I leave Maldine in a cage pulled by mules. At Lord Gargaron’s order, they drape the cage in curtains and sew them shut. After much tugging with fingers and teeth, I rip open a gap along a seam and peer out, desperate to figure out where they are taking me and what’s happened to Maraya and Polodos.
The wagon in which I am being transported follows directly behind Lord Gargaron’s traveling carriage. In a way it’s a relief to still be with him because I’ve heard he intends to personally deliver his son to the Temple of Lord Judge Inkos atop the table mountain. Surely Maraya and Polodos travel with him. If they don’t, it means he has killed them. Yet as much as I frantically pry at the other corner seams, I can’t get a look at the rest of the party, only his carriage and the ubiquitous Captain Neartos riding alongside.
Our route takes us around the mountain’s base. We pass abandoned villages, roofs broken and storehouses scorched, and the trampled fields where armies met. Here my father fought a foreign army. I’ve nothing to do in this cage but fret or think, so I think. The battle took place when Father still served Clan Tonor. Maldine, its harbor, and the surrounding region are all lands that Father’s previous sponsor, Lord Ottonor, was responsible for.
It strikes me as suspicious that Garon Palace personally took over administration of Lord Ottonor’s former territory. Although Father accepted Lord Gargaron’s explanation that Ottonor died of ill health, I can’t help but remember Mother saying that she was sure he’d been poisoned.
We hit an incline. As the beasts haul us higher, I get a view of the road below. An army marches inland, its ranks passing as in review and swelled with an unusually high number of Efean grooms and drivers. Lord Thynos rides at its head with General Inarsis beside him. If I can just shout loud enough to draw their attention to me—
Captain Neartos slaps at the bars with the flat of his sword. “Whsst! Don’t try me, Spider.”
I jerk back, but it’s too late. He stops the wagon and orders a soldier to tie the seam closed, twice as strong this time.
By the time we halt, I’m light-headed from the way the heat has built around me like uncombed cotton being stuffed piece by piece into a bag until I’m choking on it.
One wall of the cage is lifted away. I crawl to the tailgate, roll off, and brace myself against it as I stand, gulping in fresh air. It’s hot but we have stopped in the shade of a wall so that’s a mercy. By clinging to the edge of the wagon, I work my way forward. The mules have been unhitched and are being led away.
“Come along, Spider.”
Neartos walks me to the stable. Inside the thick-walled building it’s blessedly cooler, air circulating through slots set high in the wall. I’m given my own stall at the very end. It’s actually a cage set into a stall, but I am grateful for clean straw. Neartos passes a flask of wine and three rounds of stale flatbread through the bars, then leaves. I’m so thirsty I gulp down half the wine before nausea hits. I throw it all up in a corner.
My stomach churns, but I force myself to eat a few bites of the dry bread, softening it with wine. It stays down. Day turns to night. I doze off and on, relieve myself in the corner where I vomited, and as dawn lightens darkness to gloom, I hear voices.
Without a word of greeting, Neartos escorts me outside and across the stable courtyard, back to the carriages. I look around frantically for Maraya but see only a threshold overlooking a wide stone staircase that descends into a bowl-like depression. Neartos’s back is turned, so without asking permission, I go over to the top of the steps.
Below, filling the depression, lie the grounds of a temple dedicated to Lord Judge Inkos, an orderly arrangement of gardens, courtyards, barracks, a servants’ village, and pavilions for the higher-ranking priests, all set around a central garden with a pond.
From this height I can’t help but notice how the substructure resembles the ruins outside Akheres Oasis, where Amaya and I begged Bettany to come home, where Gargaron concealed stolen gold in his uncle’s tomb and murdered innocent Efeans to keep the hiding place secret. Where I noticed how similar the ruins were to the arrangement of a Fives court: four outer quarters surrounding a round center.
A storm of comprehension blows through me, spinning my thoughts.
“If the Fives court represents the land of Efea, and the land of Efea is the Mother of All…” The circular nature of the answer is both too easy and too far-fetched. “Then the Fives court represents… the Mother of All.”
“Spider! Get back here at once!” Captain Neartos calls to me from the carriages.
“You buried her beneath your dead,” I whisper in Efean.
And yet she still lives.
In the servants’ village a figure limps out onto a porch. My breath catches. I’m sure it is Maraya, although she’s too far away to see her face. I loose the arrow of my heart toward her, willing her to look this way, and she glances up but I’m not sure she sees me.
I murmur a prayer under my breath. Am I filling my heart with false hope?
A crow startles me by landing on top of a lantern post an arm’s length from me. Below, a Patron boy using a cane taps his way up the stairs in the depression. He has a crow on either shoulder, one looking ahead and one behind, and empty sockets for his eyes.
“What is this?” says the boy.
He reaches toward me, misses, and recalibrates, just as I do when I train. This time he pats a hand up my arm.
“You smell like straw.” He wrinkles his nose and sniffs. “And wine. And something sour.”
“You’re learning to see through their eyes,” I say.
He grins, but before he can answer Neartos strides up.
“Your Holiness, pray excuse the disturbance. The mule slipped her harness.”
“I see no mule, only this Efean girl,” says the boy with such innocence that I want to hug him.
Neartos points down into the temple. I look that way just in time to see Lord Gargaron emerge from a pavilion, make his farewells to a black-hatted priest of Inkos, and start up the stairs.
“We must withdraw to our carriage, Your Holiness. It is time to leave.”
“Where are you going?” the boy asks, then confides to me, “I’ve never been outside the temple except up here to the stable. I’ll go when I’m older.”
“Will you join the spider scouts?” I ask.
“Silence!” says Neartos.
“No, let her speak.” The boy leans closer excitedly, although he makes sure to touch my belly to gauge how close I am. “Do you know about the spiders?”
“My father was a spider scout.”
“That’s what I dream of doing. To see the land outside these walls.”
I’m already in trouble, so I give up on obedience. “Will you learn to take the spark out of one body and place it in another?” I ask.
The crows all shift their gazes to me.
Affronted, the boy says, “You aren’t allowed to know about that.”
Neartos takes hold of my arm with an iron grip. “You never fail to take the leap, do you, Spider? Thank you for your patience, Your Holiness. We will take our leave now.”
Steering me to the door of the traveling carriage, he indicates I must get in. Gargaron climbs in after and settles opposite me, his whip across his thighs.
“Where are my sister and her husband?” I ask.