“If–”
“This instant, or I’ll turn his eyes into ant hills and have you peck them clean.”
Something broke. “Forgive me,” he said softly, taking Anya by the ears.
She hardly had time to feel surprised, or delight at his touch. He blew onto her lips, and a shiver of longing ran up her spine before she realized what he had done.
Unable to look, he turned away as she felt the magic tingle against her skin. She started to gasp, but her lips barely parted before they sprang shut. In horror, she reached up to feel them.
They were sutured together, threaded with a spider’s web. She felt the horrid sensation of the silk wrapping around her tongue, spreading beneath her skin, strings of it seeping into her jaws, between her teeth, growing up and around her veins. Turning her very blood to sticky silk.
Fixed as she was on the feeling of her blood slowing, on wonder that she was even still alive, it took her a moment to notice the spiders. Climbing all over her face, into her hair. Had her hair become spiderwebs? Heart hammering, she tried to brush them off, but for every one that fell onto the stone floor, another took its place, sealing her mouth in a cocoon of silk.
Well, that was going to fucking well complicate things, wasn’t it?
A setback, no doubt, but the game wasn’t lost yet. She willed her lungs to slow – but not too slow. The king’s emissary would be terrified by this point.
Anya hated to admit it, but, frantically brushing a particularly large spider off her chest, she was halfway there herself.
“Delightful,” Mira clapped. “You aren’t as dull as you pretend.”
“You are too kind, my lady,” Sy replied.
“Now,” Mira said, unperturbed. “Let us allow our new pet to finish his task before we go on. I will take what I am owed before I repay him for trying to steal my prize. Then we’ll have such fun together.”
Once more, Anya unfurled the forged scroll, thinking rapidly.
It helps if I speak my intention, Sy had said. The magic of the forest was the same magic the scribes used, but ancient, wild, unfettered. If it was captured, directed – with, say, glyphs, like the ones on the enchanted arrow – it could be managed.
And what if it was directed with speech?
When Anya told the others all this, David had been skeptical to the last, but Sabina had mentioned she had seen Perrine do unaccountable things with her speech. And Anya’s explanation of how she had been cursed was almost enough to convince him what she had planned would not backfire spectacularly.
That was still a risk, though. More so now, since what she had planned relied on the use of her tongue.
It came as a whisper in her ear, a humming in her chest:Ah, but aren’t there other ways of speaking?
The wind kissing her cheek. A cricket’s silence on a clear night. The color of the sky. A path, well-trodden. A map inked in blackberries.
A secret look. A smile. A tender caress in the dark.
The feeling he filled her with even now, a feeling for which there were no words, except perhaps the desperation of a sunrise, or the longing for summer moons.
She trusted him; she’d told him she trusted him. When he cursed her tongue, he did not speak a word. That silence said something. Or maybe it didn’t.
Nonsense, she thought.Utter nonsense.
Then, with a grin she could not suppress, and that no one would see,As if nonsense never killed a person,nor saved their life.
Caught up in her machinations, already assured of her victory, Mira was oblivious. “A license is a start,” she said, approaching Anya. She took the scroll. Anya felt more layers of magic drift over her like strands of silk as Mira enchanted her. “You will deliver this to Sangfeder, and then you will return here. While you are in Äbender, you will secure monetary compensation and lands from Edgard on my behalf. I’ve heard the Degen estate is unclaimed. And let him know if he can prove he is properly penitent, I may be willing to share my prize.” She lifted a testy hand in Anya’s direction. “Did he turn your brain to webs, too? Give me the pen, you dolt.”
Anya was only too happy to obey. From her satchel, she withdrew a simple ink fountain pen. The polished nib gleamed silver in the white room. Mira reached out to take it.
Anya could not harm her. She wouldn’t dream of it. Couldn’t.
With a swift, jerking motion, Anya lifted the pen and, grinding her teeth, sliced the skin of her own hand.
As she had hoped, Mira froze, baffled that her thoroughly caught prey might still struggle.
