There seemed a great rustling and he again opened them to see all about him shifting.

“He can clean up his piss before you take him to the dungeon,” Cassius said to someone behind him. “I won’t have Elena’s carpets sullied.”

“Right,” he heard a man grunt.

Then he was pushed to his hands and knees, the puddle on the rug right in front of his face.

“Don’t move. We’ll get you soap and a brush.”

He heard footfalls on the rugs all around him. Murmurings of conversation.

But in the end, he was left in the room, on his hands and knees, staring at a puddle of his own piss, with a guard standing over him, chatting casually with each other.

This before he was scrubbing up that piss.

And this was before he was tossed, without a bath, or a meal, into a cell without a pillow or pallet, in the dungeon of the Sky Citadel.

And this was before, quite some time later, indeed, late the next day, under a light fall of snow, Jellan stood at the bottom of a deep pit he’d spent hours digging himself.

When they started raining on him, he vaguely noted they were not all emerald oil asps.

But several of them were.

He felt the pain of the bites, the poison searing through his system.

But the last three thoughts he had before he died was that he wished they were not gazing down on him from above.

It was humiliating.

Though at the very least, in the end, he was the manner of a man who endured such under the eyes of four kings.

He further wished they’d only selected venomous ones.

For the serpent squeezing him about his neck was utterly terrifying.

148

The Twist

Marian

Argyll Forest

AIREN

Marian felt the buzzing.

And she knew.

They were getting close.

It had snowed in the night.

Thus, when he woke her and forced her from under their warm rug and made her move her limbs that had frozen stiff while she slept in order to make her climb atop their steed in the pre-dawn morning, the light dusting of snow that had fallen several days before and had not gone away in this cold had become a thick blanket.

She had not appreciated this at all, for after their encounter with the highwaymen, they no longer sought the warmth of inns of an evening. Nor hot meals.

Thus, she had also woken with a chilled-numb nose, fingers and toes.

And gone to bed after eating a rabbit he’d killed for her that she’d roasted over their fire.

She had grown to become glad for the rabbits, for at times it had been but rats.

For his meals, Daemon did not wait for her to go through the painstaking process of roasting the meat.

He ate what he killed raw.