12

To my utter disgust I find Ro-emnu at his ease in the Heart Tavern reciting poetry to an audience made up of simpering young women and a handful of young men probably hoping to console the girls who don’t catch Ro’s eye. As I stride up he breaks off.

“You have such a look on your face, schemer! More frantic than sullen.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“I would never have guessed.” He stands, kisses three of the girls, and leads me over to an isolated table in a shady corner. Neither of us sits.

He studies me for longer than is comfortable. “I didn’t expect you to visit me again so soon. Is all well?”

“You have to get out of the city. The king is searching for you.”

He shrugs. “Weak sauce, Spider. I already know that.”

“No, you don’t know. His investigators learned the name of the Heart Tavern just this morning. It’s only by chance I was able to get here as quickly as I have.” After returning to the stable I took only enough time to change out of the impossible dress before coming here, although I was careful to take a roundabout path through the Ribbon Market in case I was being followed. “His soldiers could be here at any moment!”

He leans so close I have to grit my teeth to stop from taking a step backward. It isn’t that he scares me. It’s that I feel the heat of his presence like a dare, as if I’m just one of the girls who want to cluster around him. “It’s so sweet that you care about me.”

With three fingers I press into his chest hard enough to get him to move back. “I don’t care about you. I care about my mother. She’s in danger because I asked you to take money to her. I’ve just discovered the king is more obsessed with finding you than he is with fighting the armies of old Saro. I can’t chance him tracing your movements to my family.”

I can tell he wants to grab my wrist and shove my hand on his chest away but instead he leans into me so I have to brace myself to take some of his weight. “You shouldn’t worry, schemer. I’m a very careful person.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said? The king’s soldiers are on their way here right now!”

He laughs and with a flourish steps back and holds up both hands. “No, they aren’t. Do you think we are fools? We fed false information to the king’s agents. They will be led to several establishments that have nothing to do with this one.”

“How can you be sure?”

He gestures toward the young men and women he was lounging with when I came in. “Look. Here comes one now.”

“One what?”

A young Commoner woman walks briskly in. She’s got a basket balanced on her head and a line of sweat staining her dress down the length of her spine, as if she’s been walking a long way in the heat. When she reaches the cluster of young people she sets down the basket, gulps a drink, and speaks to them, glancing several times at Ro. After she’s finished a different girl grabs the basket and she and two of the young men depart.

“We have people all over the city who are shadowing the movements of the soldiers and bringing us reports. That’s how we know where they are and why they don’t know where we are.”

“But you were caught once, that time in the Ribbon Market.”

“Yes, when you and I first met. How could I ever forget that day, when a spider scout crushed a tiny child and kept walking?”

I look away, remembering the dead baby and its screaming mother, how the scouts and the soldiers ignored the devastation they left behind as they cornered and arrested Ro.

He goes on. “They caught me because they knew where my father worked. Since then I’ve arranged for him to leave Saryenia for a safe haven where he can’t be found.”

My voice trembles as I think of how weak my mother was when I last saw her, how insecure the Least-Hill Inn is, how easily Gargaron followed me there. “Is there truly such a haven?”

He shrugs, his expression more serious than before, his voice a little gruff as if he’s suppressing powerful feelings. “As safe as any place can be in a country where foreigners rule us without our consent. I sent my sister there too, if that means anything to you.”

The pulse of risk-taking quickens my heart. If I’m wrong about him, I will have made a horrible mistake.

“I’ll make a bargain with you. Leave Saryenia and take my mother and family and the oracle to this safe haven. Just until the king’s interest in you dies down.”

“It’s a prudent idea I’ve already considered, schemer, but you forget one thing. I’m a poor man from a poor family. It took all my poet’s earnings to get my father and sister out of town. How am I to afford such an expensive venture as your whole family, the oracle, and me with no hope of earning any more money to support us all?”

I set the gold coin from Temnos on the table between us.

He thumps onto the bench like he’s been felled by an ax. If I weren’t so wound up I would laugh as he pokes at the coin with a finger as if he fears it will dissolve.

“A little subtlety might be prudent,” he says.

