Page 155 of A Promise of Peridot
A violent noise dragged my eyes upward. Killoran stood atop a rickety balcony like a king surveying his subjects. Beside him was a still bound and gagged Kane, who was shouting something. Hoarse, as if he had been yelling for hours.
It was my name.
He was trying to shout my name. To wake me.
I moved my head vigorously until I saw his shoulders slump, his fears momentarily assuaged.
What I needed wasn’t a way out of these restraints, but a way toreach the bridge or platforms surrounding me without slipping through the silk so that I could climb up to them. But the howls of the crowd were growing louder. Riotous. Roaring. They knew what was coming. They wanted a show.
Come on, Arwen. Think, think, think—
Beneath me, the leaves began to rustle.
And then she appeared. At first, just her eyes. Beady, yellow, whirling in different directions—all eight of them peering over the netting, glowing like embers. And obscuring them were delicate, dark lashes as fine as her silk trap. She tilted her elegant head up, revealing two flat nostrils bare of a nose and lips as red as rubies, too dainty to contain her spiked fangs.
The widow’s long legs, dusted in black hair, protruded out and onto the web until she stood before me. The torso of a slender woman, claws—pincers—where her arms should be, all of her covered in the grotesque membranes of a near-translucent black spider. Straight sable hair hung from her head, so long it trailed across the fibers of her net as she prowled forward, and my dread turned heavy and leaden in my stomach.
She could walk across her web just fine. Either that otherworldly grace, or those sticky, membranous legs—whatever it was, she wasn’t slipping through.
“Hemlock,” Killoran bellowed to his people, “tonight we sacrifice another to the creature that lurks beneath. A beast I caught and imprisoned with my bare hands, lest you forget.” The faces above me, mottled by firelight and shifting shadows from the sun still shining somewhere far, far up above, cheered and roared at his words.
“And not just any sacrifice. The prized armorer of King Kane Ravenwood of Onyx Kingdom!”
Oohs andaahs reverberated through the crowd as more people—haggard women and slick, scrawny men—peered out of their windows and left their posts, following the cries of an audience entertained.
“And how did I manage to steal her from him?” Killoran roared. “Well, why don’t you ask the king himself?”
My stomach turned on itself at the horror, the humiliation, as he jerked Kane up by the tunic at his shoulders, and presented him, gagged, beaten, and chained, to his followers. Louder now than I had yet heard them, the crowd screamed and hollered, swarming on top of one another, disorderly in their delight.
It was almost enough to steal my attention from the creature stalking toward me and her ravenous intent. But the torchlight glinting off something around her neck stilled my racing thoughts.
A collar.
A thick iron collar, tethering her to the depths below. One she strained against, halting repeatedly to stretch her long, graceful neck from, but the chain was too taut, and each time she drew closer, or retreated, it retracted with her movements, never leaving her any slack.
But that collar was made of solid chain. And I was weaponless—
My eyes flitted frantically to the other bodies.
But none of them had what I was looking for, and she was prowling closer. One slender bent leg after another, moving with such eerie grace as her pincers snapped once, twice—
And the crowd, the prisoners, roaring with glee, cheering her on.
Focus. One of them has to have—
I just needed to know it was possible. That her venom could do what I needed it to.
Leather belt, suede pouch, wooden club, no, no, no...
There—
A metal shield.
Strapped to the back of a decomposing body was an iron shield, boiled by the widow’s acidic poison, liquefied as if it were butter.
Melted.
Her venommeltedmetal.
