The net trap is full to bursting with seething naga; both in the sense of its temper, and also in its restless, relentless movement, coils running over and over each other within the mesh's confines. The naga's glowering face goes around and around.
"You can be out of there the very minute you swear you'll stop terrorising the villages!" the archer yells, from what trial and error has deemed a safe distance.
The naga screams back.
"Anyone speak whatever that is? Any word of it?"
"The spirit seems like No," the paladin says sourly, sitting against the base of a tree, clutching a waterskin and a rag, eyes redly swollen almost shut from poison, accurately spat a remarkable distance.
"Arlo," the archer says, gently reproving.
"No word of it. Big man?"
The berserker is slinking silently around in the undergrowth in a stealthy crouch, watching the naga through slitted hunter's eyes. He makes a series of annoyed hand signs.
"You speak any of that, Arlo?"
"He says we should shut up," the paladin says, without looking.
The archer waves a rude gesture back at the berserker. "Where the pox did Malia go?" she says testily. "If she's lying under a bush somewhere with venom in her eyes—"
"Oh, aye, I'm sure she'd just lie down, all quiet-like," the paladin snorts. "Fuck, this muck burns."
There's renewed thrashing within the net trap, and the naga screams afresh.
"That'll be her, now," the paladin predicts.
Sure enough, the naga is heaving against its captivity and spitting, repeatedly and with deadly accuracy, at Malia's face. It seems outraged by the way the streams of poison twist in the air and fall harmlessly in entirely the wrong place; not least because Malia is only just out of reach of its scrabbling arms, thrust through the mesh and flailing at her.
They can't hear Malia, from where they are; she's speaking much more quietly. The small and ordinary snake she holds up, fist gripped just behind the head, however, is perfectly legible as some kind of threatening example; particularly after Malia makes a series of complicated wrist movements that turn a fist-sized rock in her other hand into a pea-sized pebble, which she flicks away. She uses the newly freed hand to gesture between the naga and the snake, making a pinching smaller gesture; and then she makes whatever her concluding argument is, getting louder on the last few words.
"—Into a fucking mongoose burrow!"
The naga makes a last shrill protest, pulls its arms back into the net, and coils itself up so that nothing of its person-shaped parts is visible, only stacked loops of muscular scaled tail.
Malia turns and marches away from it, pausing halfway to bend and release the snake into the grass, before rejoining them.
"Sulking," she scoffs. "Let it stew for a bit. Arlo, lift your head to the light?" She cups his chin in her hands to squint closely at his eyes. "Good that you washed it out. Unless your god sees fit to speed things, you've just to wait, though I can give you something for the pain."
"It's not wizard drugs, is it?" He dredges up a crooked smile.
"Don't fret; not the good stuff." She traces his cheeks with surprisingly tender strokes of her thumbs, smiling back, and turns to the archer. "You're not hurt?"
"No, and the big lad's fine."
"He's not going to stop about the glorious beast-hunts of his youth for a week, is he?" Malia says, and raises her voice. "Stop lurking, Ulfrun! We know you're a mighty hunter, but it's already caught!"
After a while to think on it, the naga yells at them, sulkily, in fractured Trade-tongue, and they sternly reiterate that the local villagers would like it to stop harassing them.
"Next time, they won't pay someone to talk to you," the archer points out severely, and the naga hisses ungratefully but eventually, resentfully, gives the list of promises they've been sent to extract.
"Question," it says abruptly, as the berserker looses the lowered net around it and hastily backs away.
"Aye?"
The naga points accusingly at Malia. "Wizard cheats!" it shrieks, and bolts into the undergrowth.
"Not a question!" Malia yells smugly after it.