“Never attempt subtlety when everyone is already looking at you.” I give a jaunty wave to his friends, who wave back cheerfully.

“Is this from your victory game winnings?”

“No.” I sit across from him. “Prince Temnos gave it to me. Lady Menoë took me with her to the King’s Garden today. That’s where I overheard the king speaking of you. Eavesdropped, really. I’d be dead if he knew I’d heard.”

He sets his elbows on the table. “You’re a quick study, aren’t you? A gold coin from the prince! You’ve already learned how to grease the wheels of gift-giving with unctuous compliments and oily lies.”

“He’s just a lonely boy who craves friendship.”

“A lonely boy who will inherit a kingdom built on Efean backs. Once he’s grown out of his innocent, ignorant charm he will crush our lives and dreams as cruelly as his forebears have done. Rather like Lord Kalliarkos, don’t you think?”

My entire body tenses and I come up off the bench, hands in fists. But I’m better than this. I won’t be provoked. I sit back down. His mouth quirks, but he says nothing.

“I didn’t ask for money from the prince. He has no idea of its value. He handed it out like candy. But you and I both know this gold coin is more than enough to pay for a year’s lodging and food for an entire household in an isolated village where Patrons never go.”

He weighs the coin in his hand. “I’m amazed and indeed honored that you would trust your mother to me.”

“That you know of a safe haven and clearly have a network of accomplices makes you a reasonable ally in this situation.”

His eyebrows lift as he thinks for a moment. “A fair point. But why the oracle too? What does she matter to you?”

“How did you know that Serenissima the Third, the Benevolent, murdered her father, her brother, and her brother’s infant son in order to make her uncle king and herself his queen?”

“You do listen to my poetry! I’m so flattered.”

“You have a loud voice when you’re onstage; I could hardly have missed it.”

He chuckles, so genuinely amused by my retort that I feel he’s given me an intimate compliment. But I stifle the thought and get back to this game we have to win right now. “I heard King Kliatemnos say he personally destroyed all the records of those years. So maybe you made a wild guess. Maybe you found a cache of missing documents. Or maybe you coaxed the story out of the oracle.”

His bright gaze drills into mine. “I’ll let you know what she told me in exchange for a kiss from your sullen lips.”

My gaze touches his mouth and for an instant—no longer than it takes me to suck in an outraged breath—my mind flashes an image of his lips brushing mine. Then I shake it off like a hard fall when I have to get back up and running. “Is bribery the only way you can convince people to kiss you?”

“Ah!” He slaps a hand to his chest. “The spider’s venom stabs deep!”

“Not deep enough. Here’s what I think. The way the oracle behaved in the tomb suggests she is highborn. So if you spin everything together, it’s likely she has ties to the palace or even to the royal family—”

“You’re amazing,” he breaks in. “You have everything. Presence, skill, flair, and intelligence. You draw the eye. You make people want you to win. You make people want you to—”

“Stop flirting with me!” Do all poets craft a sensuous voice like his, one that curls through the air to wrap clarity and beauty and warmth around their listeners? “Even if I wanted to kiss you, which I don’t, kisses are no way to make an agreement, not in a life-and-death situation like this one.”

“Alas, you argue with a ruthless logic that appeals to my mind while it torments my heart.”

I roll my eyes. Kalliarkos never exaggerates like Ro. “Get out of Saryenia before the king captures you, and take my family with you. Do it to keep innocent people out of the hands of the conquerors you claim to hate. Do it for the Efea you claim to love.”

He palms the gold coin but never takes his eyes off me. “I’ll get your mother to a safe haven, but I do it for you, sullen schemer. Thus putting you in my debt.”

I can’t get away from his mocking smile fast enough.

Waiting is agony, I reflect weeks later in the garden of the queen’s palace as I watch Temnos balance on a low beam, arms held out to either side and a smile like flame on his face. His cheeks now have a ruddy color instead of an invalid’s pallor. “Look at me, Spider! I am a fledgling adversary, aren’t I!”

“Of course you are,” I lie, the words dripping like fat over a fire. It’s impossible to concentrate while I wait for news. I wonder how Kal is, and if he and Father get along, and if he ever thinks of me.

