Sprites and Spirits, she was right!
The plan was to get you here so Hazra could kill you and the Vauphani royals all at once. I still don’t know why we’re killing our neighbors, though from what the king was saying it sure sounded like they were preparing for a war. Still, if anything, this will only provoke them more!
Which meant…If we’re discovered here, we’ll be blamed for the assassination. We were set up. Someone back home WANTS this war. So… even if I get away from Hazra, I need to make sure I don’t get caught… that none of us are caught!
Agreed.
Horrible screams and the gurgling of the dying began to fill the hall. Spirits! I needed to get out of here. But my eight tiny legs were frozen in fear. I didn’t know which way to go, where there might be an exit, some crack I could slip through. I’d already lost Ant and…
Something moved beside me and I shifted, skittering away a little.
It was an ant.
Oh, thank the Mists!
We couldn’t communicate in these forms, one of us would have to transform back to speak. Ant did so, now crouched under the table.
“I’m going after her,” he said, voice hard.
No! Get out of here, keep to your original plan. You can’t defeat her alone! I couldn’t say it, couldn’t stop him. I was too terrified to shift back and speak. He rolled away out from under the table and was gone into the mists.
Ant! No!
But I was alone again. Alone in a foreign country, where everyone was trying to kill me.
I found a crack in the wood of the table and squished myself into it. Trembling there, waiting for this horridness to be over. Hoping Ant would succeed, but almost certain he wouldn’t. As a spider, I couldn’t cry, but internally I wept with terror and grief.
Chapter 26
“Legs?”The voice was low, a whisper, but near… and it wasn’t Ant or Hazra, but…
Silence!
“We heard a commotion and came to check it out, I slipped under the door and could smell you in here, are you in spider form?” I saw him crawling along under the table, looking around. “You’re close, but I can’t see you.”
Oh, Silence, go. Get out of here!
He can’t hear you. You’ll need to change back.
I know that!
He was right beneath me, sniffing around. “Legs?”
I dropped from my hiding spot onto his shoulder.
He started and looked, then smiled. “I’m so glad you’re safe.” He spun a tight circle and began crawling back the way he’d come. “This is the way out; I can smell Amber and…” He stopped moving and whispering, frozen in place. It took me a moment to sense what he had, all the little hairs on my spider-body were on end and not twitching at all.
There was no sound.
The fighting and dying that had been happening around me had stopped, and he’d heard the silence as well.
A moment later he was a mouse and I fell off his now-much-smaller shoulder. He wasn’t a large mouse, and even though I wasn’t an over-large spider, I was too big to ride on him. We cowered, frozen, next to each other.
That’s when it occurred to me. If I couldn’t hear anything that meant one of two things: either Ant had killed the mistweaver… or she’d killed him. And given a thick fog still clung to the room, I feared the worst.
“Come out little spider,” came the sing-song call.
My bones froze — though as a spider I had an exoskeleton, so… all of me froze — icy claws of fear sinking into my soul.
