KANE’S BROWS KNIT INWARD. HIS HEAD COCKED TO THE SIDE. “DON’T YOU
love me?”
“Of course I do.” Of course, of course, of course . . . “Then let me take your place. Let me die for you.”
I opened my mouth to tell him no—please, please no—but only embers fell out. Little embers, each with wings. Tiny winged embers falling from my tongue, like ash in wind. Lighting me up from the inside. Setting me ablaze.
My eyes flew open and I gasped wildly, drawing damp forest air into my lungs. I thrashed—
My arms.
They were tied behind me. Wrapped in something. My legs, too, and across my middle. Oh, Stones, my lungs. They were seizing. I needed air. I needed to move. And something smelled like rot. Like carrion. Like death
—
The howls and shouts of Hemlock’s inhabitants shook the fog of panic from my mind, and I fought to breathe through my pounding headache, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. All I could make out were wooden bridges and wicker structures lit by lanterns and torches overhead. I was suspended somehow, across a long, thin net that webbed between all the trees and posts and branches supporting the city.
Above me, in the houses and along the interlaced bridges, stood men and women, some husky with tattoos, others thin and underfed, street urchin children weaving in and out of legs to get a better look. Killoran had
mentioned entertainment, and the slowly gathering crowd told me all I needed to know about their show of choice.
My shackles weren’t leather or metal or even lilium. But rather stiff, translucent silk. It looped around my wrists, my stomach, my legs, and spread between the trees, the two platforms, forming the netting that held me between the branches and pines.
Not netting. It wasn’t net at all. It was a web.
A thin yet impenetrable web laced around the lower trees of Hemlock’s city. And strewn throughout—
Bodies. Carcasses. Half-eaten, rotting, and decomposing all along the tangled silk.
Despite the churning in my stomach, I didn’t dare look away—I couldn’t. Not until I figured out what had killed them. Their state of decay was the only clue I had to decipher whatever was coming to kill me. I squinted at the torn limbs and open wounds.
No, not torn. Burned. Boiled and bubbled as if—
Acid.
Whatever trapped and hunted these less-fortunate prisoners devoured them with acidic venom. I wasn’t an idiot. I knew from the webbing what was possible. Had heard stories from Halden and Ryder over the years of widows: spiders the size of lions, with the upper bodies and heads of women. The venom in their fangs so toxic, one touch to the bloodstream could boil you alive.
I struggled against my thin, corded restraints. Bouncing myself on the net, I dug at the threads I could reach with my fingertips, but the tangled silk was stronger than chain. Unmovable.
Bleeding Stones.
I needed to do whatever I did that day with Halden. I had disintegrated rope somehow. How had I done that?
My lighte buzzed and tingled at my fingertips and in my palms. I clenched my jaw and gnashed my teeth.
I could sense it bubbling up.
Thank the Stones.
Feeling the heat, seeing it illuminating the dark—
I cast my eyes down over my shoulder and nearly hurled my entire stomach into the depths, swallowing any lighte back into my body in a flash.
The thin web under my bound body was all that kept me from the endless, knotted pit of trees and cliffs below. If I escaped from this impenetrable silk net and freed myself, I’d likely slip right through the gaps and plunge, screaming, to an instant death.
A violent noise dragged my eyes upward. Killoran stood atop a rickety balcony like a king surveying his subjects. Beside him was a still bound and gagged Kane, who was shouting something. Hoarse, as if he had been yelling for hours.
It was my name.
He was trying to shout my name. To wake me.
I moved my head vigorously until I saw his shoulders slump, his fears momentarily assuaged.
What I needed wasn’t a way out of these restraints, but a way to reach the bridge or platforms surrounding me without slipping through the silk so that I could climb up to them. But the howls of the crowd were growing louder. Riotous. Roaring. They knew what was coming. They wanted a show.
Come on, Arwen. Think, think, think—
Beneath me, the leaves began to rustle.
And then she appeared. At first, just her eyes. Beady, yellow, whirling in different directions—all eight of them peering over the netting, glowing like embers. And obscuring them were delicate, dark lashes as fine as her silk trap. She tilted her elegant head up, revealing two flat nostrils bare of a nose and lips as red as rubies, too dainty to contain her spiked fangs.
The widow’s long legs, dusted in black hair, protruded out and onto the web until she stood before me. The torso of a slender woman, claws— pincers—where her arms should be, all of her covered in the grotesque membranes of a near-translucent black spider. Straight sable hair hung from
her head, so long it trailed across the fibers of her net as she prowled forward, and my dread turned heavy and leaden in my stomach.
