Dragons of Summer Tide (The Dragons of Hwandor) Read Online Free Page B

and cut faster.
    Eventually the puppies seemed to be slowing down as they got full of the meat. Veer also noticed that almost all of the fuel for the fire was gone and it would be just ashes soon.  One puppy was watching Veer and had moved a bit closer to him. This puppy seemed a bit smaller than the others and had bright green eyes that seemed to almost glow. The puppy moved within reach of him and he put out his hand so the little dog could get his smell. Faster than Veer could react the little beast snapped at him and he realized that he had been bitten.  He yelled at the dog and kicked at it as it growled at him and ran away. The little green eyed dog tried to return to the other puppies but they snapped at it and made it stand alone some distance away from them.
    Looking at his hand Veer could see that the little dog had left two tiny puncture marks and his hand was losing colour around the bite. The hand which had been bitten began to sting and really hurt. He saw that his hand was starting to swell and feel cold. The feeling of cold started to spread up his arm and Veer once again began to shiver. His hand felt like it was on fire but the rest of his body was becoming very cold.  Veer grabbed the blanket and wrapped himself in it against the chill that was overcoming him as he started to feel his exhaustion and leaned down to lay his head on the saddle.  The firelight was slowly dying and Veer noticed another larger puppy approaching him and he tried to kick it away from him. He looked again at his swollen hand which now burned and throbbed. The puncture wounds were oozing a greenish liquid and looked more like a snake bite than a dog bite.  In the last flickering of the fire Veer looked at the puppy which had bitten him and the dog lashed its tail and hissed at Veer as he looked into its glaring reptilian eyes. “What are you?” Veer whispered into the descending darkness. As Veer felt himself slipping toward sleep he could also feel a warm tongue begin to lick his hand.
     

Three
     
    “A girl, last time I checked,” a female voice said. Veer opened his eyes to bright light streaming in from outside of a cave and the smell of smoke filling his nostrils. He quickly looked around to find the source of the voice and though his eyes hurt from the light he could see the silhouette of a woman standing in the opening of the cave.
    “What?” Veer started to ask and was immediately cut off.
    “You asked what I am and I said that I am a girl.”  The girl walked a bit f arther into the cave so that Veer could see that she was around his own age. “Actually you have been asking that in your sleep for a while now. Are you always this confused when you wake up or only when you’ve been bitten by a snake?”
    “Snake?” Veer managed to get out before being cut off again.
    “Yes, snake. The fang marks in your hand.” She just kept talking as she knelt by a small fire and dipped a wooden cup in a small iron pot that was sitting on a flat stone in the fire. The cup held something steaming and she knelt beside Veer and held it out to him. “Drink this broth, three days without food is a long time.”
    Three days?” Veer asked
    “Yes, three days ,” responded the girl. “Since that last storm. I found you in here wrapped in a blanket and nearly dead. I had come in to kill somebody and then I found you.”
    “Who did you come in to kill?” Veer asked.
    “A stranger ,” the girl said. “I have been following some strangers. They killed my father a few weeks ago and then I found a dead ranger in a burned out village. His name was Talenger and he and my father were friends all of my life. He was also looking for the strangers and was taking a message to the capital. Calt, his horse was gone and when I saw Calt in the storm outside of this cave I figured that it was one of the foreigners and I wanted to kill him for killing Talenger. So how did you get his horse? Because there is no way you could have killed