Glancing at me, Temnos wobbles. I catch him under the elbow.

“Don’t speak false flattery, Spider,” he scolds. “I command you to tell me the truth.”

“Like any fledgling you are making basic mistakes,” I go on more sternly, letting a little of my frustration leak out. “Don’t look down. Feel out the beam with your toes before you put your weight on your foot.”

Ecstatic at being corrected, he grins triumphantly and insists I spot him forward and backward along the beam. It’s not his fault I’m forced to attend on him, taking precious time away from the training I desperately need. After two more passes he hops down from the beam because unlike me he can start and stop whenever he wishes.

“We’ll take a rest now, Spider.”

He strikes like a bee to honey to where Amaya sits on a narrow bench embroidering a festival mask. She shifts so he can squeeze in beside her, sitting the way we sisters often did as little girls, smashed together like puppies. Of course I have to stay standing.

“Orchid, is that the mask you’re making for me so I can be like Spider?”

“Why, it surely is, my lord,” she says, displaying it with a prim, pretty smile. “You can wear it when you come to the City Fives Court with Lady Menoë to see a trial.”

Under the shade of a grape arbor the queen and Menoë have been whispering together on a couch. At Amaya’s words, Serenissima looks up.

“Temnos!” The queen calls him over. She studies him with a frown as she sniffs delicately. “You have a smell of sweat about you. Your feet are dirty, and there is a smudge on your face. Go inside and wash.”

“Yes, Gracious Mother.” Temnos casts a smile in my direction before he goes indoors.

Ladies gather to await the carriages as servants tidy up. I retreat to the Fives court to check all the joints and fastenings on the obstacles, a trainer’s duty every night and every dawn.

Amaya’s path leads her close to me and, under the pretext of bending over to pick up a ribbon she has deliberately dropped, she whispers, “Jes, have you heard yet if Mother and the rest are safe? I’m so worried.”

“Yes. The contact Ro gave me at the Heart Tavern told me last Rest Day that Mother and all of them are safe.”

“Do you believe it?”

I remember Ro’s face as he spoke of honor. “Yes, I do.”

Amaya presses a hand to her heart and for once the gesture does not look theatrical but heartfelt. “It’s been so hard, not knowing. You’re right that Commoners will never confide in me, even when I speak Efean to them. I just wish…” She glances around. There is no one in sight as dusk layers the garden in shadows. “Now that I know Mother is safe, I wish you and I could search together for Bettany. I would feel more secure if you were close by while we are touring the Garon estates.”

“Are you afraid of someone in Garon Palace?” I ask sharply.

“I’m afraid for you, trapped in this pit of nasty people with no skills to fend them off—” She breaks off, grabs my hand, and tugs me sideways so hard I stumble after her into the maze. Beyond the canvas walls, feet scrape along the ground.

“Dearest Cousin, your visits have worked magic on my son. I confess I have long feared he would die untimely but now I can hope he will live to adulthood.”

“I am surprised you never had another son if you were afraid this one might not survive.”

“It is not so simple. I fear him. He has a wicked temper.”

“You fear the king?”

“No.” The queen’s tone drops as into a chasm. “I fear my brother Nikonos.”

Menoë murmurs in the voice of a woman luring a wounded dog within reach of her hands, “Nikonos? What can you mean, Serenissima?”

“Nikonos said I mustn’t get pregnant again or he would murder Temnos and any newborn I might give birth to. Now Kliatemnos believes I prefer and trust Nikonos over him, and he despises me for it although I love only him. I don’t know what to do.”

Menoë’s silence drags on just a little too long. Either she is truly shocked, or she is calculating. I know which I’m betting on, because when two women want to be queen, one has to lose.

She goes on in an altered tone that sounds like cold lies disguised as ardent truth. “I also know what it means to be helpless against a man who wished me harm. My husband Prince Stratios was all smiles in public, but he debased me when we were alone. No one believed my attempts to beg for help, for all in the East Saro court loved him. My grandmother was sent false reports of my situation while I was locked away in a suite of rooms. And then… then…”

Menoë breaks into soft weeping whose emotion wrings my heart even though I have no reason to feel sympathy for her or even trust that this story she spins is not a false tale concocted to gain Serenissima’s sympathy. Amaya’s hand fastens on my wrist, tightening like she’s angry.

