Spirella's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Spirella turned from the ditch and ran. She crossed the hollow on all eights, faster than any man, and reached her shrine before the torches did. She slid through the sealed door and dropped the bar. Through the silk-covered windows she watched orange light spread between the trees. Six men. Maybe more. They carried steel and fire, and they moved like people who had killed before. She pressed her palm to the altar where her name was carved. This was hers. She had sealed every hole and spun every window. She would not lose it. She reached into the dark under her ribs, where her mother's gift lived, and she called. The floor stones shifted. From the cracks came a spider larger than a hound, black-bodied, its back marked with red and gold whorls. Then a second, then a third. They filled the doorway with legs and fangs. Spirella opened the door and let them pour out into the torchlight. The men shouted. The first spider took one man off his feet and dragged him screaming into the ferns. For a moment Spirella believed she had won. She stood in the doorway and watched her children work. Then the men found their nerve. They swung torches in wide arcs, and the spiders shrank from fire the way all spiders do. A tall man drove his sword through the patterned spider's head. It folded and died at the threshold. Another spider burned. A third took an axe and curled its legs and went still. Spirella felt each death like a nail through her chest. These were not tools. They were the only kin who had never turned from her. She screamed, and the sound was not human. She lunged for the swordsman, claws out. He was ready. He stepped aside and slashed her across the arm. Blood ran black down her wrist. Another man swung a torch and singed the silk from her shoulder. The heat drove her back through her own door. She was strong, but there were too many, and they were not afraid anymore. She looked at the altar with her name in it. She looked at the burning bodies of her children. Then she chose. A queen with no court is only a corpse in a crown. She scrambled up the wall, tore through the roof beam, and dropped into the vines behind the shrine. She ran. Behind her the men broke through the door and cheered inside her fortress. Ahead, half-buried in ivy, stood a taller ruin. Its stone tower leaned under thick vines. A dark arched door waited at the base. Old webs hung in the windows, older than any she had spun. The place felt like her mother. Spirella crawled inside and pressed her back to cold stone. Her arm bled. Her shrine was gone. But she was alive, and the men did not know this ruin existed. She had lost her throne. She would need a new one, and soon.