Chapter Text
Well if you told me you were drowning
I would not lend a hand
I’ve seen your face before, my friend
But I don’t know if you know who I am
Well, I was there and I saw what you did
I saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off that grin,
I know where you’ve been
It’s all been a pack of lies
- Phil Collins, “In The Air Tonight”
“Do you know any stories, Captain?” the young prince asks.
“I’m not the Captain,” Puffy corrects with a sigh. It’s the tenth time today.
Outside, sleety rain continues to beat against the windows like handfuls of thrown sand. General Technoblade had left at the head of an armed column earlier that morning, traveling with a diplomatic delegation to the kingdom of the great Western sea, leaving the King and Crown Prince in her charge. Wilbur had been silent and morose all day, Tommy restless and irritable and liable to get into trouble without a distraction. Sam had done his best to keep the boy entertained with sleight-of-hand tricks and a bit of light training–and now, Puffy supposes, it’s her turn.
“But you will be,” Tommy says, projecting nothing less than utmost confidence. “Captain Vikk is old, he’s gonna retire soon if he doesn’t kick the bucket first–”
“Tommy, stop it, that’s morbid,” Wilbur mutters, not looking up from the book that Puffy is almost certain he’s not even really reading. Tommy sticks his tongue out at him.
“Anyway, you used to be a Captain, right?” Tommy presses. “You had adventures and everything! You have to know some good stories.”
“I know a story or three, aye,” Puffy concedes.
“Or ten, or twenty,” Sam chimes in. “She’s good at them, too, does all the voices and everything.”
Very well, then , Puffy thinks, surrendering with a crooked smile. “What kind of a story would you boys like to hear?” she asks.
Wilbur only shrugs. He looks distant, preoccupied, as he almost always does, and it breaks Puffy’s heart to see it. King or not, the boy is only sixteen, and with no real companions save an eight-year-old brother just as lonely as himself and a man that Puffy suspects is not truly a man at all.
Said brother, sensing an opening, jumps in eagerly in his stead. “A good one,” Tommy says, grinning. “A scary one. And I mean a really scary one, not the dumb ones our tutors tell.”
Wilbur groans, resting his face in one hand. “You’re not coming in my room if you have nightmares.”
“I like nightmares,” Tommy insists. “I mean. The good kind of nightmares, anyway. The kind with ghosts and monsters in them. Not…” he trails off, shifting a bit on the balls of his feet.
Not the kind where you creep into your mother’s room in the middle of the night to find her cold and still, Puffy thinks. Not the kind where you’re left alone to fend for yourself against a world far stranger and colder than your bright happy life had led you to believe.
“I could tell you tales from the Badlands,” Sam muses. “We have some terrifying myths about the way the world ends. The northern isles where I apprenticed have some real nail-biters as well. They even celebrate them at the edge of winter every year– Hels Night, what we would call Reaper’s Tide or Hallow’s Eve here.”
“And that’s right around the corner, too,” Puffy adds. “Perhaps it’s a good time for scary stories after all. And I believe I do know a good one, come to think of it. The Shadow Lady and the Spider’s Web.”
Wilbur, despite his earlier detachment, sits up a bit straighter, looking up at her at last, an odd shine in his eyes that Puffy interprets as dawning interest. Tommy, by contrast, is practically vibrating with enthusiasm, his blue eyes wide and round.
“I don’t actually think I’ve heard you tell this one yet,” Sam says, surprised. “And I thought I’d heard all of your Shadow Lady stories.”
“That’s because this one always gave me nightmares when I was a girl,” Puffy admits.
“Are there monsters in it?” Tommy asks, settling in next to his elder brother, at the same time Wilbur asks: "Who was the Shadow Lady?"
"A pirate queen of old," Puffy explains, smiling. "She ruled the seas three hundred years ago, and everyone I ever knew had a story about her. As to monsters...in this story, only one, but of the scariest sort, because it looks like a man–like anyone you’d see on the street. He could be here in this castle, here in this room right now , and you’d never even know–no more than the Shadow Lady knew when she finally found him.”
