Serpent's Silver Read Online Free

He saw, peripherally, the open nostrils and the bright spots reflecting from the flashing scales. He felt overwhelmed.
    He shook his head, trying to clear it. This was magic. The magic a snake used to immobilize its prey. All the prey had to do was break that gaze and flee, and the snake would not be able to catch it, but somehow that seldom happened. Now Kian understood why. He couldn’t break the gaze.
    The snout darted suddenly, along with the long, flat, enormous head. The mouth opened wide, the fangs dripping their corrosive poison. The girl screamed.
    He tried to snap out of it. He tried to raise the sword. The gauntlets, unaffected by the serpent’s spell, raised his unresisting arms and his sword-hand for him.
    The left gauntlet grasped the lower jaw of the serpent. The right gauntlet swung the sword hard at the serpent’s eye. The blade rebounded from silver scales, leaving a barely detectable groove. His arm felt the jolt, and pain lanced through his shoulder.
    The serpent’s head went back again. It was not hurt, but now it seemed more cautious. Perhaps it distrusted anything that resisted the power of its mesmeric gaze.
    His brother, Kelvin, had slain dragons by driving a sharpened pole and a heavy lance through their eyes and into their tiny brains. This serpent’s eyes were smaller than a dragon’s and no easy target, despite their hypnotic power. He had no lance, no pole. His sword was worthless against any part of the serpent except the eyes, and he couldn’t get a clear shot at them.
    Now something else happened. His left hand, within the gauntlet, began suddenly and severely to hurt. It was as if he had thrust his armored hand into a fire. His hand—and the gauntlet—were being injured by the serpent’s venom.
    The left gauntlet dropped from his hand and landed on the grass. His hand continued to hurt, still burning. His right hand still held the sword—but what could he do with it? The angle was wrong; he could not get at that eye with a side slash, and he could not orient properly for a stab with the point.
    Hissing the hiss of a thousand lesser serpents, the monster bared his fangs again and prepared for the final strike.
    As if in a dream, Kian heard the drumming of a war-horse’s hooves. He heard a voice, a man’s, screaming something that sounded like: “Back! Back! Into your hole, you worm!”
    He would gladly retreat, if he only could.
    A whistling sound filled his ears, and that, too, was coming from outside the range of his trapped vision. His eyes remained locked by the serpent’s; only his ears were free.
    Belatedly he realized that it was to the serpent the man was yelling, not to Kian.
    Help of some sort had arrived. But was it soon enough, or strong enough? Could it break the spell that held him, and give him even a slight chance to survive?

Chapter 2
    In-law
    There was an abrupt knock on the cottage door. Heln gave Kelvin a startled look, then put down the dough for the exotic dish she was making: an appleberry pie whose recipe had been in both their families. “Who?”
    Kelvin shrugged. He was putting things together in a travelsack for the journey he didn’t want to make. Yet it was expected of him, and he did feel obliged to rescue his father and half brother. It wasn’t as though he wouldn’t have the laser and the gauntlets that had saved his life numerous times. Kian should have taken the laser, the only operating laser in the Seven Kingdoms. Instead Kian had chosen the unfamiliar and alien weapon found in the hidden chamber. Possibly he had also taken along the levitation belt the chamber still held. But Kian had almost been killed while using a flying device from his father’s world. Of course, that was partly because Jon had felled him with a stone from her sling. Still, it showed the hazards of flight. So if the term “levitation” meant what they thought it meant, neither he nor Kian wanted any part of it.
    “I expect Jon to come over,” Kelvin said as Heln