“And then what?” the queen asks breathlessly.

A new voice breaks in. “My lady Menoë! The carriages are here! But we can’t find Orchid.”

I drag Amaya through the obstacles to come out far enough away from the maze that I hope no one suspects. But I need not have worried. Oblivious to me, the ladies chatter among themselves as they climb into the waiting carriages. Menoë’s trilling laugh rises as bright as birdsong among them as if she weren’t just weeping plaintively moments before. Amaya swirls into their company with a last fierce look at me.

Afraid for me? She’s the one living in the palace amid all the vipers! But she’s right: now that Mother is safe, she and I are free to work together to find Bettany. In a different Efea, I could have left Saryenia and started a search for Bettany weeks ago; I wouldn’t have been trapped here because I belong to Garon Palace while Bett suffers somewhere far from us. In a different Efea, Bettany would never have been herded onto that barge at all.

Alone in my carriage, I have plenty of time to think about what Ro said.

In this Efea, Commoners have no say in a land that once belonged to them.

I stand atop the high beam in Traps and, from this vantage, see the small woman I raced against last month cutting her way through Rings well ahead of me. It’s my second City Fives Court trial as a Challenger, and if I’m not going to win I need the crowd to love me anyway. So I give them the dangerous tricks they want, a somersault and pike twist along the high beam toward an obstacle known as “the sapling forest.” I’ve planned my last trick to coincide with the leader’s reaching the victory tower so every eye will fix on me instead of her.

I leap for a rope swing meant to loft me over the cluster of poles, and at the height of the swing I let go as if I’ve slipped. The crowd shrieks, expecting to see me fall broken and bloody, but I tuck into a tight spin and extend to snag the nearest pole with outstretched arms. The polished wood squeaks beneath my palms as I slow my momentum by flinging myself in wide sweeps from pole to pole, each time dropping lower.

The winning adversary grabs the victor’s ribbon just as I drop safely to the ground. Blood trickles from a scrape on my left palm but I don’t feel the sting yet. I’m grinning, my heart wide open, because while half the crowd is chanting the name of the woman who won, the other half shouts, “Spider! Spider!”

When I reach the Garon balcony Lord Gargaron is meticulously choosing from a platter of tiny coriander breads shaped to look like the animals of the menageries. Instead it is Menoë who calls me over. She studies my brown clothing, which, by her orders, has been sewn across the back with silver thread in the shape of a spider’s web.

“We shall have to try something else because the pattern wasn’t visible from up here. Maybe beads.”

I imagine beads scraping off and slipping under my feet, ruining my trial, but I keep my mouth shut.

“Menoë, go to the railing with the adversary,” says Gargaron from his chair.

I walk like an obedient puppet behind her. Dyed a pale green, her long sheath gown is embellished in the pattern of a spider’s web with sun-colored beads that glitter as we step out of the shade into the direct sunlight. A brimmed hat shades her face while the sun hits me full on, not that she notices.

In the interval between the end of my trial and the beginning of the next one, vendors trawl through the crowds selling roasted nuts and chickpeas and dried strips of fish. Usually they would also be selling freshly grilled flatbread, but the price of flour has risen so high it’s hard to get bread at all. Yet to my surprise a stream of men and women carrying trays laden with tiny loaves pours down into the cheap seats. Those who receive the free bread cheer. As individuals and then in groups and whole sections they look toward the Garon Palace balcony where Menoë and I stand in full view, and the crowd offers the adversary kiss as if to a victor.

Gargaron himself brings a platter crowned with bread to Menoë, an act meant to remind the crowd that she has royal blood while he does not.

“Eat so the crowd will see the royal princess and the fresh new Challenger sharing their bread,” he says, stepping back so all eyes will be on us.

