Page 51 of The King's Man 3

“I’m not interested.”

“You haven’t given me a chance.”

I gape at him and point to the foot he’s planted on my shoulder twice already. “I’ve seen enough.”

“Bet I can change your mind,” he says, scanning the trees with a toothy smile.

I clomp along the widening brook.

“Are you rejecting me because of the king?” Bastion asks.

“I have a million reasons to reject you.”

I halt at the changing scent in the air and study the brook. It trickles down brown rocks with moss growing at the sides. It seems harmless, but... I breathe in again. There’s a rustiness in the air, growing stronger and more ominous further up.

Bastion’s grown quiet; he senses it too. He follows at a swift pace behind me. I hold my cloak over my nose as the stench becomes more putrid.

My heartbeat is a series of rampant thumps, my exposed skin a network of scratches as I push through foliage, up an incline, to a level stretch of forest and a pool that glitters under the surface as if layered with shards of shattered glass.

Glass that seems to stir. Glass that carries the sickly scent of decay.

Bastion grabs my arm. “Stop.”

There’s a warning in his voice that urges me to immediately obey.

“The miasma.”

I jerk my head up from the pool to ribbon-like mist stretching through the woods ahead. It moves lazily back and forth like waves on an incoming tide, slowly but surely creeping closer. Behind those tendrils lies the rest of the miasma, a sea that blurs the outlines of tree trunks and thinly veils a dark mass beyond—

“Those caves hold a fortune for the taking,” Bastion murmurs. “If the cloud didn’t kill.”

The backbone of trade for the area.

If there are miracle herbs in there . . .

“There’s even a rumour the shakes unearthed a clump of immortal bone.”

I take an instinctive step forward and Bastion yanks me back by the arm. “Watch out!”

He’s not talking about the miasma. A wyvern, no bigger than a farm dog, is leaping out of the pool. It twists and turns in aspray of water and sinister grace, and its silvery eyes burn in our direction.

Bastion unfurls his whip with a crack. The wyvern dances around the sound and stretches out its pearly wings, spreading its claws with a frightening screech that rattles my bones.

Bastion yells and I duck instinctively; his whip flies above me and slices into the wyvern. It bursts into droplets and falls into the pool, only to rise again.

A crude whip is nothing to a wyvern. The next attack comes faster, wings whirring the stench in the air as it rises above us. Bastion has no defence against its deadly dive—I scrabble to my feet and cast a shield around us.

The wyvern hits it with a violent splash that has me rocking hard on my feet. I slam my eyes shut to concentrate, but I’m exhausted. There’s little left in me.

“Stay behind me,” I command. “If you’re poisoned, I won’t be able to save you.”

The wyvern screeches, the sound agonised and wounded, yet it charges at us desperately, a swoop, a lunge. A claw scratches through, and sharp pain slices through my middle as if the claw had reached me. I buckle, dropping to the damp earth on my knees, my shield wispy and thin, dissolving.

The shimmery shadow of the wyvern circles overhead.

My heart jumps at a sound coming from the woods behind us, and I whip my head towards the trees. Above, the wyvern dives. Bastion throws his arms over his head, and I stare at Quin, mouthing his name.

He staggers into the small clearing, slicing his hand with a knife, and flings his blood at the wyvern in a mighty arc. It hits pearly wings and the wyvern lurches out of its dive, coming for Quin, who casts out more blood, this time catching its mouth. “Halt!”

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