Araneae Nation: The Complete Collection

by Hailey Edwards

  Cool slush splattered my pant legs as my sow galloped forward. I grinned while she splashed in a muddy groove cut by cart tracks, and wiped muck from my right eye. Forget the risers. Forget the trauma of the morning. This was living. This was why Edan fought so hard for me, so I might feel as free as a bird, as he and I had never been in our lives, as we would be once finally reaching Beltania.

  The veil was so close its energy caused static to lift the hairs along my nape and arms.

  Eager as I was, I would have braved the veil without slowing. Just charged through the ethereal shroud and burst into the glorious southland heat. But only fools neglected protocol. Even with risers on our tail, we had to slow and each prepare for the crossing. Whether it was truth or lore, I knew the cautionary tales of the veil well. All Araneae children learned of the dangers at their parents’ knees.

  The veil separated the frigid northlands from the humid southlands. It was a mystical barrier that ran the length of the entire world. Thomisidae elders had told the story of how the two gods, Kokyangwuti and her husband, Tawa, had forged this world from clay and bone. They had created a world before this one, First World, and it had been consumed by fire and greed. This world was their second, and to balance the elements, they capped this world with a sheet of ice. In this way, when the sun rose in the east and followed the length of the veil to set in the western skies, its flames might leap onto the southland’s grasses and set fire to their harvests. But even if the southlands were consumed, even if the blaze crossed the veil, the heat would only melt the northland until its cooling waters extinguished the flame. Thus the Second World would be spared a grisly death from sun fire.

  But the veil could not sustain itself. It required too much energy to guide the sun and protect the precious ice from melting, and so the two gods decided that since the veil was in place to protect our world, so must our world protect the veil. To sate its hunger, the veil may choose a sacrifice. Lives it takes fuel its magic and keep the rest of our people safe. Or so the legends say and we must believe.

  Anyone who has crossed can’t deny it’s a powerful experience.

  This was to be my second crossing, and I could not wait to say it was behind me.

  As the heat thawed my limbs and made me regret the necessity of my coat, I stretched my arms over my head and grimaced at the pain in my back. We must walk through the veil, and my stiff legs were eager for the task. Beltania sat on the other side, perhaps a half-day’s walk, near a rich tributary that would allow me to bathe for the first time in days and make use of their famed dayflower soaps.

  Flexing my fingers caused dried blood to crack and flake on my skin.

  As I stared at my jagged fingernails and the brownish grit under them, hunger pangs rumbled.

  I set my hands in my lap and studied the landscape ahead, trying to recapture my joy at leaving winter behind.

  A copse of trees sat to one side of the road, and Edan dismounted there. He took the opportunity to stretch then jogged toward me. He gathered the reins from my hands and led my sow to where his was scratching her shoulder against a tree. The sisters snuffled each other while he lifted me from the saddle and set me on the ground. My bare feet sank into the slush. Numb as they were, I didn’t mind. I hated wearing shoes. His gaze skimmed over me as if assuring himself I was still me.

  “Have you looked your fill?” I crossed my arms. “Or should I turn a circle for you?”

  “Good idea.” He twirled his finger. “I want to check your back.”

  I had injured one of my wings while rescuing Henri’s fiancée, Zuri, from a nasty fall off the sheer black walls that surrounded Erania. Edan clucked like a mother hen over my injury, but I was sound.

  That was one benefit of my harbinger lineage. I healed much faster than normal folk.

  Slumping at the inevitability, I turned to let him examine me. He would not rest until he had.

  He tugged my coat down to my elbows. “Have you taken your injection today?”

  Ah yes. My injection. I wondered when he would ask. “Not yet.”

  To prevent my conversion to a full harbinger, Henri had concocted an antivenin I injected daily. If I skipped a day, the toxins in my system would liquefy my organs and I would rot from the inside.

  Small price to pay for survival, except the injections were shots of liquid fire in my veins.