“She was looking for this monster?” Wilbur asks, hushed, his voice strange.
Lightning flashes outside the window, as if the very weather could hear the story and lend itself for special effects. A roll of thunder follows, like distant explosions.
“Aye, she was,” Puffy confirms. “For many years before, this monster, this Spider–some say he was a mad wizard, some say a demon of the outer dark, and some, in whispers, say a god–had cursed her husband, and that she could not let go unchallenged and unpunished….”
The town is picture-perfect, a sleepy, sprawling village nestled in the crook of the mountains, blanketed in thick snow that glitters in the sun. A towering cathedral stands in its center, rainbows glowing from ornate stained glass windows. From her perch on the ridge above the village Lizzie can see villagers trundling back and forth like ants, calling greetings to one another, shoveling snow from cobblestone streets. Ordinary people going about ordinary lives.
The illusion, Lizzie thinks, is almost perfect.
She breathes slowly, deeply. The mountain air is thin, straining her lungs, too used to sea level. But it’s not just the elevation that’s making it hard to breathe. The dissonance here, the wrongness permeating everything despite the bucolic facade, is like nothing she’s ever felt before--a weight pressing down on her, a towline dragging her on.
What she is looking at is almost a mirror image of the strange little island town that Joel’s friends laughingly named Boatem. There is nothing ordinary about Boatem, of course. Boatem wears its strangeness like a badge of honor, unlike this town, which hides it behind a veneer of normalcy. Boatem sits on the shore, and while well-hidden, it invites any who find it with open arms. This town huddles above the clouds, and its welcome is laced with a danger that Lizzie has never felt on any of the Storm Surge's calls at Boatem Harbor.
And what is buried deep beneath the earth in Boatem here hovers in the sky for all to see.
It is this, more than anything else, that steals the breath from Lizzie’s lungs: a gaping wound slashed through the fabric of reality, spoiling the illusion of an idyllic mountain village. Its edges twist and shift, now growing, now shrinking. And what lies on the other side is nothing at all.
Oh, yes, thinks the Shadow Lady, her hand stealing to the pommel of her sword. I’ve come to the right place, alright.
The air seems suddenly darker, colder. She glances up, squinting against the glare off the snow-coated mountain slopes surrounding her, and frowns when she sees the bank of steel-colored clouds moving slowly but inexorably in from the east. Lizzie has never feared storms at sea–her ship is named for them, after all, and she and her crew celebrate them, the blessing of the gods they revere: Eret of the Winds, ever-changing, and emerald-eyed Foolish the Undying, who rules both sea and storm. But these mountains serve stranger and crueler gods than her own, and up here, in the open, a storm means only death.
Lizzie shivers and pulls her cloak tighter, turning her gaze back to the village…and feels, suddenly, a moment of doubt.
Is this truly what you want? a warning voice whispers from the back of her mind. Do you truly believe that anything right or good can come to you here? A place with a wound slashed into the very sky? Do you truly believe that you can win out in a place like this?
Lizzie shakes the doubt away, pulling the hood of her cloak up with a smart tug. Twenty years of searching, of false leads and dead ends, dusty books and crumbling scrolls stolen from raided ships and scholar’s towers, have led her to this place, this moment, and this is no dead end. This is more than just the culmination of a quest–this is destiny, for good or for ill.
I hope you’re prepared, bastard, she thinks, touching the hilt of her sword again. God or demon or whatever you are, I hope you’re ready. I hope you’re armed with your full arsenal of black magic and dirty tricks. Because I’ve found you, and I’m coming for you, and if my gods will it, I’ll bring my Joel your head before the season turns.
“What was the curse?” Wilbur interrupts.
“Hm?” The Captain blinks, pulled suddenly from a reverie she hadn’t even realized she’d drifted into. She realizes she’s shivering, despite the fire roaring in the grand old fireplace, as if the telling of the tale had brought the chill of the haunted mountain town into their safe warm chamber.
