“Your fingers…” Sera said in a choked voice.
“Indeed, child. What he didn’t cut off, he broke.”
“He’ll pay for this,” Sera said vehemently, furious that Traho had hurt this wise, gentle merman. “I swear to the gods, he’ll pay.”
She tried once more to break free of the cocoon, to no avail. Not only was she weak, she was hungry, too.
“Fossegrim, do you know how long I’ve been here?”
“Five days. Alítheia dragged you in the day after she dragged me here,” Fossegrim replied. “She said you’d been left in a tunnel. You’ve been unconscious all that time.”
Which means I’ve been in Cerulea for, what? Sera wondered. Eight or nine days? Ten?
“I feared you were dead, but Alítheia said you were full of scorpion’s venom. She was angry. She wanted to eat you right away, but she said your flesh would be bitter until the venom wore off. I’m afraid she ate something—someone—else in the meantime,” he added.
“Has she threatened to eat you?”
He shook his head. “She says I’m old and tough and she’s only keeping me around as a last resort.” He chuckled. “Makes me feel like a sweet that nobody wants, one with a sea urchin center.”
“We need to escape before she eats either of us, and I haven’t a clue how to make that happen,” Sera said. “If only I had my sword or dagger, I could cut my way out.”
Fossegrim cleared his throat. “I find that success—in extricating oneself from captivity, or in any endeavor, really—comes down, essentially, to belief.”
Sera had forgotten the liber magus’s exasperating tendency to pontificate. There was a time and place for his wordy ramblings, but this definitely wasn’t it.
“So, all we have to do is believe we’ll get out of here, and we will?” she asked skeptically.
“Precisely,” Fossegrim replied. “Belief leads to action, and action leads to success. If you do not believe you can get out of here, you’ll give up, do nothing, and merely dangle uselessly, waiting for the end to come. However, if you do believe escape is possible, you’ll snap into action and use all the weapons at your disposal to attain your liberty.”
Sera rolled her eyes. “Fossegrim, maybe you haven’t realized this, but I don’t have any weapons. I can’t even move my hands. I’m in a cocoon!”
Fossegrim sighed deeply, as he often had in his ostrokon when confronted by a particularly dense student.
“Is it not strange that this creature that inspires such great fear in so many, is—at this moment—so full of fear herself?” he asked, nodding in the direction of the grille.
The goblins had left, but Alítheia was still huddled in the hollow where she’d taken cover, cringing and hissing.
“For four thousand years, the anarachna has been carrying out the task with which Merrow charged her: to ascertain who is fit for the throne,” he continued, his eyes still on the spider. “Yet she’s reviled. Taunted. Banished to a dark cave under the seafloor. What poor recompense for such long and faithful service.” He shifted his gaze back to Sera. “You do have a weapon, child. Can you not see it?”
Serafina was about to argue with him when she heard Vr?ja’s voice in her head again, as she did so often in times of trouble. Nothing is more powerful than love.
Love. It was easy to feel it for Mahdi, her friends, her merfolk. It was a lot harder to feel it for a giant bronze spider that wanted to eat her.
Sera saw what Fossegrim was trying to say, though—that the anarachna, like any creature, deserved to be treated kindly. With respect. Even love.
Sera would try to do that now. She had no choice.
Love was the only weapon she had left.
A LONG BRONZE LEG, articulated at the joints and tipped by a dagger-sharp claw, poked out of the hollow. It was followed by another, and several more, and then the anarachna emerged fully.
Sera watched her, knowing she had only minutes to put her plan in motion. The bloodbind had given her some of her five friends’ talents. She summoned Ava’s gift of sight now, focusing it on the spider.
For a few tense seconds, she sensed nothing. Then an image of high, impenetrable walls came into her mind. She felt various emotions as she concentrated on the image: anger, fear, but most of all, sadness.
Sera knew that she would have to tap into those emotions if she had any chance of engaging Alítheia, but she’d have to proceed slowly. The spider had built walls around her feelings for a reason, and drawing them out would be a delicate task. Sera had seen Alítheia in a rage during her Dokimí, when the spider learned she wouldn’t be able to eat Sera, and Sera knew how quickly Alítheia could become violent. If Sera wasn’t careful, she’d set the creature off and get herself killed.
“Alítheia, are you okay? Did you get hurt?” she asked gently.