The South Amaris Spider
Esme turned down an alleyway outside of the restaurant and let the streets take her south, past the glittering shops of the Hand and through the bustling business center of the Stomach.
It didn’t matter that her shoes had daises.
She wondered if the talons that had paid for them had once been pried from a Kak-sov hand cooled stiff by death.
Her feet ached all the way to the Foot, but she moved with a singular focus: killing Janos Rivel.
She’d barely held it together in that restaurant, but now she let the panic sink into her. Janos was no better than the man whose face he’d stolen. Esme never really expected anything of him, but this? Throwing teenagers to his dogs, slaughtering whole towns of people?
He was just like Omniel. Just like Omniel.
Esme couldn’t live under another man like that. She’d kill him first.
But she’d have to work fast. Janos had Isobel in his back pocket for the Valosia, the second trial. He wouldn’t be fighting anybody that could hurt him. Esme had to cut him down at the first trial.
The Foot’s streets crawled with addicts and night ladies working overtime.
The place rumbled like a gnawing stomach, with Magic-brined air as harsh as acid on Esme’s skin.
It left a stinging tang on her tongue. That tang only thickened as she came to a deflated, dilapidated home.
It seemed to be standing only in defiance of gravity.
Knocking would only bring the structure down, so Esme squeezed herself between a crack in the rotted wood slats that used to be a doorway.
Inside was dark, like even sunlight peeked in, gagged, and turned away.
Colonies of vermin huddled in the walls, but the termites had abandoned the blackened wood shards that used to be furniture.
“To what do I owe this visit?” A creaky old woman was tucked in a corner, shreds of fabric and trash piled around her like a shrine to ruin.
“Isla, I have need of you,” Esme said. She let her glamour slip off, and the old woman’s face brightened.
“You only come here when you’re doing something rotten,” Isla said with a smirk and bit her cracked lip.
She snapped her fingers and the thick glamour slathered down the walls dropped.
Now the house was tidy—no holes in the walls or invading bugs.
An Uhmerian rug lined the floor, and there was a little kitchen off the main room.
A small python coiled comfortably around a lit candle.
“It is why we see each other so often,” Esme purred, walking over to Isla, who was no longer an old woman. Her storm of hair was black rather than gray, barely tamed into a braid. She was crocheting her beloved snake a sweater.
Isla smirked, throwing her hook and yarn around. “How’s your Willimina?”
“Missing your sweetcakes,” Esme said, pouting. “You still need to loan me the recipe.”
Isla scoffed. “Then you’d have no need to invite me anywhere.”
Isla came from beyond the Void. Where exactly, they never found out.
Fifty-seven years ago, before Omniel shattered it and forever dashed Esme’s hopes of returning home, the Void had spat Isla out, a screaming, eyeless babe.
It had been Esme and Mak’kon who’d caught her, and since Omniel commanded them never to speak to or touch the Void, they could ask no questions of it.
They figured Isla been sacrificed to it by her family, as some cultures were wont to do, and it had taken her eyes and rejected the rest. It had been kind enough to keep her alive, though, and Esme was keen to keep her that way.
If Omniel had found out about Isla, he would have killed her.
The Wraiths had snuck her to the Lap and paid their orphanage to care for her.
She was never adopted, but that didn’t matter, not when she had weekly visits from several Wraiths who’d leave thousands of talons for her.
She was educated and fed and clothed and grew up well.
She even worked at the temple until deciding to strike out on her own.
The Wraiths worried what she would do for a living, of course, but she took after her adoptive monsters.
Isla was good at sneaking around.
Unlike the Wraiths, she was more human than immortal, aging at a normal-ish pace. Though she hadn’t stopped aging somewhere in her twenties or thirties, like they did, she didn’t look her age. Even now, at fifty-seven, she had barely escaped the clutches of youth.
Like the Wraiths, she had a whisper of Magic to her blood.
Not enough to command an ocean of shadows, but enough to glamour her house into a shack so no one would bother her.
Enough to show herself as an old woman, too feeble to be any trouble.
And, as an old woman, she could slip into anywhere, snatch anything, glamour herself into someone new, and escape before anyone was any the wiser.
Now, she made good money as one of the best thieves in the world. And what she stole was second only to gold in Micrea.
Medicine.
Micrea’s evergreen countryside was famous for the serums and syrups yielded by its flowers.
