Chapter 52 #3
“Do not—” Richard tried to jerk his face away, but she caught his chin and held it. “Do not wear her face—”
“But it is a useful face.” She sighed. “Thy sword would not move against it. Thy heart will not close against it. Listen, my boy. Listen to thy mother’s voice. Thy knight has carried these words for seven years, and never once hath he spoken them unto thee. Shall Mama tell thee what he knoweth?”
Richard shook his head, a new terror surging. “Do not dare tell me the future—”
“I see my youngest,” she began in the deep, husky voice his mother had always used when imparting her prophecies. “My little star. All grown and yet alone in a foreign land. Trying so hard to be brave as danger creeps close.”
Briony. His Briony. In what world would he ever let her be alone—
“Stop—”
“I see my thirdborn,” the voice continued. “My laughing boy who no longer smiles. His eyes are hollow, and his body warped. He screams, but his lips do not move, and none can hear him.”
Bile surged up. Richard turned his head and retched, but nothing came up.
“I see my secondborn. My fiery girl. In a cell with no windows. She weeps on her knees, her hair hacked short and her shackles rusted.”
“Please.” Richard bit back a sob. No. Not them, not his little ones, no—
“I see my eldest.” The voice gentled, its tenderness unbearable.
“My firstborn, who already carries too much weight. The light of my life and yet, the one who never stops breaking my heart.” Aralynn bent, her hair falling like a curtain around them.
“I see him collared. A prisoner in his own castle. I see him pinned to my own wedding bed as a man lays siege to his body. I try to scream. I try to stop it all. But I am but a ghost in the future, helpless, as he does not even fight.”
Richard went lax, a horrified buzzing filling his head. The great oak bed in his parents’ chamber—the same chamber he now used. The canopy his father had carved, the wedding bed his parents often teased they’d all been conceived in, until Elara threatened to burn the thing.
For him to be pinned to it—
“My poor boy,” Aralynn crooned. “Dost thou see now? Dost thou see why mercy is best? Thy knight hath known these things for seven long years. He hath looked upon thy and thy siblings’ faces and remembered them, hath loured at himself in the mirror for failing to alter the future.
He carrieth more, even”—a giggle, wet and wrong, slithered out of Aralynn’s mouth—“a small warning thy queen mother gave him concerning thee. Oh, kingling. Wouldst thou know? Wouldst thou know what thy mother bade him do, and what thy knight hath sworn to do, when the hour comes—”
The point of a sword burst from her chest. It punched through the plum bodice, exactly through where her heart would be. Aralynn choked, her eyes blinking in slow bafflement.
The sword wrenched free, and she pitched forward. Behind her, panting, swaying, his doublet torn at the shoulder and a line of blood running from his temple, stood Kaelen.
The sun pendant blazed at his throat.
Before Richard could say a word, Aralynn’s face stretched and split.
The plum gown unravelled into white, pointed legs, her body swelling outward in a sickening pulse, and morphing into the wagon-sized horror that had descended from the web.
The crater in her chest gaped wider as she grew, golden blood weeping down in glittering ropes.
Her eight eyes rolled onto Kaelen, and she leapt.
Kaelen tried to bring the sword up, but she rammed him into the ground. He sprawled onto his back with a grunt, dwarfed under her abdomen as her legs straddled his ribs.
Richard bucked against the sword through his palms.
The pain was unspeakable. Steel grated against the small bones of his hands. The urge to vomit flared, and his vision dimmed at the edges. All he could see was Kaelen pinned beneath the spider’s belly, Kaelen’s face twisting into a defiant glare, Kaelen’s fingers locking around his sword’s hilt.
With a roar, Kaelen drove the blade up.
It speared the underside of the siren’s belly and disappeared to the hilt. Gold liquor poured over Kaelen.
The siren shrieked, her mandibles snapping repeatedly, and her hind leg drew back and pierced down.
It went straight through Kaelen’s guts and into the mud.
Kaelen gasped. Blood spurted from his mouth, running into his hair as his body spasmed.
“KAELEN!”
Richard barely recognised his anguished scream. He threw his weight against the sword, twisting his fingers around the hilt and wresting it up. The blade scraped through skin, tissue, muscle, and the pain that exploded forced another cry, but it didn’t matter, nothing else mattered—
His knight—his knight was out of reach, bleeding on the ground—his knight—Kaelen—
The siren shuddered and listed sideways. The leg buried in Kaelen’s belly tore free, ripping out the way it’d gone in, as she toppled onto her back. Her legs drew inward, curling towards her centre, and with a final click of her mandibles, she stilled.
And so did Kaelen.