Chapter 44

"What will you give me, mortal? Or…" The spider bustled forward, to the very tip of the fern it had nestled into for the night. "Should I say immortal? You smell like something in between."

Its accent was lilting, almost as musical as the ferns themselves, and it took all of my concentration to disentangle its little voice from the foliage around it. Spiders were spies, indeed. Even the way it talked camouflaged its presence.

"What would you want from me?" I asked, copying that lilt of each syllable.

To my surprise, the spider—a simple garden one—responded to me instantly.

"I want to see the world from its highest point. I want to feel the mist and the stars and the air where nothing stirs."

It could hear me, then. I could talk to it, unlike the ants and maggots and cockroaches. Those vines of ice reined in the tiniest feeling of… pride, bubbling beneath my sculpture of indifference.

Its request—a carriage in the sky? Bascite Mountain? Both options required getting the Good Council involved, which I couldn't do.

But I said, "I could try to take you there someday. That's all I can promise right now, to try."

I expected the spider to scoff and scuttle back into its web. It paused instead.

"Who would you have me spy on, you almost-mortal?"

I didn't know why, but that question cracked in my heart. Almost-mortal. I'd never asked Coen how long he and I had to live. So far, I'd matured just as quickly as any of my peers in the village; Quinn and Lander were proof of that. Would the aging process just… stop one day? Or slow down? Or was I not quite faerie enough to warrant a never-ending stretch of life? Coen would know, of course, but he'd chosen to leave me in the dark.

A darkness I was still in, despite the stars that blazed down on me now.

"I would have you spy on some bad people," I said quietly. Behind me, a group of Element Wielders had started chatting on the rooftop, tossing bubbles of ore back and forth with casual lifts of their knees as they sipped on some drinks. I wondered painfully if Terrin was up there with them… or maybe Quinn.

"Bad people?" the garden spider mused. "How subjective."

Ms. Pincette had scratched the surface of spider morality in class, so I knew they didn't have an objective code of ethics. Still, my chest sunk a notch—

And jolted when the spider said, "Still, I have never been someone's spy before. If you can promise me that you will try your best to bring me to the top of the world one day, I will eavesdrop on these so-called bad people for you."

Its tone suggested it didn't care whether its victims were bad or not.

"Thank you," I sighed, and whispered out Fergus's and Jenia's descriptions and usual locations. After the spider nodded in understanding, I asked, "what do you mean, I smell like something in between mortality and immortality?" I resisted the urge to sniff my armpits. "What do I smell like?"

The spider's eight eyes glinted neon green in the starlight.

"Ahhh. I have a hard time describing it. You… smell like the creatures who are not quite caterpillars and not quite butterflies, but somewhere in between, stifled in a cocoon and crystallizing and ready to burst out of their self-made skins. That kind of in between."

I was too tired to jump through more mental hoops today, but I couldn't stop myself from thinking, as the spider backed back into its nest of shadows, that such an explanation didn't quite fit. Didn't quite make sense in regards to mortality.

Neither caterpillars nor butterflies lived forever, after all.

The spider came to me three days later, during Mr. Conine's class.

Or, rather, I went to it.

But not of my own accord.

We were deeper into the jungle than ever before, although rather than it being all shade and gloom as I'd expected, we'd trudged to the top of one of the humps on the mountainside, where dried mud caked the bald patches between trees.

Here, Mr. Conine had said, a pack of wild boars claimed territory, and we had been invited by their leader to sunbathe with them, of all things.

"Here's the tricky part," Mr. Conine said now. I watched his bushy sideburns moving up and down with his mouth as if through the end of a long tunnel, focusing so hard on not thinking about Coen or faeries or caterpillars that I ended up having trouble focusing on anything. "Even when boars try to rile you up for a fight—because they will try to rile you—you must remain calm and peaceful and perfectly poised, and insist you'd just like to sunbathe."

Here, Mr. Conine passed a half-glance at Fergus, as if expecting him to argue. Or to ask why the hell we'd been invited over if the boars just wanted to fight.

Fergus didn't say a word, though. He simply caught Mr. Conine's stare and tightened his arm around the back of Jenia's neck. His silence unnerved me more than his usual whining attitude, but it seemed to relieve our instructor, whose brows relaxed slightly.

"Right, then." Mr. Conine rubbed his hands together. "Ready?"

Nobody responded besides Rodhi, who flexed his fingers. "Bring out the boars, baby."

Mr. Conine put two looped fingers in his mouth and whistled.

They came instantly, a herd of tusked, stringy-haired pigs nudging through the bushes around us and stomping their way into the clearing.

I caught the eye of the nearest boar against my will, and—yep. It was definitely glaring at me, beady auburn eyes scrunched up tight in the folds of its wrinkles.

"Uh, hi," I said, trying to shake myself out of my tunnel.

Around me, everyone else had burst into whispered conversation, as if afraid that loud voices would trigger the herd's anger. I was no exception. Even my head and shoulders dropped slightly, instinctively shriveling up in the face of such… wrath.

I decided right then and there that just because I was a Wild Whisperer didn't mean I had to like every animal I talked to. I could respect this swine without enjoying its company.

"What are you lookin' at?" the boar huffed, nudging the dirt beneath him with a hoof. "My nose? My ears? You're not the best looker yourself, you know."

