Venom's Taste - Lisa Smedman [41]
The bald man gave a toss of his hand, sending the snake fluttering into the air. Arvin raced across the room, hoping to catch it, but the snake was too quick. It flew out the window. Arvin turned to glare at the human, teeth bared.
The bald man held up an admonishing finger. “Control,” he said.
Now Arvin understood. The bald man was yet another tutor, come to drill him in moderation and self-restraint. A human tutor, this time, to further humiliate him. “The flying snake held its temper,” Arvin hissed back at the man. “So what?”
The bald man chuckled. “You misunderstood my demonstration,” he said. “I held the snake’s temper. With mind magic. But before I could do that, I had to learn to control my own.” He stared for several long moments at Arvin without speaking then asked, “Is this something you would like to learn?”
“Yes,” Arvin hissed, speaking aloud in his sleep. “I want to learn.”
Suddenly the dream became more chaotic. He was no longer a yuan-ti child, but himself-Arvin-an adult human. Yet strangely, his skin was covered in serpent scales. They were as brown as the bald man’s skin had been, and crisscrossed with bands of reddish brown. No, that wasn’t a scale pattern on his arms but a series of red thongs, looped around his body and slowly tightening. Zelia, dressed in a gray robe and skullcap, like the ones the priests at the orphanage had worn, was holding one end of the cord and slowly pulling it toward herself, coiling the cord around one wrist as she hauled it in. She stood on the ball of one foot, her other leg twisted up against her chest, the ankle tucked behind her neck. “Control,” she said, the word somehow coming out as a hiss. Her jaws opened wide. Hot, stinging venom dripped onto Arvin’s temple as she leaned over him, mouth opened, fangs bared-
Arvin’s eyes sprang open. Suddenly he was wide awake. Someone was leaning over him, touching his shoulder. A dark silhouette in the moonlight with long, loose hair.
Throwing himself to the side, he called his dagger into his glove. In an instant he was on his feet-and then he recognized Zelia. “By the gods,” he gasped, holding his weapon between them. “What did you just do to me?” He rubbed his temple and winced. The headache was still with him.
Zelia remained kneeling, hands on her knees. “What do you mean?”
Arvin blinked, trying to clear his head of the disturbing images. “That dream. I was…”
“Someone else?” Zelia asked, rising slowly to her feet.
Arvin nodded. “A yuan-ti. A child. A… girl.” The latter was something he’d only just realized-that he’d been female in both of the dreams.
“Sometimes when a psion sleeps, a power manifests spontaneously,” Zelia told him. “You obviously manifested a telepathic power that allowed you to peer into another person’s mind and listen in on her thoughts. That it was a yuan-ti is hardly surprising in a city with more than two thousand of us. Your mind tried to make sense of what the power showed you and turned it into a dream.”
Arvin stood, considering. Was that what he’d just been doing? Looking in on another person’s thoughts and knotting them into his dreams? It hadn’t felt like a dream. Not until the last, chaotic part that had woken him in a cold sweat. That last segment was easy to explain-it was a jumble of his old memories and fears, combined with fragments of what had happened earlier today, including the headache that just wouldn’t go away. But the first part had felt like… a memory.
Arvin stared at Zelia. “It wasn’t just any yuan-ti,” he said slowly. “It was someone trained in ‘mind magic.’ That girl was you-wasn’t it?”
Zelia