She could walk across her web just fine. Either that otherworldly grace, or those sticky, membranous legs—whatever it was, she wasn’t slipping through.
“Hemlock,” Killoran bellowed to his people, “tonight we sacrifice another to the creature that lurks beneath. A beast I caught and imprisoned with my bare hands, lest you forget.” The faces above me, mottled by firelight and shifting shadows from the sun still shining somewhere far, far up above, cheered and roared at his words.
“And not just any sacrifice. The prized armorer of King Kane Ravenwood of Onyx Kingdom!”
Oohs and aahs reverberated through the crowd as more people— haggard women and slick, scrawny men—peered out of their windows and left their posts, following the cries of an audience entertained.
“And how did I manage to steal her from him?” Killoran roared. “Well, why don’t you ask the king himself?”
My stomach turned on itself at the horror, the humiliation, as he jerked Kane up by the tunic at his shoulders, and presented him, gagged, beaten, and chained, to his followers. Louder now than I had yet heard them, the crowd screamed and hollered, swarming on top of one another, disorderly in their delight.
It was almost enough to steal my attention from the creature stalking toward me and her ravenous intent. But the torchlight glinting off something around her neck stilled my racing thoughts.
A collar.
A thick iron collar, tethering her to the depths below. One she strained against, halting repeatedly to stretch her long, graceful neck from, but the chain was too taut, and each time she drew closer, or retreated, it retracted with her movements, never leaving her any slack.
But that collar was made of solid chain. And I was weaponless— My eyes flitted frantically to the other bodies.
But none of them had what I was looking for, and she was prowling closer. One slender bent leg after another, moving with such eerie grace as her pincers snapped once, twice—
And the crowd, the prisoners, roaring with glee, cheering her on.
Focus. One of them has to have—
I just needed to know it was possible. That her venom could do what I needed it to.
Leather belt, suede pouch, wooden club, no, no, no . . .
There—
A metal shield.
Strapped to the back of a decomposing body was an iron shield, boiled by the widow’s acidic poison, liquefied as if it were butter.
Melted.
Her venom melted metal.
Those pincers, too close now. The sound like a knife being sharpened before it cut into fresh meat. Slicing, snapping, clicking. The silk shook as the creature hovered above me, and I—
I didn’t squirm. I didn’t cry. I sucked in a great lungful of air and braced myself. The widow crouched low, and the fine hairs of her legs tickled my shoulders and nose. Slowly, she cut through my restraints with those gleaming pincers, taking her time as she freed my arms, my torso. Her hypnotic yellow eyes shone, her lips parting to reveal the shining white fangs inside.
Her nostrils twitched, pupils rolling together to follow my involuntary jerks and spasms every time a fine hair touched my skin. She cocked her head to one side, and then the other . . . waiting.
Waiting for my struggle, for the hunt—
But I lay still, despite the audience’s groans and bellows for me to scramble away. I shuddered through the horror, the smell of earth and musk, as the creature opened her gruesome arachnid mouth, let out a hungry, fevered hiss, and tore her venomous fangs through my thigh.
My vision tunneled to a single pinprick. It was worse than agony.
The closest I had come to feeling even a whisper of this kind of pain had been the night Kane’s healers purged wolfbeast venom from me. And that— that had been a splinter, a papercut, a stubbed toe compared to this.
I shrieked.
Sobbed—
Bellowed as acid ripped through muscle, flesh, my very bones, until I could feel my blood bubbling, sputtering under my skin.
Another wave of relentless anguish hauled me under and I screeched, my voice like a banshee in my own ears—
Do not faint. Do not faint.
All the while the crowd cheered for my death. For my evisceration. Some faraway part of my brain remembered what needed to be done. My only chance at survival.
I reached with arms that didn’t feel like my own for the metal chain connected to the widow’s collar. Tugged and wrenched it looser, longer, until I had enough slack to bring the chain down to where the creature’s fang was still impaled in my leg and ran the metal through my own bubbling, sizzling flesh.
Moaning through clenched, gritted teeth, I nearly vomited from the splintering, nerve-shredding torture. One more minute—
One more second—
Until finally, finally—the widow’s chain snapped, liquefied by its own acid, with a wonderful crack.
I had to move very, very quickly now, lest the widow realize she was free and take off, leaving me to plummet through the gaping holes of her web. I pushed one hand into my thigh and felt the lighte eagerly pour through me, sealing up the wound, purging the acid, cooling the burning, ripping venom.
I exhaled with the fleeting relief, and with my other hand I clawed for her collar, dodging as she lurched toward me, her toxic fangs just narrowly missing my neck.
