder.
“Ha. Ha.” I rolled my eyes, then got to my feet and took stock of myself. Thankfully I hadn’t been wearing my clothes, but the snake blood had gotten all over our sleeping bags. I used a cleaning spell to take care of the stains, then pulled on my clothes as Iannis came back into the tent.
“Is that really necessary?” he asked, still buck-naked himself. “It isn’t as if there’s anyone around to see us.”
I laughed. “We can’t spend all day having sex,” I said. “And besides, I’d rather not be naked when the next predator comes by to eat me.”
“True,” Iannis agreed as he donned his robe. “It seems the fire wasn’t enough to warn them off. I’ll have to put a protection spell around the perimeter.”
We cut off some of the leftover deer and broke our fast as we watched the quasi-bison graze in the distance—Iannis and I decided to call them “quasis” for short.
“How were you able to get away from Solantha at a time like this?” I asked. “I know you’ve got Chen to run things in your absence, but with the Convention about to start, and you gone, she must be pulling her hair out.”
“Yes, and I feel bad about leaving her alone to deal with that mess,” Iannis said. “But without you, there can be no wedding, and the Convention is of little import to me. Of course I had to come after you.”
“How did you know that I was in Manuc?” I asked. “Were you able to sense me? The serapha charms weren’t working before. Ta’sradala must have done something to them.”
Iannis shook his head. “They didn’t work for me either, and I was terrified that meant you were dead. Luckily, Liu saw you being pulled into the pool—she was hiding in a cherry tree nearby. From the way she described the scene, I gathered someone with incredible power had to have taken you, and the list of suspects was short enough. No living mage could have done it.”
“Not even you?”
“Not even me. Coupled with the recent letter from my mother, Manuc seemed like the most likely place to start looking. In fact, Aunt Deryna sent a message warning me of what had happened that found me just as I was embarking on the east coast.” He looked grave. “She warned me to prepare for the worst—that it was unlikely I’d still find you alive. It is a good thing she underestimated you, as so many have done before.”
I grimaced. “No, her prognosis was pretty spot-on. I’m very lucky to be alive. Your grandmother definitely didn’t intend for me to survive those awful tests. And now that she sent you off to that horrible desert with me, I can’t imagine she cares for anyone at all. All that bluster about you being part of the family…I have to wonder how she treats her enemies, if this is how she acts toward her loved ones.” I shook my head in disgust.
Iannis laughed sharply. “At least now you know why I don’t like to speak of my Tua heritage. I’ve often wished my mother were an ordinary mage or even human. My greatest ambition is to be as unlike Ta’sradala and her ilk as possible.”
“When you consider how helpless we were against Tua power, maybe you can better understand the resentment of ordinary humans and shifters against mages.”
Iannis frowned. “It is not at all the same. We are not congenitally capricious and amoral—”
I raised an eyebrow. “In some cases, it is exactly alike, especially from the victims’ point of view.”
Iannis was silent for a while, but the frown lingered.
“Besides, not all Tua are evil like Ta’sradala, no matter how powerful they are compared to us,” I continued on, mollifying my accusation a bit. “The younger ones I met were a lot more reasonable and actually helped me survive. I think you were just unlucky to get stuck with Ta’sradala as your ancestor.”
“Very likely,” Iannis admitted. “Kidnapping my grandfather was rather outrageous, even for her race.”
“In any case, I’m very glad you found me, even if we are stuck in this place,” I said, squeezing his hand. “Now we just have to figure out how to get out of here.”
He brightened at that. “Once we can get back to Recca, we can use my gulaya to go straight home,” Iannis said. “But we need to figure out how to ensure the dimension spell takes us there rather than somewhere else. We got lucky last time, landing in a world with breathable air and food, but we may not the next time around.”
“I wish I could transmit the dimension walking spell, the way the Tua did to me,” I said. “There are…technical aspects that I don’t understand, and I’m not sure I even have the words to put them into human language. I feel like if we could just figure out the formula behind the magic, we could direct the spell to where we want it to go.”
Iannis frowned. “The only way I know of doing that is the knowledge transfer.”
I bit my lip at that. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do a knowledge transfer—I knew how the spell worked, thanks to Fenris’s knowledge, and it could only be done once. If the transfer was successful, Iannis would have access to my entire lifetime of memories. Fenris was incredibly brave and selfless to give me access to his past—if I scoured them thoroughly enough, I could access his most intimate secrets, his most humiliating moments, recollections of all the stupid things he had said and done over the long decades of his life. I did not want to know all that about Iannis, and would have refused if he’d offered. Was I really willing to give Iannis that same power over me? I trusted him with my life, but could our upcoming marriage survive if I exposed myself so completely to him? I would have to live with him afterward, knowing that he had intimate knowledge of everything about me, that I had no secrets left.
“I’m not sure that I’m ready to do that,” I said cautiously. “Not unless there really is no other option.”