I woke up with someone’s hands on my chest, pressing down, I assumed, to stop my bleeding. I was in the utter belly of darkness, my body on some cold stone floor, the air damp and stifling around me as if I were its prisoner.

<<What was the point of draining her, fool>>?

With a flicker, white eyes glowed in the blackness, like fireflies at new moon, if those fireflies were both insidious and vengeful.

<<No point>>.

<<Well, now the master will be furious. He will not want to see her with holes in her neck, will he? Fetch my poisons>>.

The pyres intended as if they thought I could not understand them. Their meanings fell into me like hail in a winter storm, but their forms were cloaked by the depth of the darkness around us. I felt the pain of my ripped chest bones and the pointed burning of a deep, thin puncture wound. My memories returned to me, and I recalled that fangs had indeed impaled me while I was fleeing in the woods. But why had this been done? To what end?

I tried to make sense of my surroundings, but sense cannot be made where it does not already exist.

<<Your poisons will only make it worse>>.

<<Do as you're told and stop whining. I will fix your mistake before you get us both put to Sleep>>.

I wanted to lift myself, to find my footing and escape the place where I lay, but I could not move my arms or legs. The frog's toxins coursed through me.

Hissing and the clanking of glass filled my ears, and then a cold liquid was poured over me. It gurgled and spat as it funneled into the puncture wounds. The concoction stung my very soul, and I would have screamed, perhaps, if my jaw were not frozen shut.

After a few moments, the pain subsided, and a slow warmth returned to my fingers. I could move them again in little spasms and I could close my eyelids at last, for it was then I realized that they had been stunned open through the entirety of my current situation.

<<We must take her to the master>>, the pyre who possessed some skill with poisons meant. <<You carry her. But do not drain her again. And certainly do not drink from her>>.

The other pyre, perceptibly the one who had assaulted me in the forest as I escaped the slimed clutches of the frog beast, hoisted me onto his massive shoulder.

He took me out of what seemed to be a dungeon and then through blank, sordid, grungy halls until we arrived at a court. The place was dismal—even frightening, one could say—with torches for lighting and thick, moldy gray bricks of stone for walls and floors. Every step echoed, every inch bleeding darkness.