“The curse,” Wilbur repeats. His previous apathy has fully vanished; he’s leaning forward, eyes bright and sharp and attentive. Tommy has settled at his side, crosslegged, with Sam’s yearling wolfdog pup Fran nosing her way under his arm. “You said this Spider cursed her husband. How?”
“Well,” Puffy begins slowly. “There’s a few versions of that story, which I suppose is inevitable. Stories are living things, you know–they tend to take on lives of their own. Some say her husband–Joel o’ the Wild that was–insulted the Spider. Others say he bested him in a grand tournament unawares. Or perhaps he was simply collateral damage–someone else had angered the Spider, and Joel was simply caught up in the storm of his rage. But the one thing all the tales seem to agree on is that he was cursed–”
“--to kill his friends or be killed by them,” Sam breaks in, frowning, brow furrowed in thought. “Come to think of it, maybe I have heard this tale, or part of it.”
“Aye,” Puffy agrees. “But not just once, for those caught in the Spider’s web must dance to his strings. Over and over again, the ones caught in the curse were made to kill each other, no matter how hard they tried to fight it. Three deaths, each one worse than the last…”
“And each one taking a piece of their soul,” Sam murmurs. “They forgot themselves, forgot who they were, who they loved…”
“And killed and killed until only one remained,” Puffy finishes. “The ones who died three times were doomed to fall through endless nothing until the last one living gave in to his despair. The lucky ones awoke as if from a dark dream, but the curse would mark them and haunt them for the rest of their days. The unlucky ones–at least one for certain, perhaps more–never awoke at all.”
“Holy–” Tommy begins, only to be cut off by a sharp elbow in the side from Wilbur. “Ow! What the h…what was that for??”
“Language,” Wilbur hisses. “You’re next in line for the throne, act like it.”
Tommy glares at Wilbur, sulking. “You curse,” he mutters. “I’ve heard you a million times.”
Puffy can’t help but smile, though in truth she feels a whisper-thread of uneasiness inside her, faint but unmistakable. That the story has caught the boys’ interest is clear, which had been her hope, but…
‘Ware when you tell the Spinner’s tales, a voice echoes in the back of her mind, and for a moment she’s seventeen again, belowdecks on the Midnight Rose, gathered around the glow of a single lantern with Drey and Arlin and Finn as they traded dark tales from the far corners of the Earth. He listens for his name, Drey had explained, so ‘ware you tell ‘em right, lest you draw his eye, and find yourself playing his games.
“So the Spider cursed her husband and his friends,” Wilbur muses, goosing her out of her memory. “If he could force them all to do that…turn on each other, kill each other…” He pauses, something dark and restless stirring in his eyes. His hand rises to his head, fingers resting for a brief moment at his temple before brushing a lock of hair aside.
It’s a gesture she’s seen him make countless times, and until now she’d never thought to wonder what it means. That thin thread of unease grows, and suddenly she finds herself wondering if this was the right tale to tell after all, so close to the fulcrum of autumn and winter, when the walls of the world are thin.
He listens for his name, she thinks, feeling a ripple of gooseflesh pass over her. Here in this room, with the storm raging outside, she can suddenly almost believe it.
“Well?” Tommy pipes up, looking up at her eagerly. “What happened next?”
She hesitates, glancing over at Sam, but Sam is no help: he’s as engrossed in the tale as their young charge. “Go on,” Sam urges, smiling a bit. “The Shadow Lady tracked the Spider to his lair…what did she do?”
“What could she do?” Wilbur whispers, almost inaudible beneath a roll of thunder.
Tell the tale right, Cara. Finish what you started.
She takes a breath, and continues on.
The village, by the time she reaches it, is eerily silent.
The villagers she’d watched from the ridge above have melted away into their homes, doors bolted and windows shuttered. She can hear, faintly, the lowing of livestock from some unseen barn at the far edge of the town. Other than that, the only sound is that of the rising wind…and, she fancies, a low, almost subaural moaning, more felt than heard: the sound of the air as it swirls around the event horizon of the black hole at the heart of the town.
