Chapter 62 - A Queen's Court

Nennia led Lillia deeper and deeper into her lair, through holes in the floor and corridors crafted entirely from the millions of silk threads drawn across the spider queen’s domain. She had to swallow fear and other squeaking sounds at each turn. Each new descent into shadow was another horror that Lillia needed to close her eyes and pretend wasn’t there.
The Spider Queen wasn’t with Lillia through the entire descent. Or at least she wasn’t always directly leading her. Nennia would duck into a larger passage—one that allowed for her size—and leave the princess alone to fight her way through the tangled webs. Then, at some point, she would appear below Lillia and guide her in a new direction.
It took everything Lillia had to put Hooke away and keep it away during the climb down. She hadn’t carried a blade for long, but she was starting to feel naked without one in her hand. Hooke was a lifeline, but that lifeline would have been rude here.
Worse, if Lillia gave in and cut some webbing out of the way, she might have untangled the whole mess and sent herself falling down into the shadows below.
The silk was beautiful. That was the worst part. It layered over the stone in patterns too deliberate to be mess, too delicate to be simple infestation. Curtains. Braids. Lacework. Whole hanging veils that would not have looked out of place in a palace if Lillia could ignore what they were made from and what they were for.
If all of this was what was in the light, Lillia didn’t want to imagine what was hiding in the darkness.
Lillia had been guided for almost an hour by the time Nennia finally slowed. Her arms were sore from pulling herself through the webs. Her core whined from needing to balance on unsteady floors.
Every nerve was on fire from constantly needing to ignore every alarm bell blaring in her head during the entire descent. Each step she took made the web shiver. Worse, after each shiver something answered from the walls. A twitch. A scrape. The delicate tap of legs against stone. Lillia knew that the web was announcing each of her footsteps to anything that would listen.
Nennia, for her part, had been mostly silent during the descent. She led the princess through motion alone, aside from occasionally telling her to continue without her. Nennia kept calling Lillia the ‘young one.’ She didn’t know if that was a compliment about her age, or a comment on how fresh she was.
The room Nennia finally stopped in was more pit than room, a massive, carved-looking hole that stretched up and down into shadows that Lillia couldn’t see.
Up, somewhere at the top, there was a pinprick of blue light. It wasn’t enough, and Lillia still had to squint to see, but it was light.
There was no floor in this room outside of the spiderwebs. They were woven tight and thick across the hole to the point where there were few places that you could see through them. It was the steadiest the ground had looked to Lillia in a while, but she still hesitated to step out onto it.
Nennia went first. Even though she was obviously heavier, each step of her eight legs seemed to fall lighter than any of Lillia’s. Each motion barely put pressure on the threads she stepped on, almost plucking them as she pulled away.
Lillia was sure her clumsy steps would put her through the web and sprialling down into oblivion. She took a deep breath and stepped out into the webbing.
She didn’t fall. That was a good start.
Once she stepped onto the web, Lillia looked up. Nennia was far out in the centre of the room, awaiting her.
With each step, Lillia heard a thousand voices in her head telling her to turn around, that this was too scary, and that she was certainly dead. Some of them were the scared girl who’d fallen into this dungeon in the first place, others sounded damn rational in the moment.
After all, she was walking out into the middle of the giant spider’s web to meet with the spider. What was she other than a fly?
If Nennia was planning to kill Lillia, she was patient about it. The spider queen waited in the centre of the room for Lillia’s entire, painfully slow journey out there. Once Lillia was close enough, Nennia smiled. Her teeth were sharp.
The threads beneath Lillia’s feet tightened with each beat of her heart, as if the room had learned the rhythm and was quietly repeating it back to her. Through one of the gaps, Lillia saw more webbing below. Then, more below that. Layer after layer descending into black.
“You’ve come so far into my lair. Young one, aren’t you scared?”
Obviously! Completely! Utterly! Incomprehensibly!
Lillia swallowed down all of those answers and shoved them deep in her stomach alongside all the screams she’d have to let out later. It took a moment, but she eventually found something appropriately diplomatic for an answer.
“You have a lovely home. I am very impressed with the silk work.”
Nennia leaned forward, her entire form shifting to carry her humanlike torso close to Lillia. “What a sweet young lady. Such a diplomatic response.”
When she swept in close and the human torso was all Lillia could see, she could almost mistake Nennia for human. It would have been easier to do so if it weren’t for the eleven unblinking red eyes where a proper two should have been.
“Well, Diplomatic Little Princess, you said you came here to negotiate. Why?” Nennia cut back in before Lillia had a chance to speak. “And why should I listen to you at all?”
There was truly no good reason for Nennia to listen to anything Lillia had to say. Even if she hadn’t been drawn deep into Nennia’s lair, the Spider Queen could have just killed Lillia as many times as she wanted, over and over again.
She couldn’t appeal to power, and she was asking a favor. Quite different from the negotiations she’d seen her parents engage in.
“You said it yourself. We’re both royalty. I’ve come to speak to you, leader to leader.”
“Leader to leader,” Nennia echoed. “And what exactly do you lead, Princess?”
The room grew colder as Nennia asked the question. Lillia heard something skittering on the walls above.
“I am the heir to House Ashvalin. I am the…” Lillia trailed off as Nennia leaned in closer. It took her a moment to find the courage to continue. “I am the ruler of the four kingdoms and—“
Nennia was too close now. Lillia could feel her breath on her lips. It smelled strangely sweet.
“Excuse me, if you could just…”
“Don’t lie to me, Princess. I can feel your heart racing through my web.”
“I am a little frightened.”
“You’ve always been frightened. Now, you’re frightened and lying.” One of Nennia’s hind legs twitched, and Lillia felt one thread pull under her feet. “Try again and don’t test my patience. I get hungry when I’m irritated.”
