Spirella crouched in the ferns before the ruined shrine, counting the hours until the elf patrol swept south again. Six legs and two hands pressed into the moss. She had counted three patrols since sundown, and each one had passed close enough to smell the rot on her breath. A spider-child of Mirkwood could not build a court in open air. She needed walls. Her mother had left her nothing but hunger and a name whispered in the deeper dark. Shelob's forgotten half-blood. Spirella wanted a throne, and she wanted subjects — the twisted, the shunned, the ogres and gollums who slept in ditches because no village would keep them. But every outcast she had approached in the past month had refused to gather without shelter. Gather in the open, they said, and the elves scatter you by dawn. The shrine sat in a hollow choked with vines. Stone walls. A steep tile roof. A carved face above the door, wet with green rot, its mouth open in a scream. Some swamp god the forest had forgotten. Spirella liked forgotten things. She crossed the clearing on all eights and pressed her palm to the door. The wood held. That was the first good sign. Inside, the air smelled of old water and mice. Her eyes adjusted fast. A cracked altar. A collapsed bench. A hole in the back wall the size of a badger. She fixed the hole first, dragging stones from the floor and packing them with mud from the threshold. She spun silk across the windows and let it harden into gray sheets that muffled sound and blocked light. She worked through the night without rest, which was one of the gifts her mother had left after all. Before dawn she climbed to the roof beam and hung from it upside down, testing the sight lines. The shrine sat low. Vines curtained the walls. From ten paces out, the building looked like another hump of stone. From twenty, it disappeared. An elf patrol would have to walk into the doorway to find her. She dropped to the floor and stood at the altar. This would be the seat. She scored her name into the stone with a claw. Spirella. Below it, a smaller mark — the eight-legged sigil her mother had worn. At first light she left the shrine and moved south along the root-paths, toward the ditch where a gollum had been sleeping for weeks. She had a place now. She could offer a roof. She was three steps from the ditch when she smelled smoke, and then iron, and then the sour sweat of men. Torches moved through the trees ahead of her. Not elves. Something worse. Whoever they were, they were walking the same path she needed, and they were walking toward her shrine.

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.

Spirella's arm had scabbed black by the next night. She sat in the ancient ruin and stared at the old webs above her. A throne meant nothing without knees bent before it. She had no followers. She had only cold stone and the memory of dead spiders. So she left the ruin to find the one creature she had marked before the men came. She found him crouched by a still pool, muttering to his own reflection. His huge eyes caught the moonlight. His long fingers dipped into the water and came up empty. Spirella had watched this gollum for weeks. Others in Mirkwood spat at him and threw stones. He was an outcast, like her. That was why she wanted him first. "Smeagol," she said. "I know what it is to be hunted." He spun and hissed. "Who is she? Nasty spider-thing, comes creeping, yes." Then he tilted his head. "But she is alone too, precious. Alone like us." "Not alone," Spirella said. "I am building a court. A safe place for those the forest throws away. Kneel to me, and no one hunts you again." Smeagol crept closer on all fours. He sniffed her scabbed arm. His voice split into two. "She bleeds. She was beaten." Then softer, almost tender. "Poor thing. We knows beating. We knows the stones." He looked up at her, and something in his black eyes went bright. "Yes. Yes! We serves the spider-queen. We kneels." He dropped his face to the mud at her feet. Spirella felt it move through her like warmth. One knee bent. Her court was no longer empty. She reached down and touched his matted hair the way a mother might. "Rise," she said. "You are the first of many." But Smeagol did not rise. He seized her wrist and pressed it to his cheek. "First servant, yes. And we will make them all bow. The elf who guards the trees. The fat hobbits in their holes. We takes their eyes, we takes their hands, until Mirkwood is ours!" Spirella pulled back. "No. I want a haven. Not a slaughter." "Haven?" Smeagol laughed, a wet clicking sound. "They burned her home, precious. They will burn it again. A queen who does not hurt them is a queen they murder in her sleep." He crawled around her, quick and sure. "We knows how to hunt. We knows the quiet ways. Let Smeagol show her." Spirella stared at him. She had wanted one loyal knee. She had gotten it. But the creature bowing to her already dreamed of blood she never asked for. His hunger was larger than her own. She turned toward her ruin. Smeagol scurried behind, whispering plans she had not made. Her court had begun. So had something she did not know how to stop.