Page 142 of The Sun King's Noon

He was being watched.

“I am here to kill you, siren. And claim your heart.”

A pause. Then a voice—a woman’s low voice—emanated from everywhere at once—from the leaves, from the web, from the mud. It was accompanied by a laugh.

“Bold of thee to try, kingling. Many such bold ones have walked beneath my boughs. Their entrails now feed my roots. Their dreams now feed my children. Wouldst thou be added unto the wood, sweet morsel, or wouldst thou parley first?”

Richard turned on the spot, sword tracking with him. He searched the high web, the dim trunks, the spaces between, but nothing took shape.

“Where is my knight?”

“Ah.”The laugh again.“Thy knight with the soft eyes. Easy, kingling. Easiest of all thou broughtst untomy shore. I had but to put on thy voice, faint and frightened and how quick he came running.”

The wind shrieked, but the voice kept talking, burrowing into Richard’s ears.

“Thou shouldst have stayed. I wrought thy dream with care. I sought out the brightest faces of those thou lovest. The father at his most generous. The mother at her most knowing. I gave thee thy beloveds in their finest hour, and thou didst spurn it.”

“You gave me my loved ones with their hard edges sanded off,” Richard said, surprised at the steadiness of his voice. “But I love my father at his most demanding, and my mother at her most despairing, and my siblings when they are tiresome and cruel. That is what it means to be family.”

The wind eased, and the leaves quietened. When the voice came again, her laughter had vanished.

“Family. Aye. I had a family once.”It sighed.“We were six. Born of the first hour, the first breath drawn in all lands. My brothers and sisters and I. When we broke from our mother’s tether and stepped forth into the air, my kin bristled at the sight of me. Unsightly creature of eight legs, they said. When I shifted my body into a more wondrous guise, still they scoffed and took the sky, and the sea, and the white mountain, and the long river. To me, they left the rotted log, and the cold places where light cometh not. But weep not for me. I have made my peace with the dark. And one by one, my brothers and sisters shall meet such ends as their beauty hath earned them. My brother, the white horn-bearer, is taken already, I have seen. He liveth conquered by the elf-king, each day an exquisite torture.”

Richard’s jaw dropped. The unicorn heart Galdran owned. But somehow, the beast itself lived. “How came you to see this from your isle here?”

“Glimpses. Through the eyes of mine kin, when they look upward and the looking carrieth. We are bound, the six of us, by the first thread that wove us.”A dark satisfaction entered her tone.“My sister, the bright one. The phoenix. She fared worst of any of us. Once, she loved a king. She gave him and his line her blessing from fire and her deepest friendship. When he betrayed her, it was done so utterly that the wound of it singeth still in the world.”

“Which king?”

“But of course, sweetling. I speak of thine own forefather. From a thousand years gone. The one whose face thou wearest.”

Richard’s thoughts stuttered. “What?”

“Thou hast not been told of him, hast thou? He hath been struck from thy chronicles, his name a hole in thy histories. I shall give it back to thee. King Rience of Ardenia. The Veil-Maker. Thou art the very mirror of him, kingling. Bone for bone. The set of thy mouth. The line of thy jaw. The black of thine hair. Thou couldst be his ghost stepped down from the tapestries he ordered burned.”

Richard wrenched his dry tongue from the roof of his mouth. “The veil was built a thousand years ago. We have no records that survived that age. We know only that the dwarves?—”

“Aye. Rience saw to that. He buried his own name to bury his shame. The dwarves were his workmen, and the spell was his design, and the cost of the spell—”The voice paused.“—was paid in my sister’s screams. Yet she trusted him andloved him in those last hours, evenwhen she had begun to suspect. Even now, when her suffering does not end, she has come to forgive him.

So thou seest, kingling, when the elf-king Galdran looketh upon thy face, he doth not see a man whom he hath some passing interest in. He seeth the very visage of the king who walled his people into a thousand years of rot and ruin. He seeth Rience returned. His obsession and ardour with thee is not new. It is older than thy great-grandsire’s grandsire. It hath been waiting for a face like thine to be born again into the world. Thou art Rience brought to life once more.”

Richard’s breath burst out of him, his mind sprinting in a hundred directions. The veil. The destroyed records. An ancient king he had come to resemble.

“Tell me more,” he rasped. “Tell me exactly what Rience did to the phoenix?—”

“Ah. But the time for tales is done. Thou hast lingered overlong at my hearth, kingling. And I have become peckish.”

High above, in the canopy where the web was thickest, something large and white unfolded. It descended on a thread, unfolding leg after leg, each as long as a spear, ridged and jointed and bristled with dark hairs. The body that hung from the thread was the size of a wagon, with a piercing hook at the end. The head was filled with clicking mandibles and eight black eyes.

Richard’s knees quivered. He remembered being four and seeing a large spider skitter across his bedsheets. He remembered the terror he felt. Remembered how he’d run, shrieking, into his laughing father’s arms.

But now, he was grown. And all monsters, he’d come to learn, could be taught to fear. Locking his stance, he raised the sword.

The spider lowered her bulk until her eyes were level with Richard’s. The mandibles parted, and the voice came.

“Oh. Thou art a small and shaking thing. How thy heart doth race.”

“Small and shaking perhaps.” Richard tilted his head. “But tell me, siren—in all your long years of skulking where light shines not, has a single soul ever called you fair?” He curved his lips into a smirk. “Or dost thou still squat in thy own filth and dream of being gazed upon with aught but abhorrence?”