Chapter 4 - The Race Against the Venom
Cassian arrived within seconds, two guards hot on his heels. When he saw the dragon lying paralyzed in the dirt, foam bubbling from his black lips, his face went completely bloodless.
“What happened?” Cassian shouted over the dragon’s ragged breathing.
“Poison!” Sorcha was already unlatching her heavy medical chest, throwing glass phials and clay jars across the straw. “Nightroot extract! It attacks the central nervous system, paralyzing the diaphragm. If we don’t purge it from his system within the hour, he’ll suffocate on his own tongue!”
“What do you need?” Cassian demanded, dropping to his knees beside her without a second thought for his uniform.
“Charcoal! Crushed willow bark! Four buckets of clean river water and every drop of distilled alcohol in the stores!” Sorcha’s hands moved with terrifying speed, grinding roots and mixing black powder in a heavy iron bowl. “And someone hold his jaw open! If he bites down while I pass the tube, his jaw-lock will crush my arm!”
The guards hesitated, staring in sheer terror at the dying leviathan.
“Do it!” Cassian roared, lunging forward himself. He grabbed Vesper’s massive upper jaw with one hand and braced his boot against the lower mandible, forcing the great maw open just enough for Sorcha to slide a thick leather-wrapped tube down the dark, cavernous throat.
“Hold him steady!” Sorcha cried, pouring a black slurry of activated charcoal and neutralizing herbs straight down the tube.
For the next two hours, the enclosure turned into a grueling, frantic battlefield against death. There was no politics here. No council votes, no scheming lords, no training regulations. There was only the sound of a great beast fighting for every single breath, and two humans refusing to let him die in the dirt.
Sorcha worked like a woman possessed, pumping water through the tube, administering counter-herbs, wiping the white foam from his black lips, and whispering desperate, urgent commands into his ear.
At one point, the dragon’s heartbeat—a slow, heavy thrum that usually shook the ground—became so faint, so erratic, that Sorcha stopped breathing. She pressed both palms flat against his massive chest, right over his heart, and began pressing down with all her weight, tears streaming down her soot-stained cheeks.
“You survived twelve riders,” she sobbed, her voice breaking as she threw her entire body weight into the chest compressions. “You survived their ropes, their harness, their cruelty! You are not dying because some cowardly clerk slipped poison into your trough! Do you hear me, Vesper? You do not die here!”
Cassian’s hand covered hers, pressing down beside her to add his strength to the CPR. For the first time in three years of service, neither of them pulled away, their hands locked together over the chest of a dying dragon.
Slowly, agonizingly, the heavy ribcage beneath their palms gave a deep, shuddering heave.
Thud.
A single, powerful heartbeat shook the earth.
Then another.
By the time the first pale rays of sunrise cut through the high windows of the enclosure, Vesper was still breathing on his own. It was a slow, ragged rhythm, but the deadly foam had receded from his jaws, and his amber eyes flickered open, focusing with sharp, undeniable clarity on the woman kneeling beside his head.
Cassian sat back in the straw, completely drenched in sweat, his chest heaving as he stared at the poisoned water trough across the pen.
“This wasn’t someone trying to scare us off,” Cassian said quietly, his voice dead flat, carrying a cold, lethal promise.
Sorcha wiped her forearm across her forehead, smearing black soot and sweat across her face. “No. They wanted him dead before we could take our findings to the High Commander.”
“They wanted a dead dragon and a closed case,” Cassian stood up slowly, his joints popping in the silent room. He looked down at Vesper, then turned his gaze toward the heavy wooden doors leading out into the bailey. “I’m going to find the proof. Even if I have to tear Lord Ashby’s office apart brick by brick.”
Behind them, Vesper opened his amber eye fully.
He didn’t look at Cassian. He looked straight at Sorcha. Slowly, deliberately, the massive dragon exhaled a long breath of warm air over her hands, and for the first time, Sorcha understood something that made her heart pound harder and faster than the terror of the poisoning had.
The dragon hadn’t merely trusted her with his wounds. He hadn’t just tolerated her presence because she was a healer.
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He had been choosing her, quietly and deliberately, every single time she stepped into his enclosure.
And if Sorcha wanted to know what Vesper was truly offering her—what kind of bond the council had spent a year trying to destroy—she would first have to survive the men who were determined to make sure neither of them saw another sunrise.
