to take a step, stumbled, and nearly fell. At the last moment he grabbed a tree for balance. All the while, the forest was becoming brighter, the moonlight flooding his vision. Something was wrong with his eyes.
Pulling his short sword clumsily from its sheath, he stared into its polished surface and saw that his pupils had dilated to the point where the red of the iris had all but vanished. Grimacing, he lowered his sword, stood a moment, then remembered he hadn't sheathed it. He tried to shove the short sword into its sheath but missed, in-stead shoving it point-first into the ground as he stumbled. Unable to catch himself again, he fell flat out onto the soggy ground beside it. Above him, the trees seemed to have turned to pale gray shadows, wavering back and forth as though they were under water.
Lying there, watching the forest spiral in circles above him, Ryld wondered if he was going to die. The belladonna had halted his trans-formation into a werewolf, but at what cost? His heart was pounding at an alarming rate, and his skin felt dry and hot. He tried to wet his lips, but even that effort was too much for him. All he could do was lie on the forest floor, inhaling the smell of wet earth and rotting leaf with each halting breath.
His breath. That was the one thing he still could control.
Ryld cast his mind back to his training at Melee-Magthere. One of the tests initiates had been required to pass involved maintaining concentration in times of physical duress. The initiates had been instructed to strip off their clothing, sit cross-legged on the floor of the practice hall with their eyes closed, and focus on their breath-ing. At the time, Ryld thought the test was designed to teach them to ignore the cold of the stone floor - but he was wrong. One of the masters strolled between the rows of meditating pupils, dropping centipedes onto their skin. The insects were each as long as a finger and bit immediately when they landed, injecting a venom that raced like fire through the students' veins. Those initiates who cried out or gasped were given a sharp rap on the head. If they cried out a second time they were hit harder. A third, and they were told to leave Melee-Magthere and never return.
Ryld had been dimly aware of the student behind him gasping a third time and listened with only a portion of his mind as he was or-dered to leave. He heard the choked sob he made as he obeyed. Ryld forced his mind deeper into meditation, at the same time bracing himself for what he knew was coming next. When the centipede fell onto his thigh, he didn't flinch. As the centipede bit into his flesh like the stab of a fire-heated skewer, he told himself to remain calm, to breathe in through his left nostril, out through his right, in through his left nostril, out through his right. . .
Then the centipede scurried across his groin, its hundreds of legs tickling, its head moving from side to side as if it was look-ing for a second spot to bite. In the space between two heartbeats, Ryld nearly forgot how to breathe. He felt his heart begin to race, while instinct screamed at him to leap to his feet, to brush the foul insect away.
Then he remembered his life before Melee-Magthere - his life in the Stenchstreets, and the time, years before, when the nobles had come on their hunt. He was only six years old then, but he remem-bered lying there, blistered from the fireball that had left corpses strewn all around him. In order to survive, he'd been forced to lie utterly still, to play dead while the hunters claimed their trophies: teeth, ears, and occasionally an entire head. Ryld had learned then to control his breathing, to make it shallow and slow, inaudible above the sawing of blades through flesh. Thankfully, they did not deem any parts of a small, scrawny boy worth taking.
Remembering that trial, he found the strength to ignore the tickle of the centipede and its second painful bite.
When the ordeal was over, the masters nodded, silently acknowl-edging the fortitude of Ryld and the other five students who had passed the test. Ryld had been almost unable to walk for an entire tenday afterward.
Lying in the forest, riding the waves of the war between the belladonna and the disease,