“I see it.”
She’s already slowed. Her hand up, the rest of us stalling behind her as she reads the forest the way she reads everything, quietly, completely, like it’s telling her something in a language the rest of us don’t have ears for.
The trees go very still.
Then Finnian says quietly, “Above.”
I look up.
The canopy is moving. Not with wind. Something in it. Multiple somethings, the branches bowing in sequence, a ripple moving through the high dark toward us in a way that has a specific, horrible logic to it.
“Run?” Tiana asks.
“No.” Kestra’s voice has changed. Gone flat and certain, the steel beneath the silk that I’ve been watching surface more and more since the root hollow. “Stand together. Don’t separate.”
The first spider drops.
Spideris doing a lot of work as a word for what lands six feet from me on the forest floor. It’s the shape of one, eight legs, the general architecture, but ancient in the way the trees here are ancient, built for a world that preceded courts, the body the size of a hunting dog and the legs spanning wider than my arms can reach. It’s the color of the forest floor, which is the first problem, and it’s fast, which is the second.
There are four more behind it.
My thorns erupt before I consciously call them.
Blue-green fire spiraling up my forearms, vines cracking from the earth in defensive sprawl, not elegant, not controlled, just the wild magic reading the threat level and deciding this qualified as a full response situation. The nearest spider hits the vine wall and recoils. I move forward.
“LIGHT. NOW.” Kestra’s voice, aimed at Finnian.
He hesitates. Just a breath.
Then the Seelie gold blooms from his hands, not his magic, I know that now, but the binding Amarantha seared into him.
The Summer Sword’s light.
He’s channeling her claim on him like a weapon, and the expression on his face as he does it is the expression of a man swallowing poison to save someone else.
It works. The light floods the canopy, noon-bright and brutal. The spiders freeze. They’re built for shadows. The light hits them like a physical force.
I file that away.
Kestra’s ice sword is in her hand.
Tiana is?—
I almost lose my footing watching Tiana.
Thirty years hiding in the borderlands. Thirty years surviving without a throne, without an army, without anything but Kestra and her own two hands.
It shows.
She moves through the spiders the way water moves through rock. No magic that I can see, just her hands and her body and a viciousness so practiced it’s gone past violence into something almost technical.
She takes the second spider’s leg off at the joint and uses the momentum to redirect herself toward the third without stopping, and her expression throughout is the same patient focused look she uses when she’s reading a map.
I file it under things I am not asking about right now and handle the fourth.
My knife. The thorns wrapping my forearm as reinforcement. The spider is fast but I’ve been fighting things faster than me since I was twenty-two and the mechanics aren’t so different, find the center of mass, control the legs, go for something vital when you get the opening.
I get the opening.