  The routine was its own sort of blistering torture, but I bore the pain for Edan’s sake.

  “You are being reckless,” he scolded.

  “I will take it after we cross,” I promised.

  “Yes, you will.” His touch was gentle despite his tone. “Or I will dose you myself.”

  I screwed up my face. “I said I would do it, and I will.”

  “You were writing again.” He grunted. “How goes the journaling?”

  “Fine.” I shrugged. “It’s odd writing down our story.”

  Henri had requested a complete record of my life from the night Idra took me to present. Since I was in his debt, I saw no way of sidestepping his expectations. Besides, it might help others like me.

  No doubt that was his purpose. Zuri suffered through the same excruciating regimen as I did.

  Gentle as his soul was, he must agonize over her pain. If I could help alleviate it, I would.

  “Your story.” He thumped my ear. “I want to be left out of it.”

  “Oh, no. I must be thorough.” I chuckled. “Praises for the hero of my tale must be sung.”

  “I am no hero.”

  “You saved my life.” I mused, “That is, I believe, the very definition of heroism.”

  While Edan prodded my back, I watched the wary guards approach. They stopped several yards away and dismounted. Their hands went to their sword hilts as if magnetized, but they did not draw.

  Asher was the last to arrive. He wore Mimetidae black from head to foot, but even such somber garb failed to conceal the yellow blood streaking his neck and cheek. Red blood poured from a cut on his forehead, but since the others weren’t shunning him, I assumed a riser had thrown a rock or other object at him, that he hadn’t been injured by one directly. Their bodily fluids were contagious. If he had been injured by one, and if its blood or saliva entered the wound, he would contract the plague.

  No doubt they would sterilize his wounds the instant his feet touched the ground.

  Unless… I hadn’t considered that Henri might have started him on the plague preventative too.

  He slid from his mount and joined the others, who kept a careful distance from me.

  “Don’t pay them any mind.” Edan’s voice drifted over my shoulder. “They’ll be gone soon.”

  It could not be soon enough. “What if they warn the Salticidae what it is they’re harboring?”

  “If they choose to break their vows to their paladin, and if the Salticidae turn us out, then you and I will take the gold that Henri gifted us and set out for a new city. Or perhaps a smaller village since you prefer living in the open.” He tapped my wingtips. “Not that I blame you when you have these.”

  I grinned at him over my shoulder. His was a marvelous skill to make me feel so at home in my skin while he pretended he envied even one small part of my transformation. Though I must admit, I loved to fly. I offered to take him with me once, but he worried my fragile-looking wings might tear.

  I rather thought he was afraid of heights, not that he would ever admit such a fault to me.

  As important as it was that he seem invincible to all, it seemed doubly important he appear that way to me. Edan had been my protector since we had been ripped from the arms of our parents to serve their master, a horrid male with paper skin and a halo of white curls he vainly brushed himself.

  Thank the gods he had been too old to threaten my maidenhood, but he’d had a friend delighted to relieve me of the burden. He had lived to remind me that he owned me, that he owned other pretty baubles too, of which my brother was one. The very real fear that Edan and I might be turned on one anoth
er for our master’s amusement had no doubt been the instrument of his death. For if he had not taunted Edan so, then when Idra stole me while I was shopping for gowns at Fortunia’s night market, he might have simply escaped the old lecher and come for me rather than skinning the bastard alive.

  But Edan chose instead to vent the rage accumulated during our years of servitude.

  I cast no blame on him. He did no less to our master than he deserved.

  I tensed at Asher’s approach, enough that Edan stopped his inspection and came to my side.

  Asher’s gait was the rolling swagger of a male who thought much of himself. His black hair was parted with a comb rather than his fingers and was cropped shorter at his nape and longer on the top. His eyes were black as river rock and just as cold. The saving grace of his countenance might be the contour of his lips. The thinness of the upper and the plumpness of the lower made his smile lopsided.

  I flushed when his sharp glare pinned me to the ground, and I glanced away.