“Ahoy-yo!” she calls, but there’s no response.
She continues on, walking slowly to avoid slipping on the icy cobbles, with the balance earned from thirty-five years of life lived on the decks of ships. She passes a blacksmith’s shop, a tanner’s, a bakery done up like a gingerbread house with its snow-frosted roof. Storybook buildings in a storybook town.
Set dressing , she thinks, gloved fingers brushing the pommel of her saber again. And it feels like a set, a play staged for her benefit. Only where are all the actors?
She turns toward the bakery, meaning to knock–she can see smoke rising from the stone-and-mortar chimney–when suddenly the light disappears.
The storm strikes with the force of a cannon-blast.
In an instant, the village disappears into a meaningless blur of white, ice crystals scouring the exposed skin of Lizzie’s face, the winds almost strong enough to knock her off her feet. She flattens herself against the door of the bakery, gasping, her very breath seeming to freeze in her lungs, and pounds her fist against it.
No one answers.
She throws her whole body weight against the door, but it hardly even rattles–barred from the inside, she thinks, barred against the storm. His storm. He’s trying to shut me out, trying to hide from me–
Another gust of wind catches her from behind, and this time Lizzie can’t keep her balance. She falls in an ungraceful heap, wrenching her knee painfully as she goes down, tangled in her cloak. The cold seems to have penetrated into her very bones, and her face feels raw and sandblasted. She has to find shelter soon, some open door, or she’ll die.
“Hey!”
For a moment, she’s not certain what’s she’s hearing. It sounds like a voice, but the blizzard makes a mockery of her senses.
Then again: “Hey! You, there!”
She pushes herself to her knees, squinting into the whiteout, and sees a faint glow., and what might or might not be a man-shaped shadow in the snow.
Foxfire, a whisper comes from somewhere deep down in her mind. Will-o-the-wisp. Don’t follow.
Yet what choice does she have? If she stays out here, she’ll freeze.
“Over here!” the voice calls again, fighting to be heard over the howling of the storm. “Hurry!”
She staggers to her feet, one hand held before her as she struggles toward the light. She slips, falls, rises again, concentrating grimly on putting one foot in front of the other. The light and shadow resolve themselves into a cloaked human figure, holding up lantern.
“I’m here!” she gasps, just as the knee she’d twisted buckles beneath her. A strong hand reaches out and catches her arm, wrapping around her as it pulls her upright, and she feels herself ushered into some warm space.
The creak of hinges, a muttered curse as her rescuer struggles to close the door against the blizzard, the heavy thud of a wooden bar. Safety.
“That, if you don’t mind my saying,” her rescuer announces conversationally, “was beyond stupid.”
Lizzie doesn’t answer–it’s all she can do to catch her breath. Her vision is blurred; she rubs her eyes to try and clear them, wincing at the sting, and sees a pink smear along the side of her hand. Her eyelids are scratched and bleeding.
“You’re damned lucky it wasn’t worse,” the voice continues. “I’ve seen people snowblinded so badly they never recover their sight. And that’s if the storms don’t flash-freeze them where they stand. Here. Sit.”
She’s guided forward and deposited in an overstuffed armchair. A mug is shoved into her hands, and she yelps as the heat makes contact with her half-frozen fingers.
“Drink that,” the voice orders. “Go on, down the hatch, but slow, or you’ll shock yourself.”
Ordinarily, Lizzie wouldn’t have caught herself dead consuming anything a stranger put in front of her, but the cold has made her feel slow and stupid. She sips cautiously at the mug–some sort of herbal tea laced with honey, bitter but not unpleasant, and she finds herself surprised at how much better she feels.
Her vision is clearing, enough for her to finally get a good look at her surroundings. The chair she’s sitting in is drawn up beside a heavy table of polished dark oak, covered in half-unrolled scrolls, quills and inkwells, stacks of leatherbound ledgers. On all sides of the room, shelves and shelves of books and scrolls and journals of all sizes and colors line the walls from floor to ceiling.