The crowd booed their displeasure as I ducked to the side, the silken lattice swaying and bouncing with my every movement. The widow
crawled around me, pouncing to pierce me with her fangs once more.
I rolled, skirting another blow, the web dipping uneasily and my foot slipping through a gaping hole.
More cheering, more rabid joy—
My hands wrapped around the thin strands of silk, the fibers too slight, too dainty to hold me—
My stomach plummeting as I reached, and reached and reached. And finally grasped her collar.
My fingers twined around the metal chains, pulling myself upright and, despite the pain, over the creature until I was seated atop her like a horse. She screeched out a wicked sound, and I wrapped my hands in her hair to hold myself steady. Her bony exoskeleton was thin, and bowed under my weight, the reedy, prickly hairs grazing my arms. While the crowd thundered with glee as I tried to hold on, the widow’s flexible body writhed and shrugged, trying to buck me off. I yanked the chain around her neck harder, rearing her up like a steed on its hind legs.
“Come on,” I said, grunting. “I freed you, come on—”
Suddenly she took off, and I was thrown backward as we skittered toward a large oak platform bursting with spectators. Their shouts of elation quickly bled into gasps of terror as the widow’s legs scurried over vines and stairs and bodies. I held on for my life, tugging at her silky hair as she hissed and shrieked, fangs snapping.
I just needed to get closer, higher, over to where Killoran and his men were beginning to panic, scrambling for their weapons, crawling over one another to aim their crossbows at us.
The widow lunged for a cowering, dirtied child and I yanked her back with all my strength until the tendons in my arms were straining, sweat beading and pooling on my brow—
Back, Stones-damn it, back—
She screeched again, so close to my ear it sent my teeth gnashing. “That’s not the one you want,” I bit out. “How about the man that
chained you?”
The widow retracted from the boy and cocked her elegant head in my direction. Long, silken black hair spilled over my knee and I wriggled from the sensation.
“He’s up there.” I tugged the chain toward Killoran’s war room. “And I’m going to kill him.”
The widow took off, climbing vertically over the unpolished posts, pails of water, a butcher’s hut—one long, elegant leg plunging through a cut of beef as patrons ran for the bridges and dove off the platform, away from her still-dripping fangs.
Higher still she climbed as arrows rained down on both of us. But if I had practiced one single skill with my lighte in the weeks since Siren’s Bay, it was the iridescent golden shield I flowered around me, which protected us both from the weapons that sailed overhead.
We climbed high enough that I could see Killoran, dragging Kane by his lilium chains away from the balcony and into his throne room. The widow would keep climbing, keep feasting through the city. This was my shot—
Without even steeling myself, I released her hair and leapt.
I landed hard, halfway onto the knotted beams of Killoran’s balcony, hands scrambling to grip the ledge. I hoisted myself up and over the mismatched wooden planks and slumped down onto the floor to catch my rough, ragged breaths.
I was mere feet from Kane, who was too pale and drenched in sweat, trying to call to me through the leather gag.
But I couldn’t hear him. I couldn’t hear anything except the roaring in my ears and the racing of my heart and that pulsing, unfathomable pain in my mind, back again. I tried to push myself up but my sight had blurred—
Killoran’s men had me in their grip within seconds.
Exhaustion consumed me and I sagged against their steadfast hold.
“No matter,” Killoran muttered from across the room. “I’ll dispose of her myself,” he roared to the crowd outside. But all I could hear were their screams as the widow prowled through their city, plunging her spiked legs through their canvas roofs and tearing her fangs into anyone in sight.
Served them all right.
I hoped she went to bed very full tonight.
Killoran stalked toward me, unsheathing his sword.
And suddenly that mind-altering sensation, that crippling, gooseflesh- inducing twist . . .
It was replaced by an onslaught of sea wind and cackling, white-hot coals and the unflinching stare of death and a cold morning filled with dazzling sunbeams and—
I strained against the assault and squeezed my eyes shut.
An assault of sequences I hadn’t ever seen—a child inside a womb, a decaying fox in a wood, a chorus of bells, ashes and embers and flames—I sucked in air as I tried to grasp one image, one sensation, and make sense of it before another invaded my mind. I strained against my captors as the power battered me.
Unrelenting madness and ecstasy and power. Pure, persistent power—
Beckoning to me— To its master.
Reunited, though we had never met. I was not afraid.
I knew what it was.
I knew why it belonged to me.
The only thing on this continent that could cause such sickness and euphoria and turmoil in the same heartbeat.
Killoran was wielding the Blade of the Sun.