  The report of his disapproval was deafening, though he hadn’t spoken another word.

  I must have imagined seeing him smile, because I was quite sure now I had never witnessed it.

  “I will lead my ursus through first.” Edan clasped my shoulder. “I want to be certain there are no surprises waiting on the other side. Then I want Marne sent through with her mount.”

  Asher flicked his gaze at me then back to Edan. “I’m not sure it’s wise to separate you.”

  Edan palmed the hilt of his sword. “Are you telling me you can’t protect her for a half hour?”

  “I have done all I can to slow the risers. The ones we slaughtered ought to buy us time while the others fight over the corpses. But I’m sure you can imagine how the guards view Marne now that—”

  “She saved my life. For all they know, she saved theirs too. Harbingers play with their food, so I would counsel my guards to be grateful they have survived up to this point.” Edan lowered his voice. “Tell me now whether you can and will protect her. I would rather risk the crossing together than her be harmed, if they dared. I think you and your guards have witnessed her ability to protect herself.”

  “There’s no doubt of that.” Asher was studying me again. “I’ll protect her as best I can.”

  “If you can keep your guards clear of me and the risers too,” I said, “I can handle myself.”

  “Don’t take risks.” Edan bent to kiss my temple. “We must be quick about this.”

  With a wink, he set off for his ursus, grabbing her reins and leading her toward the wavering air curtain that was the veil. The folds parted for him to enter, shutting on his heels, blurring his outline until he vanished from sight. Though he walked less than twelve feet from me, I saw nothing of him.

  My hand rose to my throat, my fingers tracing the mounds of scar tissue where Edan had ripped Idra’s sigil from me. My fingers trembled, my chest constricting the farther he eased away from me.

  “You don’t have to be afraid.” Asher stared after Edan too. “I won’t let them harm you.”

  “Thank you.” As Edan had said, I worried more that I might harm them. I was so very hungry.

  “You must have done this before.” His assumption hung between us. “At least once.”

  “I was violently ill during the journey. I don’t remember much of it at all.”

  In many ways, it was as if I had gone to sleep among the other fledgling harbingers then woke to Edan’s face hovering over me as we sheltered in the trunk of a tree while ice storms howled outside.

  The rest of our journey was colored by my delirium, my fevered attempts to return to Idra as her outrage at my escape made my ears bleed. I was ashamed that I had begged Edan to end my torment, but I could not have endured her belligerence one more day. That was when he had gripped her sigil in his hand, told me he loved me, pleaded for the gods’ mercy and ripped the vicious thing from me.

  Edan had been convinced the sigil was at the root of my sickness. He had been half right, but his brutal cure almost killed me. If Paladin Rhys hadn’t found Edan stumbling with me in the cold while he and his guards were out hunting, and if Paladin Rhys hadn’t welcomed us to his home or if Henri hadn’t been such an accomplished healer, then I might have perished from an infection or blood loss.

  Edan would have followed me. He was too overbearing to allow for the possibility of letting me entertain myself in the spiritlands while I waited for his natural life to end. What did that say for us?

  Perhaps our relationship was closer than it ought to have been otherwise. Or perhaps after being slaves to another’s desires for so long, we required fulfillment of another’s wishes to taste happiness.

  I feared we were bound to each other now as surely as if we still wore the master’s collars.

  I shook free of the past in time to notice Asher’s preoccupation with the flowers on my chemise.

  Grasping the halves of my coat, I tugged it tighter around me. “Will you stay with me?”

  He spared a measuring look for his comrades. “It would be safer for you if I didn’t.”

  I brushed fluttering strands of platinum hair from my eyes. “Do they think I can beguile you?”

  His breath caught as if a terrible realization had seized him. “Can you?”

  Idra could. Lailah could too. In fact, she had. If I was a full-blooded harbinger, I could lure him.

  “Rest easily,” I assured him. “I don’t have that power.”