The purple redeemer could cool even the most potent of fevers.
An orchid that reeked of oranges was a common ingredient in a wife’s tea when she was keen on remaining without child.
Liar’s rose was practically Amaris’s favorite flower.
But the fields that grew those lifesaving (or life-preventing) blooms were all owned by families that lived in Amaris, and violating Micrea’s private property laws meant a lifetime of servitude if caught.
Good thing Isla was never caught. She distributed every tonic a chemist did for half the price and shipped them twice as far.
“You’re troubled,” Isla said, her words snapping Esme from her thoughts. “I can feel it. You’re all mucky.”
“I need to kill someone,” Esme said. “It is a trouble in itself.” She threw herself into a chair beside Isla. Between them was a small table and, on it, a portrait of Isla, her partner, and their snake in matching crocheted outfits.
“And who is the victim of this assassination attempt?” Isla asked, looping yarn around a hook.
“How do you know it’s an assassination? It could just be regular murder.”
“You don’t kill people who aren’t worth the effort,” Isla said. “Which heir?”
“How do you know it’s an heir?” Esme wished Isla were less perceptive. How was a Wraith to maintain an air of mystery in these conditions?
“You are obvious!” Isla shrugged. “The king is dead and there is a new king to be crowned soon. You desire always to be in control, and Isobel is likely standing in your way at every step. You have already made your choice and need to make sure there is no recourse. Thus, an assassination.”
Esme frowned, sinking deeper into the chair. “Well, yes, fine, that’s right. But he’s a piece of shit, too. I’ll need your help.”
Isla snorted. “It’s always nice to kill people when they deserve it.” She shook her head. “Of course I’ll help you. I enjoy your little schemes.”
As much as it would have been nice to keep Isla, Esme couldn’t have raised a child in the castle.
At the beginning, the Wraiths even made a pact to keep their distance from her, to let her grow up normally.
But sneaking into her room at the orphanage to make sure Isla was sleeping well wasn’t exactly distancing themselves.
Neither was taking her out on the weekends to teach her how to steal, but Esme and Daphna did it anyway.
They taught her how to braid her hair and put on makeup.
They taught her about swords. Urias made her learn bird calls.
Tagas was the one who taught her how to read a person’s glamour like their mind.
Samander and Padrian took her flying so she could feel the wind in her hair.
They told her the truth about Magic, about herself, painful as it could be.
Mak’kon purchased her first real dress, a giant pink pouffy meringue with red bows, and Esme was lucky Isla was blind so she couldn’t see how much Esme bawled seeing her in it the first time.
She’d still heard her, though. And laughed at her. Very hard.
Isla was never their child, but she represented the unbelievable fact that Wraiths could do good things.
Now Esme was going to do another.
“So, which heir shall be your unwitting victim? Should I guess?” Isla asked, standing and scooping up her darling serpent. She dropped him into a bag hanging from her waist and waved at Esme to follow her into the kitchen.
Esme groaned. “It’s the Lake Prince. He’s committing a quiet genocide for profit,” she said.
“Well, that constitutes some intervention,” Isla said, counting her cabinets.
When she reached the tenth, she opened it and ran her fingers along the edges of each shelf, having memorized the unique line of bumps labeling each one.
The third one up had a collection of small bottles.
“Do you want to see my latest stroke of genius?” she asked, grinning at Esme.
“Of course.”
Isla took three bottles down in specific order. “Smell these,” she said. “Tell me which one is poisoned.”
The first reeked. Dead rat—liars’ nectar. The second one was a dry red wine—as good as poison, in Esme’s eyes. The third was liars’ nectar again. “The first and third,” she said.
“Wrong,” Isla squawked, giddy to have tricked her. “It’s only the third. First has my liar-liars’ nectar in it. Mimics the smell and taste, none of the painful death.” She winked. “I’ve been working on the recipe nonstop.”
“You evil woman,” Esme muttered, taking another smell. Not even her heightened senses could detect the difference between the two. “How’d you pin down the taste?”
“Human experimentation.”
“Isla!”
“Bad humans!” Isla, truly a product of Wraith rearing, beamed at her. “I didn’t kill them, either. I force-fed them the antidote after every drink. They were even ethically sourced. Karin gave me some the nasty little rule breakers she had to kick out of the Den to use as test subjects.”