“You’re saying you just walked out of there and the guards did nothing?” asked the dwarf.

“We left and returned many times. They barely looked at me. They don’t pay much attention to the animals, so long as there’s a human owner to vouch for them. Stupid, I know. But with farmers driving their flocks to market every day, it makes sense they can’t check them all.”

Aedwyn stood quietly as the two old druids discussed him. He had been a scribe in training at the monastery before they sold him into slavery to cover a shortfall in his tuition fees, and he’d been around enough priests to know how much old men loved to talk. He’d also been on the wrong end of a priest’s birch often enough to know when to keep his mouth shut.

His master, a man named Brannoc, had spent several days in Drachenel, peddling his potions, playing the part of Aedwyn's barely-sapient assistant. Aedwyn had stammered though his script, asking the patient the describe their symptoms again, keeping them distracted, while Brannoc ducked into his wagon to whip up a batch to treat each malady.

When the reagents finally ran out, they left Drachenel behind. Brannoc drove them into a woodland glade for no other reason, it seemed, than to show Aedwyn off to a friend.

The dwarf was almost nothing but druidmarks: his body covered in thick green scales, his voice carrying a strange lisp. Aedwyn had screamed the first time the creature’s “tongue” emerged for a closer look.

The dwarf harrumphed. “A man of your talents, prancing about like some man’s sex slave. It’s undignified.”

“A leather collar is better than a cold iron one,” Brannoc pointed out.

The dwarf’s tongue slithered up beneath Aedwyn’s loincloth in search of warmth.

“Well, I cannae deny these woods grow colder every year for a cold-blooded druid like me,” the dwarf mumbled around the three feet of snake protruding from his lips. “There are times I wish I could be among my own kind again. Ahh, to sleep beside a furnace. Or a warm body.”

The more snake that forced its way from the dwarf’s mouth, the smaller the man himself became. His scaled skin sagged, his eyes sank into hollow pits, and then his skull collapsed. At last the loose skin sloughed away into a heap on the ground, leaving a far more humanoid serpent coiling its thick body around his limbs.

“Perhapsss we should all have one of thessse,” hissed the snake-druid. “How much do you want for him, old friend?”

“He’s not for sale,” Brannoc said firmly. “But we can share him for a while, if you like.”