The fifth spider breaks for the trees when the fourth drops.
Silence.
Real silence, not the teeth-silence Whispen warned about. Just the forest processing what happened, the undergrowth settling, my own breathing too loud in the aftermath.
“Everyone.” I turn. “Sound off.”
“Here.” Tiana. Already cleaning her hands on the moss.
“Here.” Kestra. Ice sword melting, shoulders dropping an inch.
“Here.” Finnian.
Except his voice is wrong.
My arm throbs where the púca raked it. Kestra’s ice treatment dulled the burn but didn’t kill it. The scratch is stillthere, still angry, still reminding me with every movement that something in this forest marked me and I don’t know what that means yet.
But I’m standing. I’m functional. That’s enough for now.
I turn to find Finnian standing three meters back, one hand braced against a tree trunk, the other pressed to the side of his neck. His face has gone a particular color that has no business on someone with his complexion, grey underneath the gold.
My stomach drops.
“Finnian.”
“It’s nothing.” He lies. I’ve never seen him lie and as he does his face twists in the pain of the lie.
I cross to him in four steps and pull his hand from his neck.
The bite is small. Smaller than it should be for how wrong it looks, a pair of marks, already darkening at the edges, the skin around them flushing outward in a bruise-pattern that moves too fast.
“Kestra.” My voice comes out flat. “Talk to me.”
She’s already there. She looks at the bite and then she looks at me, and Kestra’s face is not a face that goes white easily.
It goes white.
“Truth venom,” she says. “Dark Forest spiders. The old ones.” She’s already looking at the trees. “We need cold water. Moving water, a falls, a spring, anything. Now.”
“How long does he have before?—”
“Before the walls come down? Twenty minutes.” She meets my eyes. “Before it becomes dangerous? Longer. But the walls—” She shakes her head. “We need to move.”
Finnian straightens. “I’m fine to walk.”
“You’re fine to walk now,” Kestra says, with the particular gentleness of someone delivering bad news to a person who isn’t ready for it. “In ten minutes that changes. We need to be at water by then.”
He looks at me.
I look at him.
“Then let’s move,” I say.
We move fast.
Kestra ahead, reading the forest floor for the path toward water. Tiana behind, watching our rear. Finnian beside me, walking steadily, which lasts about seven minutes.
I feel it before I see it, the slight change in his gait, the way his weight shifts from controlled to compensating. I get my arm around his waist before he asks.