She’d seen a hundred libraries in her long search for this place, many of them far larger and grander than this one. And yet…there’s a depth here, a sense that she could wander long in the narrow corridors between the stacks, lost among the words.
Careful, girl, she cautions herself. There are whirlpools here.
A rough cough startles her from her reverie, the sound of her rescuer clearing his throat. “Feeling better?” he asks.
She turns to look at him. His age is hard to determine in the flickery lamplight, neither old nor young. Tall, with muddy red-brown hair and shrewd hazel eyes peering at her from an otherwise wholly unremarkable face, dressed in a simple robe of faded brown homespun and fingerless gloves of undyed wool. If you were to look up the word “librarian” in an illustrated encyclopedia, Lizzie thinks, you’d find this man staring back at you in woodcut print.
“Better,” she murmurs, nodding. “Thank you.”
The librarian shrugs. “I was closing the storm shutters when I saw you wandering out there, just before the blizzard hit. Not often we see strangers up here, no need to tell you why. What, exactly, possessed you to make the climb now, at the edge of winter?”
Lizzie pauses, considering. She’s not so naive as to believe the people of this village would aid her in her quest–likely most, if not all of them, would be in thrall to her prey. There is danger, here, no doubt…but opportunity, as well.
“I’m looking for someone,” she answers, slowly.
“Yes, yes, of course,” the librarian says, shaking his head. “You’ve come seeking the Green God–oh, you needn’t look so surprised. It’s the only reason anyone ever comes here, after all…but I’m curious, as I said, as to why you should come now.”
“Then this is his place,” Lizzie presses, ignoring the question and putting just a hint of an edge in her voice.
“This is my place,” the librarian retorts, rolling his eyes a little. “The talespinner and his friends come and go, and when they’re here they don’t stay long. Would you? In this weather?” He nods at the window, where the blizzard shrieks and buffets at the frame like an angry beast.
“You’re here,” Lizzie points out.
The librarian shrugs again. “I told you, this is my place. Someone’s got to keep the books, make sure the roof doesn’t fall in under all that snow. Besides, you’re not the first to come here seeking him out, nor will you be the last. They drift in by ones or twos every few years, looking for a deal with destiny. Some even find it.”
A queer chill runs through her that has nothing at all to do with the frigid arctic air. A deal with destiny? she thinks. Or a deal with the Devil?
“How can you stay here?” Lizzie asks. “How can you live here, knowing what he is?”
“And what is that, do you think?” the librarian inquires, tilting his head curiously.
“I know he’s a monster,” she states flatly.
“A monster,” the librarian muses. “Have you so much experience of monsters, then, that you’d know one sight unseen?”
“Have you so little,” Lizzie retorts, “that you could spend your life in one’s lair and never know?”
The librarian laughs. “On the contrary,” he says, spreading his arms to indicate his books. “Trolls and orcs and boggarts, horrors of the Outer Dark that would drive men mad just to look at them, wicked men and wicked gods…all the boogeymen of the world. I live in the lair of a thousand monsters, why should I be troubled by–”
“A spider?” Lizzie interrupts, staring sharply at him.
“Just so,” the librarian says, smiling.
Lizzie takes another sip of tea, mulling over the librarian’s words, trying to hide her frustration and dismay. That she might have come all this way only to miss her quarry…
“Where do they go, when they’re not here?” she asks.
The librarian shrugs again. “Everywhere and nowhere, I’d expect. And nowhere, unfortunately, is exactly where you’re going to be going, at least for a while.”
“...what?” Lizzie asks sharply, her head jerking up to stare at him.
“The storm,” the librarian explains, and Lizzie relaxes minutely. “By nightfall, the snow will be up to the windowsills, and it’ll go on two days at least. Once the winds have died we’ll be able to dig ourselves out, and you’ll be free to resume your quest…but until then, I’m sorry to say you’re stuck with me.”
“Damn!” Lizzie hisses, punching the arm of the chair lightly in frustration. Then she sighs. “You’ve provisions enough, I hope?”
“Enough and more than enough,” the librarian says, nodding. “Besides, what better place to be snowed in than a library?”