  “I almost wish you hadn’t told me.” He exhaled. “It was easier when I could blame you.”

  I had to stop myself from reaching for him. “What was easier?”

  “You are the loveliest female I have ever seen,” he said softly. “I can see why your husband has fought against such odds to keep you by his side, even though he must realize it will end badly. How cruel the gods are to allow such a creature to wear your beauty when all you touch withers and dies.”

  Struck mute by his callous words, I could only watch him return to his comrades.

  When his greeting elicited whooping laughter from the other guards, I turned and buried my hot cheeks against my mount’s coarse fur. Though my eyes were dry, I wiped my hands beneath them. I had only a few minutes to prepare myself. I wouldn’t waste them on Asher and his petty rudeness. It would have been difficult enough to cross with a serene mind knowing the risers were so near, but it seemed now I also had to contend with the stinging humiliation of being mocked by my own guards.

  Lore said the veil consumed the weak, sickly and injured. I would give it no cause to taste me.

  Chapter 3

  With a final bark of laughter, Asher separated himself from the others. It shamed me to realize I had been watching him this whole time, waiting for the moment when he would speak to me again. I readied insults to hurl at him if he mocked me to my face, but his mirth drained once he turned aside.

  I tracked his progress eagerly as though I relished pain wrought by his hand.

  He smoothed his hair upon noticing my intense stare. “Are you ready to cross?”

  “I am.” I took my mount’s reins and brushed past him. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

  “Watch yourself.” Asher grabbed my arm, his grip soft despite his tone. “Call if you need me.”

  I stared at his hand until he slid it down to cup my elbow. “Would you come if I did?”

  “I wouldn’t have suggested it otherwise.” He dropped his hand. “I’ll be listening for you.”

  “You spoke to me earlier of persons acting beyond their control.” I forced out the words while I dared. “Did you consider me in your estimation? Or only yourself? Am I no longer a person to you?”

  His lips mashed together.

  Asher had a talent for saying what he thought without uttering a word.

  I pitied him. “How you must despise yourself if you’re so eager to take your hate out on me.”

  I sidestepped him and let the pulsating warmth of the veil descend around me.
Heat caressed my cheeks and sent tendrils of my hair fluttering into my eyes. The air sat heavier in my lungs, and what I assumed would be a straight path branched in several directions. There was the road where I stood. Then there were six separate paths forking from the main one and leading deeper inside the veil.

  “Lovely.” I rubbed a hand down my face. “No one told me there were different paths.”

  “There is but one path for mortals.”

  Cold sweat drenched my back as Idra’s voice filled my ears. Her voice. My ears. She was here.

  I spun around to face a slender female wrapped in a gossamer gown. Her pale hair was bound in a complex knot atop her head. Her lips were lush and red. Her citrine eyes glittered when she smiled, and her teeth were serrated and pink as if I had interrupted her meal by wandering in this place.

  “Which is the way out?” As though I expected a scrap of honesty from her.

  Her laughter stung. “Why would I tell you the one thing guaranteed to take you from me?”

  “Please, let me go.”

  Her eyelids fluttered shut. “Your pleas are as sweet to the ears as I remembered them to be.”

  I bumped into my ursus in my haste to put distance between us. “What do you want?”

  “What have I always wanted?” She grinned. “You. It’s always been you.”

  The beast spooked at the sight of Idra and ripped its reins from my hand. I slapped its flank hard and sent it running, I hoped, toward Edan or Asher. When it arrived riderless, surely help must come.

  “Why me?” All the times I had asked, she had hummed to me until I forgot the question.

  “Want is reflexive. There is no reason. It’s the desire you experience when you see something of rare beauty or intrigue and you must possess it, as if in the having of it, you too will be made better.”

  “There are other pretty females—” I clamped my mouth shut. Who was I to condemn another?

  “But none retained their spark. None clung to free will after their metamorphosis was complete.”

  She owed Edan for that. Her sigil would have washed away my identity. Its removal saved me.