by Jill Myles
Unfortunately, it didn’t help my situation, either.
By the time Alek awoke, I still didn’t have an answer to my situation, only more questions and a confused feeling in the pit of my stomach that only got worse every time he gave me a sleepy smile.
“Thank you for letting me sleep,” he said to me, rumpling his hand through his hair. The tufts stuck out even worse now that he’d slept on it, and it made him look young and boyish.
“Of course,” I said, annoyed. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was going to hurt him once we emerged from this tunnel.
“Do you want to take a few hours and sleep, Rinda? I’ll watch over you.”
I shook my head. “I’m fine. Let’s get going. I’m anxious to leave this place and get back into the sunlight.”
And to get my future decided once and for all.
~~ * ~~
We dug through the leftover belongings in the cave, looking for anything that might be of use. To my utter delight, we found an old, cracked lantern and a flask of lantern oil, and I thought I would faint with relief when Alek lit it and warm, friendly glow flickered and grew. A lantern would burn longer than a torch, and was far more reliable. Just to be sure, I pricked my thumb and pressed a thumbprint on the base of it, just to be safe.
With the lantern in my hand, the tunnels seemed less fearsome, though the dust was just as thick and the spider webs even thicker the further down we moved through the tunnels. Alek and I still passed the time by talking as much as possible and stayed close enough to where one was touching the other at almost all times. It surprised me anew to discover that Alek was funny, and charming like the best courtiers.
I was not nearly quite so charming – my thoughts and actions were blunt from a lifetime of trying to get the upper hand in the conversation, but Alek didn’t seem to mind. He’d simply grin at my sharp words, as if nothing I could say would shock him. So I told him everything about my father, even the painful parts. The times when Father had ridden out to the coast to visit a duke and taken my sister, but left me behind with the servants, simply because he didn’t want to see my face. The insults my father lobbed my way on a daily basis. My determined spending of Father’s money. Imogen’s sweet, distracted affection and her reluctance to stand up to Father for me. I laid my disappointments out before him. The tunnels felt like our own private world, like nothing I told him would go farther than the two of us.
“It must have been a very great betrayal when your father married you off to me,” he said after a time, his words thoughtful. “It’s a wonder that you don’t hate me.”
“I am not so surprised by my father’s actions,” I said, the cynical twist returning to my mouth. “Whenever he was angry at me, he sought to do whatever it was I’d hate the most. When I was young, I had a pony named Clover that I loved with all my heart. I’d ride her for hours every day, and at night I wanted to sleep in the stables next to her, I adored her so. One day my father grew angry because I’d interrupted him during a state dinner. The next day, Clover was gone, given to a visiting earl as a gift for his son.” The pain of it still stung after all this time. I remembered the hurt like it was fresh, and more than that, I remembered my father’s ugly smile of delight at my pain. I’d sobbed with misery until I’d seen his smile. And once I saw it, my tears dried and a hard ugliness entered me. I never cried in front of him again. I glanced at Alek, forcing a smile. “I learned not to show my father the things I truly cared about, and after a time, I suppose I stopped caring about anything at all. So no, while it surprised me that he would become so creative and spiteful with his punishment, it did not surprise me that he would stoop to such levels to hurt me.”
Aleksandr digested this in silence as we walked. Then, after a few moments passed, “But you didn’t say that you did not hate me.”
“Of course I don’t hate you,” I protested.
He gave me a half smile, and I flushed, turning away. It had sounded like a tacked-on excuse, even to my ears.
“It’s all right if you do, you know. I wouldn’t keep you in this marriage knowing that.”
That made me feel better and worse, all at the same time.
Chapter Thirteen
That night – at least, I supposed it was night – we took turns sleeping for a few hours, the other keeping watch. Once we’d both had a short rest, we got up and continued traveling, eager to be out of the tunnels. If the song was right, we’d be out of the tunnels by the third day. Of course, the song had not been completely accurate so far – though there were spider webs aplenty, we had yet to see any spiders. Perhaps it was wrong about other things as well? I kept my suspicions to myself, as if voicing them would somehow make them possible.
