Chapter 52
Richard’s eyes opened onto a wall of cobwebs.
It bowed inward, pressing his shoulders, his ribs, his thighs against something hard and ridged at his back—a tree, he realised.
The glistening silk had cocooned him standing upright, with his arms pinned to his chest and his lungs struggling to inhale the sweltering air inside.
Small dark shapes skittered across the silk. Hundreds of them. Spiders burrowing their way through the cobweb. The inside of Richard’s collar prickled, tiny legs scuttling up his neck, and the memories slowly returned.
“Father?” he whispered. “Mother?”
Memories upon memories. Running into Haldric’s embrace. Waking to Briony. The almost fight in the courtyard. The Summer Ball. His father’s brilliant grin, his mother’s gentle hands—
“Look at you. Look at my handsome boy.”
The cry that tore out of him was akin to a flayed animal.
It muffled against the silk and reverberated in his ear, a wet, ragged howl of grief.
They were dead. Dead. He had lit their pyres himself and collected their ashes to scatter at the lake.
His siblings were orphans. His neck bore an elf’s claim, and the prophecies that haunted his knight promised more horrors to come.
Richard bit down on his tongue until he tasted copper.
Real. This was real.
He forced his right hand to his hip. The silk dragged at his knuckles, sticky, clinging, but he managed to reach his sword.
The blade was plain to look at but had been designed by the Iron Sisterhood—Ardenia’s finest blacksmith forge run by six friends—and they had ensured the sharpest edge.
The silk parted with a single cleave upward, and cold air rushed in.
He fell.
The drop was no more than a foot, but it took him by surprise, and his knees smarted on striking the tree’s roots. He looked up to see the trees’ canopy pressing so thick and close that only the faintest sunlight filtered through.
Richard got to his feet. The tree opposite him was enormous, its gnarled trunk resembling a face. Where it’d been unclear before, daylight now laid the truth bare.
“Oh.” Richard stumbled closer and traced over the grooves that shaped eyes. Heart racing, he scanned the other trees and found the same. A woman with braids ingrained into the bark. A child with a dimpled smile. A man with only one ear.
Not a trick of the light. These had once been people who had become wood. Perhaps they, too, were cocooned, and the trees had absorbed them over time as they dreamt on.
Richard’s stomach lurched. In a manner, their deaths had been kind.
Flashes of the dream world bombarded him again—the laughter as Aralynn put Haldric in his place, his siblings’ antics in the ball, Kaelen—oh, Kaelen, sweet even in a siren’s crafting, who had followed him into the unknown—
Richard swallowed against the lump in his throat.
There was work to be done.
* * *
He found Flint several trees down, at the base of a redwood—its vast trunk the size of a horse. His cocoon was a swollen, pale sac, and through the cobwebs Richard could just make out Flint’s face—slack, and peaceful.
Richard brought his sword up. The first cut split the hardened silk in a horizontal slash, and as the blade sank in—
—green fields, a stone cottage with a thatched roof and clothes on the washing line, a pond of lily pads, and three children racing through tall grass.
The boy at the front had long dark hair and a wild laugh.
And behind him came a smaller boy with tousled mousy hair, and a girl with auburn pigtails, cackling as she tried to overtake the leader—
Richard recoiled, the vision seared into his mind. So this was Flint’s dreamworld. No wonder he smiled so serenely.
Gritting his teeth, Richard slashed through the webbing once more—
—children skidding to a halt at the pond’s verge.
Flint flopping onto his stomach to plunge his hands into the water, going ‘I’ve got it!
It’s slimy!’, and Edith jostling him, trying to snatch the frog, and Lyell standing back with folded arms—‘Frogs carry disease, you know. No, don’t lick it, Flint! ’—
Richard cut again. The hole was large enough now—
—a woman calling from the cottage door. ‘Children! Bread’s out of the oven!’ She had Flint’s upturned nose and stood in an apron with flour on her hands, smiling, hip cocked against the doorframe. And the children scrambled from the pond and ran across the field, laughing and laughing—
Richard set his foot against the trunk and hauled the man out. The cocoon split, spiders scattering aside, and Flint sagged forward into Richard’s arms, his head lolling.
“Flint. Flint!” Richard shook him. “Wake.”
A hoarse gasp. Flint’s body convulsed in Richard’s grip. He coughed, retching up strings of webbing from between his lips. He blinked at the ground.
“What—” His eyes bulged. “No, no, no!” He scrabbled out of Richard’s hold. “No. No, no, no, no—” His head whipped towards the shredded cocoon, and he keened. “Let me go back! Let me go back, gods damn you!”