The little loaves are cunningly shaped: a braided scorpion’s stinger, a bull’s horn like a cornucopia, an hourglass wasp. Menoë chooses a simple round roll of bread stamped with an eight-legged figure representing a spider. She breaks the roll in half and, to my astonishment, hands half to me in sight of every person looking our way.

The bread is still warm, the crust crisp and the inside melting on my tongue with the most delicate of textures. I savor it while Menoë basks in the crowd’s approbation.

“That was clever of you to pretend to fall from the swing when you saw you were losing,” she says.

She has given me an opening. “Far be it from me to complain, my lady, but these Challengers have run many more Novice trials than I have. I cannot regret the honor of becoming a Challenger so quickly, but my career as an adversary would have been better served if I could have ascended through the Novice ranks in the ordinary way. I fear the crowd will grow tired of me too soon if I don’t perform well enough.”

She glances at her uncle. “Spider fears she is not good enough to win a victory as a Challenger.”

“That is not what I said!” I blurt out, my pride stung. Then I wince. Such presumption will get me whipped.

Gargaron hands off the platter to a servant, then moves up beside me. He places a ringed hand on the balustrade, boxing me in between them. A white scar arcs over one of his knuckles, like he parried a knife blade with a fist.

“Then what did you mean, Jessamy?”

I see the path and take it, for they will account my words as competitiveness and never guess I have an ulterior motive. “My inexperience hurts me. Never doubt that I will work my way up in time, for I intend to gain the rank of Illustrious. But meanwhile all the glory that shines on me now will fade.” A hunk of bread still warms my fingers. “The bread that rises too fast may collapse. Sudden fame is not always a boon, my lord.”

“True. I know your mind is working all the time, Jessamy. Do you have some idea you wish to share with me?”

Amaya could manage this with more subtlety. I decide to bull my way through, because that is what he expects. I just have to hope he grabs for the bait.

“The skill of Challengers here in Saryenia is much higher than that of the provinces. I don’t fear the competition. Not at all. But if I lose too many times I’ll lose the favor of the crowd.” The emotion that grips my throat like the heady taste of ambition is no lie, no theater. It is real. “If you send me to run in the provinces I could gain valuable experience against opponents of a more comparable skill level, and thus have a better chance of more victories.”

“It speaks well of you that you hate to lose, Spider. There may be a solution that will meet all our needs.”

“What is that, Uncle?” asks Menoë, startled and suspicious.

But my hopes rise, and I have to battle to keep my expression blank.

“Nothing to do with you, Menoë. My tour to check up on the finances of our far-flung estates begins next month. Bringing a few adversaries with me to hone their skills on the provincial circuit will heighten awareness of Garon Palace and our royal connections throughout the land, which also serves our greater purpose.”

I clamp down on a rush of triumph, but a grin escapes anyway, a big smile that I have to force off my face by coughing.

He doesn’t even notice as he plucks a sculpture of bread off the platter now held by a patient servant. It has a narrow neck and stubby wings, meant to resemble the firebird who rises from the ashes of defeat, the symbol my father always uses to identify himself. Ripping off the firebird’s head, Gargaron chews and swallows while he contemplates.

“This will do very well. Menoë, make sure you hire poets to gabble about Spider’s provincial tour. News of her victories must be trumpeted about here in Saryenia.”

A frown withers her pretty features. “But with Spider’s help I have been making such good progress on working my way into the confidence of Serenissima and the boy, Uncle. He dotes on Spider. He’ll be distressed if she leaves.”

“With your lovely face, polished manners, and sharp wit I am sure you can flatter this monstrous prince into falling in love with you instead.”

A startling glimpse of enmity surfaces from below the false serenity of her face. “Exactly the words you said to me on the day I left for East Saro on the happy occasion of my first marriage, Uncle. We all know what came of that.”

Gargaron slips the whip from his belt and lays it athwart the railing. “Let us not raise the ghost of unpleasant gossip and the imprudence of your indelicate actions.”

A mask of fury turns Menoë’s beauty into stone, but my excitement drives her ugly past out of my head. Tears prick at my eyes from sheer, brutal joy. Gargaron has no idea of the chance he’s given me.

Amaya and I are going to find Bettany and bring her home to Mother.