The cobwebs grew thicker as the tunnel began to slope upward once more. Excitement began to brim inside me, but I kept it to myself. If the tunnel was sloping up, perhaps that meant we’d be back to the surface soon? My hopes were dampened by the fact that the cobwebs grew so thick that they tugged at my hair and pulled on my skirts, and soon every step began to feel like I was walking through a sticky fog. We paused so Alek could make another torch and I secured my skirts with another thumbprint. The blood would ruin the fabric, but I didn’t care as long as I didn’t have to constantly pull it free of the spider webs.
“I don’t like this,” he said to me, hefting the torch high to burn our way through.
I stepped in place behind him, watching as the spider webs melted away overhead. I agreed with him – I was starting to get afraid. “We can’t turn back now,” I whispered, wishing I could hook my hand in the back of his belt again to feel safer. Instead, I had to hold my lantern and dagger. He kept the torch high overhead, but his sword had been unsheathed and he used it to hack at the thicker webs that dragged at his clothing along the wall.
The webs continued to grow thicker, at times so heavy that I feared that they’d put out the torch, and I held the lantern a little closer to my body. The walls of the tunnel were impossible to see now, so thickly covered with webbing that they masked the floor and ceiling, and it felt more like we were stumbling through a cocoon rather than down a rocky tunnel inside the mountain.
Something hard and round dropped into the tangles of my hair.
I shook it, trying to dislodge the item. When that didn’t work, I paused and set down the lantern and my dagger and ran my fingers through my long, tangled hair, searching for whatever had fallen on me. Ahead, Alek continued to burn at the cobwebs, making slow but steady progress forward. He had not noticed that I had stopped. My fingers found the round burr in my hair, and I tugged it free and pulled it in front of me to examine it.
It was a spider, his body as big as a coin, with long, spindly legs that shivered and curled up close to the body. As I stared at it, the legs uncurled and it crawled off of my hand and up the fabric of my sleeve.
With a shudder, I slapped it away and shook it free from my clothing. It landed on the ground and scuttled into the webs, disappearing.
“Alek,” I shrieked. “Spider!”
He stopped and made his way back to me, sword ready at his side. “Where is it?”
I couldn’t stop running my fingers through my hair, checking for more of the leggy insects, worried that I’d somehow missed another. “It was in my hair. I could feel it crawling.” My skin shuddered with disgust.
“It was a small one, then?” Aleksandr looked at me thoughtfully, then at the cobwebs.
“Not that small,” I protested in irritation. “It was the size of my hand, almost. Quite big.” As I spoke, I continued to dust my arms off, worried that I might have seen another crawler.
“I don’t see anything,” he said, swinging the torch closer to the wall.
I scowled, glancing over at him. “I didn’t make it up, you know…” the words died in my throat as something crawled along his collar, and began to make its way across the front of his jerkin. Something with eight long legs and twice the size of the one I’d pulled from my hair. A knot fo
rmed in my throat, and I swallowed hard, then pointed. “Alek?”
He glanced down and yelped, dropping the sword to brush his jerkin free of vermin. “Creator,” he breathed, then grinned over at me. “That was uncomfortable.”
“That was a large spider,” I retorted. “Of course it was uncomfortable.”
Alek lifted the torch and swung it close to the walls, not quite burning the cobwebs. They seemed to move and pulse with shadows, and I could almost hear legs skittering across stone. I swallowed hard. “Do you think those are going to be the only spiders we’ll see?”
He lifted the torch toward the other wall, and we both watched the webbing writhe as the creatures hiding in there sought to run away. Aleksandr sighed. “No, I don’t think so.”
I picked up my lantern again, and my dagger, and kept both close to my body, eyeing the walls with a little more than fear. “What should we do?”