Lizzie snorts. “Suppose that’s a point,” she allows.
A silence falls between them, not quite comfortable, and Lizzie is suddenly aware of her exhaustion, the ache in every muscle from the long climb up the mountain pass, the tingle in her fingers and the stinging in her snow-scoured face. Her stomach growls, and she realizes she can’t remember when she last ate anything aside from the dried meat and ship’s hardtack she’d brought along for the trek. Perhaps, she concedes, it would be good to rest here, to curl up near the fire with a book and a real meal.
Besides, she thinks, the librarian had been careful enough to say that the Green God and his friends came and went...but not that they had come and gone. He and his cronies might well still be here, snowed in just as we are. And when the storm ends…
“You don’t mind bedding down here in the stacks, do you?” the librarian asks. “My sleeping quarters are a bit modest for two.”
“That’s fine,” Lizzie answers absently. “I wouldn’t want to displace you.”
She glances down at the table, where a book with a familiar red leather cover has caught her eye. She reaches for it, feeling goosebumps shiver along her skin as she runs her fingers over the fine embossing, the gold leaf faded with age but still gleaming mellowly. Tales of the Feywild.
“I had this book,” she murmurs. “My father gave it to me when I was just a girl…the first book I ever owned. I passed it on to my own daughter not two years ago, when she turned ten.”
“Oh?" the librarian queries, his back to Lizzie as he rummages through a chest. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a lover of fairytales…then again, I suppose even swashbuckling pirate queens can dream of being fairies.”
Lizzie smiles.
“Yes,” she says. “I suppose they can.”
She springs out of her chair in a flash, aches and pains forgotten in the sweet-sour electric flood of adrenaline that washes through her. One hand buries itself tightly in the librarian’s hair, yanking his head back harshly; the other presses the blade of her saber into his throat, drawing a thin line of blood.
“Except,” she hisses in his ear, “I said naught of piracy.”
A strangled, wheezing sound issues from the librarian’s throat. It goes on and on, and Lizzie suddenly realizes that the man is laughing.
“Lizzie,” the librarian who isn’t a librarian at all wheezes, giggling. “Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie.”
She bears down harder on the blade, meaning to cut his throat and be done with it before he can ensnare her in some spell, but the sword falls from fingers gone suddenly numb and nerveless. Her limbs feel like dead wood jointed with pegs–puppet limbs without strings. Her knees give out and she falls, tearing out a clump of the man’s hair--the color leached now from the red-brown of river mud to a dirty gold--as she falls. I did that much, at least, she thinks, the thought coming as if underwater, muffled and distant.
“Lizzie the Shadow Lady,” the ‘librarian’ continues, looming over her with an acid smile, hazel eyes gone a bright poison green. The flickering lamplight plays odd tricks with the shadows; for a moment, Lizzie fancies she can see eight long arms, spreading out over the bookshelves behind them. “Lizzie the Ocean Queen...how did I ever miss you?”
“It was him,” Tommy breathes, hushed, eyes wide. “The Spider…it was him all along!”
“Yes,” Puffy says, nodding. “She’d run her quarry down at last…only to find herself the prey.”
“I’m dying to know, Lizzie--I can call you Lizzie, can't I?” the Green God says, crouching down beside her, elbows resting on his knees. “Once you found me, what was it you were planning on doing next?”
“I’ll have your head, bastard,” she croaks, baring her teeth in a snarl: the only movement she can manage.
The Green God wheezes laughter again, bringing his fingertips to the cut below his Adam’s apple and marveling at the blood. “Almost pulled it off, too, didn’t you. Been a while since someone had a blade at my throat…twenty years, I think, almost to the day.”
“Go to hell,” Lizzie spits. God of Sea, God of Storm, God of Wind, she prays silently. Lady Death and Queen of the Hunt, hear me if you’re there, please just let me move…
“Oh, they can’t hear you,” the Green God says. “Not here. They’ve served you well as you dragged a bloody wake across the seas, no doubt, but you’re in my house now, not theirs. My house, my rules.”