I swallowed the sting of that insult and resisted folding my arms.

"I think your nose and ears are lovely, and I'd… I'd just like to sunbathe."

Truthfully, I didn't want to be here at all. Knowing that this was all an experiment in a bubble made all the classes not only seem pointless, but mocking.

Barely three paces away, Emelle and Gileon were already laying down with their boars, angling their faces toward the sun in peaceful companionship. Rodhi was placing his hand tentatively on a snout. Even Fergus had managed to get closer to a boar than I was to this one now.

My boar pawed the ground again.

"You want a piece of this, huh?"

"N-no."

I took a step back without thinking, pressing into the shadows. Nobody had noticed that I wasn't doing well over here. All my friends had their eyes closed already, and Mr. Conine was busy helping Norman ease into a truce with a particularly brutish pig with black patches all over its body.

I had been avoiding Mr. Conine's eye lately, anyway. I didn't know what would be worse: finding out he'd been tortured into his position here at the Institute just as Ms. Pincette had, or finding out that he'd volunteered to be here. To hand Dyonisia fellow human beings as if they were forged bits of metal she could dip back into the fire.

"I don't want to fight." I raised my hands, but my voice sounded insincere even to my own ears. I did want to fight—not this boar, but something… anything to help me punch away the vines of ice and the tunnel of darkness and the invisible threats swirling about my head like pesky gnats always out of reach, and—

The boar charged.

I stumbled back into the ferns.

And the boar—stopped, as if it had been caught in the same sculpture that seemed to suffocate me nowadays. Every part of its body froze, except for its auburn eyes, which blinked at me furiously.

Just then, my hips and fingertips and hair felt a tug, and that's when I knew.

Sasha and Sylvie had saved me. I didn't know how or why, but I'd recognize their style of Summoning anywhere. It was their magic that had immobilized the boar and tugged on me now, urging me toward them.

I just barely saw Emelle's eyes flaring open before I was yanked backward down the slope.

On and on, I followed those tugs, trying to keep up lest they start actually dragging me. Before long, the shadows of the jungle nestled into my skin again, and I found their two lithe forms crouching in the widespread roots of a fig tree.

"Rayna! So glad to see you."

Sylvie jumped up to throw her slender arms around my neck. I hugged her back, but didn't hesitate to say into her hair, "Are you alright? What's wrong?"

Is he alright, I couldn't ask through the lump in my throat.

"Oh, we're fine." Sasha waved a free hand—her other one, I noticed suddenly, was levitating a… a spider, keeping it trapped in her own web of sticky magic.

And I recognized the eight green-tinted eyes.

"What are you doing with that? Let it go!"

I untangled myself from Sylvie and lunged, but Sasha backed away.

"We can't let it loose, Rayna! It's been snooping around your house for days, and it was following you through the jungle just now before we tracked it. We thought you might want to interrogate it before we make a paste of it, see what it wants with you."

I swung my gaze from Sasha to Sylvie, and back to Sasha. Understanding slammed into me, just as I heard the spider cry out, "Oh, let me see the top of the world before I die! Please!"

"It's my spy," I said as gently as I could, touching Sasha's wrist. Reluctantly, she let go of her hold on it, and the spider dropped onto my upturned palm. "I told it to spy on Fergus and Jenia because I overheard them talking strangely to their friend Dazmine." I wanted to start asking the spider questions, but first I had a pair of twins to deal with. "Now, are you going to tell me why you two are following me, or do I need to set a spider on you both as well?"

They glanced at each other. Sylvie wrung her fingers together.

"Well…"

"He's making you guard me, isn't he?" I asked, disbelief welling in my throat where that lump had been. "He's making you track my every movement."

"Not exactly," Sasha said unashamedly. "He asked us if we could look out for any threats directed at you, and we thought we found one." She nodded at the spider, who was… trembling. The poor thing was trembling. I hadn't known spiders could do such a thing before now.

I wasn't sure what to say to Sasha or Sylvie. Thank you? Back off? I miss you?

Instead, I settled my eyes on the spider and whispered, "What did you find?" The twins wouldn't be able to understand anything it said anyway.

"The one girl, Dazmine, and the other girl, Jenia, are in an argument," the spider rattled out."Jenia and the boy Fergus were trying to get her to join them in something. Something big. They've only alluded to it, never mentioned it out loud. I cannot figure out how they are communicating unless through written messages."

The spider's eyes were snaking back and forth between the twins and me, clearly suspicious of the former two and clearly regretting its commitment to me.

"After many urgings, the girl, Dazmine, put her foot down and refused to join them. Jenia is hateful, but Fergus is murderous, and threatened to, I quote, ‘fill her lungs with rot' if she didn't cooperate."

The spider paused, and I had the strangest feeling it was trying to word its next finding in a way that made it all seem more important than petty drama.

"But Jenia the Hateful stepped in, told Dazmine the Dissenter to leave, and neither has spoken to each other since."

I slumped back, making sure to keep my palm steady even when the rest of my body started to shake. Now that I thought about it, Dazmine had been standing off to the side during class today, away from Jenia and Fergus. But what had she refused to join?

And why did the spider's findings only make me feel more confused than before?