Alek's face was grim. “We keep going. There’s no other choice.”
I swallowed hard, raised my lantern. The faint light of it shone on the tunnel ahead, thick with spider webs. I glanced back at Alek and admitted, “I’m scared.”
He set down his sword again and moved closer to me. “I won’t let anything happen to you, Rinda,” he said in a calm voice, even as he reached out and began to tuck my long hair into the back of my collar so the spider webs wouldn’t pull on it. Once that was done, he patted my back and gave me a serious look. “Do you trust me?”
I nodded. “I trust you.”
“Then let’s keep going.”
The next few hours were hellish. Spiders continued to drop from the ceiling onto us, and I was constantly using my dagger to brush an unwanted traveler off my shoulder, or off my skirts. The back of Alek's jerkin was covered with tiny spiders, and no amount of brushing could make them stay off of us for long. They swarmed over us, never biting, just crawling. Every inch of my skin felt covered by spiders. I worried they would get into my mouth, my nose, my ears.
I wanted to scream, except screaming would do no good, because then my mouth would be open for more to drop into.
Alek continued to hack at the spider webs with the torch, but the battle was a losing one. The webbing grew thicker and thicker until we were struggling to push forward, and the torch went out repeatedly when the webs were too thick to even burn through. We’d re-light it with the lantern, but that made me worry even more – my lantern did not have an endless supply of oil, and it was running low, the flame growing weaker and more flickering.
“At least they’re all small spiders,” Alek said, pausing to hold his sword between his knees and freeing a hand to slap one of his newest passengers away. He shook his jerkin wildly and spiders rained off of him. Almost immediately, another one dropped from the ceiling and back onto his shoulder. “It could be much worse.”
“Can small spiders make all this webbing, though?” I asked him with a frown. Some of the tendrils looked very thick and large to me. “That doesn’t seem right.”
He shrugged and put his sword back in his hand, and we began to move forward slowly again. The world was quiet of everything except for the swish of Alek's sword as he cut through the webbing, the hiss and sizzle of the torch as it burned away the spider webs, and my own frightened breathing.
Then, I began to hear something. A heavy rustle, like that of thick brocade skirts, except not quite the same. I paused, trying to make out the sound, and Aleksandr paused as well, squinting at something ahead in the tunnel. Then, to my surprise, he shoved his torch in a thick cluster of webbing. The flame snuffed immediately, leaving behind only the scent of smoke.
“Alek?” I said unevenly.
“I think I see something,” he said, staring ahead into the thick cobwebs.
“What is it?” I whispered, my heart pounding in my breast. “What do you see?”
“Cover your lantern for a moment,” he said, taking a few steps ahead. “I want to make sure.”
I pulled my skirts over the lantern – they wouldn’t catch on fire, since both lantern and my skirts had been ‘lucked’ by me. Darkness engulfed the cavern and it took everything I had not to scream. My heart pounded in my chest so loudly that I feared he’d be able to hear it as well. My breath came in shallow, frightened gasps as spiders skittered across my skin again.
“There,” he whispered in the silence. “Do you see it?”
I forced myself to concentrate, to calm down. A faint glow still emitted from my skirts, and I stared at the smoking red embers of the now-snuffed torch. Beyond that, all I saw were cobwebs…
I squinted a little harder. Why could I see cobwebs in the darkness? A small disk of pale cobwebs, seemingly no large than my fist, loomed in the distance. “Is that…”
“Light,” he agreed, a laugh bubbling from his throat. “We’re almost out.”
The rustle came from behind me again, much louder than before. Hurriedly, I grabbed the lantern from my skirts and pulled it forward again, illuminating the cavern with soft light. “Did you hear that?”
Alek pulled his sword forth. He put his hand out, indicating that I should stay put, and took a few steps back where we had just come from.
Not willing to be left behind, I followed close after him, glancing back at that small circle of light with longing. We were moving away from it. But I followed Alek.