He reaches out, picking up the book of fairytales she’d dropped as she’d pounced on him, and ponders a moment, tapping his finger against his lips in thought.
“You know,” he continues, “I had planned on an encore performance, back then, but I ended up deciding against it. You wouldn’t believe the amount of energy it all took, creating the sets, getting the cast together, making sure they hit their marks. Besides, sequels are rarely as good as the originals. But…” he pauses, grinning. “I think, maybe, with some fresh talent, we can really pull it off now, don’t you?”
Hermes and Naia, Lizzie thinks desperately. She wants to close her eyes, break contact with that awful green gaze, but even her eyelids seem paralyzed. She tries to picture her children: daredevil Naia, in love with the sea, always diving overboard whenever the crew’s back is turned, and Hermes, so strong he can pick her up one-armed. Don’t forget them, no matter what he tries to make you do…don’t…
“Sleep, Shadow Lady,” the Green God whispers. “Sleep and dream, of fairy fortresses, blood and flowers, dark magic and love sharpened like the blade of an axe. Dream of monsters, of boogeymen in the woods. And never fear, milady…you won’t dream alone.” He smiles gently, cruelly. “I’d never separate you and your beloved woodsman…or has he abandoned the land altogether now and become a pirate? Humans change their hobbies so often…who knows, maybe he’s secretly dreaming of becoming a wizard,” he suggests with a wink.
“I’ll…see you…in hell…yet…” she gasps, with the last of her will and strength. Then sleep settles over her like a suffocating blanket, and she’s falling through blank pages, through the world’s backstage, through the darkness before the words “Once Upon a Time…”, to whatever tale awaits.
“And so the game began again,” Puffy says at last. “No two tales agree on who the players were, or what atrocities they were forced to visit upon one another. Some say it was truly all a dream, in the end…even her journey up the mountain, an illusion cast by a bored god on a foe he considered barely worth acknowledging. Others…” She shivers, frowning. “Other versions I’ll not tell here, not now.”
“Why not ?” Tommy pesters, his voice on the edge of a whine.
She thinks of the version Drey had told on that long-ago night in their cabin, of how the Shadow Lady’s husband had cackled as he’d buried an axe in her bosom, of a player so maddened by dreams and despair that he had called up a horror not seen in untold aeons and nearly loosed it on the waking world. And she thinks again of the warning he’d whispered: ‘ware when you tell the Spinner’s tales, Cara, for he listens for his name...
“Because it’s near midnight already,” Sam says quietly from her side, saving her from having to come up with an answer. “Long since time for the crown prince to be in bed…and you too, your Majesty.”
Wilbur doesn’t respond. His expression is blank and dreamy, his eyes far away.
“Your grace?” Puffy queries, frowning.
“She never had a chance,” Wilbur finally says, his voice sounding slow and drugged. “She couldn’t even fight him.”
“But she did fight him,” Puffy says softly. “Perhaps she didn’t win…but she fought, fought as hard as any could ever do against a monster such as him. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s what matters in the end.”
Wilbur pauses a moment, chewing that over, and Puffy is encouraged to see light returning to his eyes has he does. “Yes,” he replies. “I think…I think maybe it is.”
“C’mon, Wil,” Tommy says, yanking at his older brother’s jacket. “Let’s go to bed, I’ll tuck you in.”
“Not a chance,” Wilbur scoffs, ruffling roughly at the young prince’s hair. “C’mon, I’ll walk you back to the kennel, you can bed down with the dogs.”
“Hey!”
Puffy watches as the two of them retire to their chambers, bickering as they go. She has never been a mother, nor does she ever care to be, but she loves them, loves them as fiercely as she’s ever loved her friends, and her crews, and the men she leads today.
She wonders, for a moment, what she would do if she found herself and her loved ones caught in a trap like the one the Spider had laid for the Shadow Lady and hers.
By the mercy of the Gods of Sea and Storm and Wind, of Lady Death and the Queen of the Hunt, she thinks, shivering, may we never never have to find out.