Neve’s eyes flicked to Solmir. The former King still stood with his jaw tight and his arms crossed, but there was something more than cold in his blue eyes. Pity, maybe. Or guilt.
“I am no god,” the Seamstress continued. “Power pulls them, the gravity of it tugging them forward—no matter how they might resist—to the Sanctum, where so much magic lies, or to open doors between worlds. I couldn’t feel the pull, but my Weaver did. And it grew too strong to resist. My Weaver went to the Kings, went to their Sanctum, unable to stop itself.” Her breathing shuddered. “They cut my god with the bones of one of the others; the Dragon, maybe, or the Hawk, one of those that succumbed earliest. They drained its power into themselves. And now my Weaver is gone.”
A monstrous story in a monstrous place; a woman twisted for the love of a bestial god. But still, an answering grief stirred in Neve’s chest, human feelings for these inhuman things.
“I felt it happen,” the Seamstress said. “We were tied together so, my Weaver and I. For its love, I gave up my humanity. Part of me thought I would die once it did.” She paused. “I’m sorry I didn’t.”
She fell quiet; no one filled it. Strange, how the emotions felt by monstrous gods so echoed Neve’s own. How they didn’t seem so different at all.
The Seamstress thoughtfully curled a segmented leg against her teeth. “I cannot tell time anymore, but I know much has passed since they took my Weaver. Why do you only come now, once-King?”
“Trying out those other plans.” Solmir’s eyes glittered; the softness he’d shown her while she told the tale of her loss was gone, and now he was all chill and hard edges. “The ones you told me were pointless.”
Sharp teeth dimpled her lip as the Seamstress grinned. “I won’t say I told you so.”
Solmir grunted. “It might’ve worked, but there were… complications.”
Complications like Red, like her Wolf. Even now, Neve didn’t know how to feel about that. All these things she’d done to save a sister who didn’t want to be saved, who’d made a home of her sacrificial altar.
“It wouldn’t have,” the Seamstress said flatly. “Open ways between worlds draw gods toward them, yes, but only the Heart Tree can draw something as powerful as the Kings. They felt your doorway, and I’m sure they tried their best to get to it. But they could never have been fully pulled through. Not as they are now.”
Solmir’s eyes darted Neve’s way, a flash of blue too quick for her to try to read.
The Seamstress selected another insect piece from the pile of her offerings. “How busy you’ve been, once-King. I felt the rupture—all of us did, here on the fringes, though it was too small to draw the Old Ones—but I didn’t think it was you who went through. Only a shadow-creature, or some lesser beast. I should’ve sensed the passage of one with a soul.”
“I’m only about as important as some lesser beast now,” Solmir said. “And my soul is a small, mean thing.”
“Still remarkable you have one.” The Seamstress sat back, chewing thoughtfully. “Mine sank into this place long ago, melded with the dark and the muck and the rot as I pulled up magic and let it twist me. I don’t even remember what color my eyes were.”
“Yours was compromised long before you came here, I think, or you would never have fallen in love with the Weaver.” Teasing, it seemed, looked entirely different on Solmir than mocking did. There was a light in his eyes that wasn’t malice; he held himself more loosely.
“Pots and kettles.” The Seamstress flicked the ends of her spider legs like fingers. “I meant no offense. Long friendship tends to make tatters of manners.”
“I know it’s made tatters of mine.” In one smooth motion, like it was something he’d practiced, Solmir sank to one knee. His fist came up and hovered before his forehead, chin tilted to the Seamstress’s dusty floor.
Surprise made Neve’s brows climb; she looked to the Seamstress, expecting her confusion to be mirrored. But though the creature looked stricken, it seemed more as if she was touched, like Solmir kneeling was one more piece of a ritual between gods and monsters that Neve didn’t know.
Faceted arachnid eyes widened, the Seamstress’s legs twitching as she backed up a step, one hand coming to her chest. “Oh, once-King, no.” It was half a laugh and half a sob. “I’m not a god. I am not one to be shown deference, not beyond the words of welcome.”
“You were the Beloved of the Weaver.” Again, a sense of capitalization, as if Beloved was just as much a title as Shadow Queen. “And the Weaver is gone. I show you the deference I would’ve shown it.” Solmir looked up, face solemn, with none of the contempt Neve had grown to expect as his default. “Anyone who can make an Old One feel something like love is deserving of deference.”
The Seamstress quirked her mouth in a sorrowful smile. “You think love is so difficult,” she murmured. “Such a fraught thing. But sometimes, it can be simple, even when everything around it is not.”
Solmir said nothing. But when he straightened, his mouth was that thin line again, his expression arrogant and cold. Neve watched through narrowed eyes, unsure how to add up all these disparate parts into the whole of him. There was more to Solmir than cruelty and ambition, apparently, but she couldn’t trace the fractures in that armor to see what waited beyond it.
Shadow Queen.
Neve flinched. Her head turned, looking for a speaker, whoever had just whispered in her ear. But there was no one else in the cabin, and no one close enough—
The Seamstress. Her eyes were fixed on Neve, hypnotizing in their strangeness, and her mouth didn’t move. But it was her. Speaking, somehow, into Neve’s head.
I have learned the ways of this place, how sinking yourself into it allows you to speak mind to mind. She sounded bemused, as much as one could when their voice was disembodied. Swallowing shadow is swallowing a piece of this world, little queen, and then the things of this world can speak to you through it. You pulled us in when you pulled in the magic in your grove. And though the once-King carries that magic now, it still left its marks in you. Magic scars. Something like a sigh brushed through her head. I grow so weary of it. All of it.
Neve glanced at Solmir—all his attention was on the pieces of insects hanging from the rafters. The words of the Old One’s lover were for Neve alone, spoken only into her skull.
I was like you once, the Seamstress continued. A human girl, caught in webs beyond my imagining. The Weaver looked so different on the surface, but I loved it enough to follow it into exile. And by the time I saw its true form, it was beautiful to me, for I’d been changed, too. She paused. Monstrousness is a curious thing. In its barest form, its simplest definition, a monster is merely something different than you think it should be. And who gets to decide what should be, anyway?