Surrounded by enemies, I have to tread carefully, spider and all.
I shift my right fore blade just enough to draw my father’s attention. After a polite interval he withdraws from the royal carriage and returns to stand by the back wheels of his. With hands clasped behind his back, not looking at me, he says, “Identify yourself, Soldier.”
“Father,” I say.
He raises a hand to forestall further words, then pretends the gesture was merely to scratch his ear. “Abandon this spider elsewhere in the city. Go to our old home and await me. Let no one see you. I’ll clear a path.”
He waves aside the infantry troop behind me, giving me enough room to clank back out onto the square. I don’t dare look back, not until I reach the far edge of the square. Only then do I halt and swivel around to wait, because I have to see if Kal really did it.
After some time a strange procession emerges from Eternity Temple. First comes a group of priest-wardens moving with the faltering walk of people sure they are about to be punished for what they are doing. They are followed by a double line of highborn Saroese girls and women of all ages, on foot, well over one hundred. Drab scarves cover their hair. Most are hiding their faces behind those same scarves, but some of the younger girls stare in delight at the new wonders unveiled this day, because they’re not yet resigned to the darkness.
Crowds have a temperament, and I can taste the way the people celebrating in the square swing wildly between joyous gaiety and a hungry anger left over from the weeks of enduring a siege. The anxious women and confused priest-wardens hang like bait before the agitated crowd.
“Shame! Shame!” a man shouts from the crowd. “Who has forced these holy women out of their sanctuary? Ill fortune upon us!”
More voices take up the call. “Go back! Go back inside lest the gods punish us for impiety!”
The crowd presses forward menacingly. The terrified wardens flee, abandoning their charges. But this is my responsibility too, because I set Kal on this path, and I won’t show less courage than he has.
I stump over. People scatter from my path. I ignore the frightened looks of the temple women as I place myself at their head and brandish my forelegs to keep the crowd at a distance. To my surprise, a troop of infantry trots out from the tunnel to take up a loose perimeter around the procession in support, as if Kal just realized what a whirlwind he has unleashed. At a deadly slow pace I and the nervous soldiers accompany the procession all the way beneath the hot sun from the City of the Dead to the queen’s palace.
It’s a long walk for people who have been trapped inside walls their whole lives but I can’t bear to leave them to make the journey alone. The first time we stop so they can rest, a small girl sidles forward to take advantage of the cooling shade the spider’s shadow casts. Her skin is so pale, as if in all her days the sun has never touched her. And after that, each time we halt they cluster as close as they can, perhaps convinced I am a talisman who will lead them to a brighter place. Some of the braver ones even touch the spider’s metal legs.
Only after they have all filed past the gates into the dubious safety of the queen’s palace do I leave.
I hide the spider in an overgrown section of the Queen’s Garden. From there it’s a quick walk on familiar side streets to the neighborhood where a lowborn man struggling to maintain a captain’s position could afford to live in a measure of peace with his most peculiar family. The compound gates are locked, but I know how to sneak in over the roof.
At first I think the compound is abandoned because the front rooms where we lived are empty, but signs of life stir in the kitchen courtyard with its cistern, hearth, and grain storehouse up on stilts. An Efean woman emerges from the interior to stir the embers of the griddle into life.
She’s followed out by a second woman, who begins kneading dough for bread. “You’d think he’d have sent warning he was coming. I wanted to go to the walls, see those cursed Saroese surrender and get their throats cut for the misery they’ve put us through.”
“Which Saroese?” asks the woman at the griddle as she coaxes sparks into flames. “The foreigners look no different from our own, do they? Efea will rise.”
“Hush, Tenefre. Not when he’s in the house.”
A third woman appears, yawning, with Wenru in a sling at her hip and a barely toddling child clinging to her hand. She glances toward the closed gates that lead into the private family courtyard. “Usually he comes to see Wenru right away. Should I knock on the gate and offer to bring the baby in to him?”
“No! You know he doesn’t like to be disturbed. He’ll come when he’s ready, Santhay.”
The wet nurse sits in a chair, shifts Wenru to her lap, and kisses the toddler on the head. The child wobbles off in the direction of a gull come to search for crumbs, and the startled bird flutters away over my head. The women don’t even look up, but Wenru follows the bird’s flight with longing.
“Mmm. I’m so hungry I could eat a crocodile.” Santhay taps Wenru on the nose with a generous smile, her voice lilting into a singsong. “Or a fat baby. I could eat a fat baby!”
He blinks, all solemn eyes and resigned boredom.
She sighs. “You are the most unnaturally quiet child.”
He ventures, awkwardly, “Baba. Baba.”
To laugh would be to give myself away and anyway, as false as his baby talk sounds, I have to admire him for trying. I creep around the roof, leaving them behind.
Father is standing alone in the family courtyard where once everything he cherished most could be found. The space lies empty, inhabited only by birds and lizards. He’s wearing the ordinary clothes of a common laborer. The sight sparks old memories, for when I was little this was how he always dressed. He was easier then, more relaxed, before he gained a captain’s rank and had to maintain a captain’s dignity.
I drop down from the roof. He turns.
“Jessamy!”
He strides across the gap and crushes me to him so tightly I can’t speak.
“Father,” I wheeze.
He sets me back and frowns with such anger that it isn’t until he touches the scar above my eye that I realize it isn’t me he’s angry at. “Where have you been? Was the king correct? He received a strange message—‘spyder cot’—written in the margin of Princess Berenise’s letter from Maldine. He was sure it referred to you.”
“Yes. Lord Gargaron kidnapped me and sent me to the mines.”
“The mines!” He rubs his forehead, then closes the hand into a fist. “And here I have sat, stuck like a bird in a cage while my daughter—”