“Flint—”
“Put me back in!” Flint seized Richard’s shoulders. “You had no right! Please! Please—”
“Enough!” Richard grabbed his neck and shook him. “Think of Edith! Will you leave her to waste away?”
That landed. Flint’s eyes widened. The corners of his mouth pulled downward, and tears brimmed over to spill past his cheeks.
“We were just children,” he whispered, broken.
“I know. I am sorry.”
“We were just children.” He clutched at Richard’s tunic. “What wrong—” His voice cracked. “What wrong did we do?”
He gave a ragged sob, and his knees buckled. Richard sank down with him, hugging him close. For a long while, Flint only wept into his chest.
“It was no fault of yours,” Richard murmured, rubbing the man’s back. “Too many failed you three, and still, the harm lingers.”
Flint’s sobs ceased. He shrank away from Richard and staggered up, swiping an arm over his eyes.
“We went looking for you last night,” he said hoarsely. “Kaelen heard you screaming and ran off—though that were probably the siren. Then, I heard Edith and Lyell screaming, and well—” He shrugged and checked his inner pocket. “It’s likely got Kaelen somewhere.”
Richard rose with a nod. “We must find him. And end the siren.”
Flint snorted and gestured at an emerging trail of spiders. They scampered in urgency, some climbing over one another. “Good luck with that. I wager the siren’s being warned as we speak.”
* * *
The spiders ventured deep into the forest—a thin, dark river coursing between roots and over stones.
Richard followed, nettles scraping against his trousered knees.
Every tread of his boot sank into muddy ground, but the leather—Ardenia’s finest—kept his feet clear of water.
Flint’s flimsy shoes, however, were waterlogged.
The man did not complain, his eyes distant and his steps behind Richard slow. It was almost a relief when the terse silence was broken by the faint sound of waves crashing.
“Cliffs,” Flint muttered.
“We are climbing.” Richard brushed at the stray cobwebs on his sleeves. “What became of our packs?”
Flint grunted. “At the camp, wherever that is from here.”
Richard exhaled slowly. He could only hope the ship and the rowing boat were still in place.
They kept walking. Richard scanned every tree for a sign of Kaelen.
His lips were parched, his tongue dry, but the thought of drinking from the little streams they passed repulsed him.
After an hour, his sword arm ached from holding the blade ready, but he refused to sheath it.
Not when the spider trail only seemed to be thickening, writhing with too many legs clambering over each other.
“Flint. Do you see how it has thickened?”
Richard paused when he heard no answer and turned.
The path behind was empty.
“Flint!” Fury blistered through him. “Flint, you coward!”
The bandit hadn’t been taken. He’d not heard a struggle. No, Flint had gone. Slipped off at some bend, likely heading to the cliffs for those Skullbreath flowers.
“Deceitful lout!” Richard yelled. “You may well go and fuck your—” The words felt too foreign to continue, and with a ‘tch’, he continued to walk.
After another fifty yards, a greenish glow lit the surroundings.
The trees grew further apart, and strung between their trunks was a giant web, an enormous lacework that hung in shimmering tiers from the canopy.
It started far above his height and spanned the distance between five trees.
Dew beaded its silk, and little spiders streamed through the trails in their thousands.
The hairs on Richard’s nape rose.
He was being watched.
“I am here to kill you, siren. And claim your heart.”
A pause. Then a voice—a woman’s low voice—emanated from everywhere at once—from the leaves, from the web, from the mud. It was accompanied by a laugh.
“Bold of thee to try, kingling. Many such bold ones have walked beneath my boughs. Their entrails now feed my roots. Their dreams now feed my children. Wouldst thou be added unto the wood, sweet morsel, or wouldst thou parley first?”
Richard turned on the spot, sword tracking with him. He searched the high web, the dim trunks, the spaces between, but nothing took shape.
“Where is my knight?”
“Ah.” The laugh again. “Thy knight with the soft eyes. Easy, kingling. Easiest of all thou broughtst unto my shore. I had but to put on thy voice, faint and frightened and how quick he came running.”
The wind shrieked, but the voice kept talking, burrowing into Richard’s ears.
“Thou shouldst have stayed. I wrought thy dream with care. I sought out the brightest faces of those thou lovest. The father at his most generous. The mother at her most knowing. I gave thee thy beloveds in their finest hour, and thou didst spurn it.”
“You gave me my loved ones with their hard edges sanded off,” Richard said, surprised at the steadiness of his voice. “But I love my father at his most demanding, and my mother at her most despairing, and my siblings when they are tiresome and cruel. That is what it means to be family.”