“Something’s following us,” he said in a soft voice. His back was to me, and he ignored the spiders that skittered over his tunic. “Do you have your dagger?”
I clutched it close, for once not distracted by the constant crawl of bugs in my clothing. “I do. What should we do?”
“Do you still see that circle of light at the other end of the tunnel?”
I glanced behind me. Even with the lantern out, I could still find that circle of sunlight, now that I knew to look for it. “I see it.”
Alek turned to look back at me, his face grim in the shadows. “Good. Now turn around and run.”
I paused, uncertain. Did he mean–
“Run,” Alek growled at me, his voice urgent. “Run! Don’t look back. Just run!”
I yet hesitated, taking a step backward.
“Run! I’ll be right behind you. Go! Go now!”
I turned and ran.
Spider webs pulled at my face and hair as I ran. I didn’t stop, not even when the webs grew so thick that I had to fling myself through them. I kept pushing and struggling towards that circle of light that grew larger with every step I took. The floor of the tunnel angled upward steeply, and I knew it was heading out. Joy and anxiety pulsed hard through my body, my breath rasping harsh in my lungs. I could hear nothing but my own pounding feet and heart.
“Run,” Alek shouted from behind me, and I kept running.
Just when I was close to the surface – so close I could smell fresh air – the spider webs grew so thick that they completely covered the entryway, and hundreds of the crawlers swarmed in the webs. I shuddered and pushed through them regardless, so desperate to get out that it overrode even my fear of them. The webbing caught my hair and spiders swarmed over me. I pushed harder, bracing my elbow against the web and leaning on it with all of my weight.
The strands broke and I tumbled into the sunshine.
I gasped and clawed at my face and hair, pulling off endless strands of webbing out of my eyes and mouth. Spiders crawled over me and I brushed them off awkwardly, noticing that for the first time in hours, they didn’t return when I brushed them away. I wiped at my face with frantic relief, laughing as I stared at my surroundings.
The mountains had cut away abruptly, as if chiseled by a godlike hand. I had fallen onto a small ledge that overhung a burbling creek of water and green, lush grasses. I scrambled to the edge of the water and splashed my face, wiping away the last of the cobwebs and gave a happy sigh. The sunlight beat down on my head, hot and blinding. I reached over to where the oil lamp had rolled in the grass and hastily righted it. The small flame had not burnt out, which was a stroke of luck
(though no surprise thanks to my Birthright magic). My dagger had fallen in the grass next to it and I picked it up and wiped the blade on my skirts, then frowned.
Where was Alek?
I stared in the cave mouth with a sense of dread pooling in my stomach. “Alek?” I called.
No answer.
My mouth dry, I picked up the oil lamp and my dagger and moved back to the front of the cave. The strands there still crawled with spiders, and I was reluctant to go back in and let them crawl all over me again. “Alek?” I called again.
Still nothing.
I swallowed hard and went back in the cave.
The darkness engulfed me again, and I had to bite my lip to keep from crying out. I wanted to go back into the sunlight. Instead, I forced myself to walk forward. “Alek!”
The familiar, heavy rustle echoed in the darkness. I moved forward with the lamp, desperately searching the darkness for Alek. What if he’d gotten trapped in the webbing and was here in the dark, lost and alone and going the wrong way? “Alek! Answer me!”
I heard a muffled groan. Heart beating fast, I ran forward, and then…stopped. Alek lay sprawled on the floor of the cave, his legs covered in webbing, eyes closed. His sword lay discarded nearby. Looming over him was the largest spider I’d ever seen. Each of the eyes was as large as my fist, and the legs were as long as I was tall. It was mottled black like the shadows, and wiry bristles of hair stuck up from its body. An enormous set of mandibles snapped and spit another wad of cocooning over Alek's legs.
It was wrapping him for dinner.
I choked back the urge to scream and clutched my knife tighter. The spider continued working, though as I stood there, trembling, it raised its two front legs, as if bracing to attack me.