Bad Blood

Seven

Asra hated the swamp even more than she hated the capital city.

The air was so humid she thought she might drown with every breath. Moisture clung to her coat and the open wounds on her thigh, and the soggy earth drenched the fur on her paws. The dense trees, tightly-coiled clumps of moss slung over their branches, closed in on her like prison bars.

Worst of all was the constant roar of thousands of frogs and toads. Their croaks were even louder than the swarms of insects. She missed her arid home, where her pelt stayed dry in the warm sun, where she could climb to the top of a rocky outcropping and see for miles, and where the only sound was the wind as it caressed desert brush.

There, she could be alone with her thoughts. Here, she could barely hear herself think.

The frogs didn't even have the decency to be edible. She'd attempted several times to snatch one up, partially to satisfy the gnawing hunger in her stomach and partially to spite the damn things. When she finally caught one-a slow, fat bullfrog the size of a dinner plate-it urinated. She spat it out, saliva foaming all over her muzzle. She tried to wash the taste out by lapping out of a pond, but the stagnant water tasted worse than a days-old carcass.

Ciaran found the whole thing hilarious, and it was only when Asra flashed her fangs at him that he stopped laughing.

"Sorry," he said. "I guess it's just a dog thing. Every time we came through here, Bane would ... " His smile vanished, and he fell silent.

At first Asra was grateful for this. She hadn't been able to get the man to shut up for more than a few seconds since she met him, and his voice was just one more irritation in the cacophony of the swamp.

But with Ciaran's silence also came his foul mood. Each time Asra asked which direction they should go, he was short and snippy with her. Each time she growled a warning at him, and each time he shut his mouth and sulked like a teenager. She'd never admit it to him, but she much preferred him being a chatterbox.

As they neared New Port, a fresh source of revulsion revealed itself: an overwhelming malodor of decay and rotting eggs. Asra wrinkled her nose.

"What is that stench?" she said.

"Pluff mud," Ciaran said.

"What mud?"

He pointed to the edge of the water, where tall grasses grew out of a mud so dark it was nearly black. Dozens of small crabs, each with one claw significantly larger than the other, scuttled across the surface. Asra raised a paw to shoo them away.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Ciaran said as he walked past. "You could sink and get stuck, especially as big as you are."

Asra straightened and said, "It's just mud."

Ciaran shrugged. "Try it and find out. But I'm not sticking around to help you."

Curiosity getting the better of her, Asra waved the tiny crabs away and pressed a paw into the strange substance. It was oddly fluffy and soft, as though she were digging through freshly ground flour, yet somehow wet and slimy. Intrigued, she pushed deeper, until something sharp sliced into her paw. She yelped and jerked her leg away, but the mud sucked in her paw like a tornado. She leaned back on her haunches, pain searing through her injured thigh, and yanked her paw free. Fresh blood mingled with the mud on her fur.

Ciaran watched the event without a hint of humor on his face. "Are you done?"

Asra growled to herself, then followed after him, her paw aching almost as much as her bruised dignity.