Lillia nodded. Threat received. “I am the rightful ruler of the four kingdoms.”
“But not the ruler?”
“In…” she tried to place the exact date, but couldn’t; there was a chance it had already passed. “In a few days, I will be old enough to be named queen and replace my aunt on the throne.”
“But you are down here.”
“But I am down here,” Lillia said. There was movement on the walls. Shadows that weren’t shadows moved up and down the webbed network. “If I can escape in time—”
Nennia chuckled. Somewhere above, a hundred little feet moved at once, then stopped together.
Lillia took a deep breath. “When I escape here. Before or after. I can reassert myself as queen.”
Nennia pulled away from Lillia, rising back high enough to look down on the girl. “So, you come to me as the leader of the four kingdoms. Not as a woman of the dungeon?” She crossed her arms. “Do you plan on offering me one of your kingdoms, little princess?”
Lillia recoiled. That idea was more gross than anything she’d seen down here. “I couldn’t split the kingdoms!”
“Then you come to me as an adventurer, do you not? I will entertain your title of surface princess, but I can’t go accepting empty promises.”
“And I wouldn’t make one.”
“Glad we see eyes to eyes,” Nennia said.
The spiders from the walls were on the web now. None of them had a human half like Nennia’s, all of them were larger than any spider that Lillia had ever imagined, let alone seen. The smallest were as large as her father’s hounds, the largest—
Well, the largest was right in front of her.
“I hope you don’t mind if my children sit in on this negotiation,” Nennia said. “They need to learn from Mother at some point. We spent so many years waiting for someone to stumble into the dungeon and wake us.”
Lillia tried to focus on Nennia and take a deep breath. She failed on both fronts; her eyes wandered and her breath came short, the exhale nearly whistling.
“So, princess, you come into my lair as an adventurer. What’s stopping me from treating you like all the rest?”
She could do this. She’d thought about it. Probably not enough, but she had thought about it.
“I’m not treating you like the rest of them did. I didn’t come in here and treat you like a monster.”
Nennia chuckled again. Everything she did was shockingly aristocratic for a spider and more appropriate for her status as a queen. “Please, young princess. I am a monster.”
“But I’m not treating you like one.”
“And you think that’s enough.”
“I think you’re listening.”
Nennia’s dark lips were already parted with a prepared response as Lillia spoke, but she pulled it back onto her tongue. The spider-woman’s fangs flashed as she smiled. “That I am.”
“If I’m talking and you’re listening, that means I can make you a deal as long as I know what you want.”
“And what if I want to kill you?”
“You can. I really wouldn’t enjoy it, but you could,” Lillia said the words as confidently as she could, even as she realized they were insane. “But you’re going to probably kill me at some point over and over again. No matter what accord we reach, I will have to come through your lair to complete the third floor.”
“What adorable logic,” Nennia said as she stood and paced around Lillia. There were more of her children in the room now, enough that she couldn’t see the web on the walls. “You make a good point. Maybe I play with you before I kill you. String you up. You’ll come back the same as that other knight.”
Lillia kept her screams internal, but a sharp breath escaped at the implication of Sir Nobody.
Nennia noticed. “He was such a noble knight. He tried and tried his hardest, but he couldn’t quite cut his way through my children. He stopped coming eventually. It’s always sad, losing such a tenacious plaything.”
“Well, you have me instead,” Lillia said. “And you’re only going to get this once unless you agree to work with me.”
“Negotiating the number of times I get to kill you? Certainly an interesting angle.”
“I can’t keep coming here again and again unless we work together on something,” Lillia said. “You don’t get your game.”
Nennia was behind her now. Lillia couldn’t hear her move, but she felt the vibration of the threads through her feet as Nennia plucked them.
“That,” Lillia said, “and based on everything I’ve heard, I think you’ll enjoy the work I’m asking of you.”
“And what is that work, little princess?”
“I need your help killing Eisel,” she said. “Another one of the—”
“I’m aware of Eisel, child,” Nennia said. “I’ve heard him skittering about on the upper floors. Making his little schemes, thrashing against his position in the dungeon.” She rounded Lillia, ending up back in front of her. “Is that your proposal? I help you kill him, or you’ll sit down, die, and leave me alone again?”
Lillia nodded.
“Adorable. You really came here with nothing.”
That was a dagger.
Lillia took a deep breath and let her arms flop to her sides. “Unless you’re interested in items, then I have very little to offer a mighty queen. I am cut off from my kingdom. I have survived based on the kindness of others in places where I should never have found it. This is my place in the dungeon right now, but it won’t be forever.”
“You’ve seen charity, but you haven’t asked me for it.”
“Your reputation precedes you.”
“What reputation is that?”
“You are a fearsome queen who has previously pulled monsters out of their rooms in order to kill them permanently,” Lillia said. “So, I came here planning to appeal to your…interests.”
Nennia clicked her tongue and leaned her torso in. “Little Lillia, you haven’t offered me a chance to kill him at all. You’ve offered me a chance to defeat him for you.” She put her cold hand on Lillia’s cheek and lifted her chin. “How am I supposed to feed him to my children if he comes right back?”
That was a horrifying clarification. Nennia dragged monsters out of their room to permanently kill them and called it motherly love. The idea sat weirdly in Lillia’s stomach. She couldn’t figure out if she preferred that to the alternative of Nennia just thinking it was fun.
In the process of stewing over those options, Lillia realized she had one more thing to offer.
“If you help me make him weak enough, I can get him out of his room. He’ll die outside of it, and then you can feed him to your children.”
“Oh,” Nennia dug her nails into Lillia’s cheek. “Does our little princess have a plan?”
“I think so.”
“Why don’t you tell Mother all about it,” Nennia said, “and if I like it, I will help you take care of your little problem.”