Page 116 of By the Orchid and the Owl
“Move along, Drey,” Fergus called. “Unless you think you’ve got a little… fungal infection? In that case, I’d love to help you.”
I recoiled. The verbiage. The knowing smile. He knew thatIknew he’d killed Mr. Fenway, and he was casually inviting me to die the same way.
And since Kitterfol Lexington hadn’t caught him the first time around—or if he had, he hadn’t cared—Fergus could kill me without any immediate repercussions, no matterwhatthe so-called rules were.
I didn’t let myself recoil again. Didn’t let the fear creep out onto my face. Instead, I deadpanned, “No, thanks,” and strode off in the other direction.
When I was out of sight, though, when I had made it across the bridge and was on the safe side of Bascite Boulevard, I plunged into the foliage past one of the Element Wielder houses, where I crouched in the ferns until my heartbeat steadied.
Legs clicked among the leaves.
I paused. Counted to ten. Felt its hairy, twitching presence. And as those vines of frigid cold crawled up and down the inside of my spine, I found my voice again.
“What would it take,” I breathed at the eight green-tinted eyes staring out at me from a nest of stems and leaves and spiderwebs, “for you to be my spy?”
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 sayimmortal? 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 ittalkedcamouflaged 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-calledbad peoplefor 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.Thatkind of in between.”
