Chapter Text
The nursery feels a lot emptier than it ought to be, for a place as well-furnished and comfortable as it is. The bed that Hornet once shared with her sibling has been swapped out for their cradle, which is far more accommodating for her small size. Their old dresses and cloaks still hang in the armoire, ranging in size from gowns that she had seen them wear mere days before it happened, to simple frocks meant for a hatchling.
Hornet’s own clothes take up the left side of the closet: mostly fabrics in rich colors that her mother and the other Weavers had sewn for her, but lately there has been an increasing amount of white dresses. Hornet doesn’t complain when the Pale King picks one of the white ones out, even though she knows she’s going to spill jam on it or she’ll trip in the garden because the hem is too long, and the retainers will scold her even though it’s not her fault.
Then she remembers that there are no retainers left. The Pale King had dismissed the last of them just yesterday. Who’s going to clean up the Palace, now? It’s so big; just the two of them won’t be able to manage.
Anyway, the dress. She’s still too little to pick out her own clothes. She can’t even get the hangers without her stepping stool, which is only tall enough for her to get into the cradle anyway. Not that she climbs in there of her own volition. The entirety of the White Palace, so it seems, is hers to play in, and she has to go to bed at 8 o’clock? It’s ridiculous.
“Daddy, the red one,” Hornet says, bobbing up and down and generally making it difficult for him to do up the buttons and tie the ribbon on her cowl. She has officially lost her patience. “Red? Please?”
“Next time. I’ve already dressed you,” replies the Pale King, with that tired sigh Hornet has been hearing a lot these days. He sighs again when Hornet tugs at the ribbon, and takes her hands to stop her.
The most peculiar thing happens when he does that. Hornet, for the briefest of moments, thinks of the Pale King’s workshop, as clear as a photograph. She imagines his work bench, with a lot of papers and mechanical bobs and bits scattered across the surface. Why did she think of that? Did that thought belong to her? It feels like maybe it didn’t. The Pale King never let her into his workshop, no matter how hard she cried.
“Shop?” she asks when he lifts her into his arms.
“No.” It’s always no with him! Then: “I’ll give you a project today, but you must not go into the workshop.”
“’Kay.” Hornet puts her chin on his shoulder and watches the nursery recede from view. On a Saturday morning, it would have been a servant trying to cajole her out of the room, even though they all knew she would be cranky because she had woken up in the White Palace and not in Deepnest. Sundays and Mondays it was her sibling who carried her to breakfast, and it was her father who carried her all the way back to Deepnest or at least to the Palace entrance, if her mother had come to pick her up.
Today is a Wednesday, and Hornet hasn’t seen Deepnest in months. The Palace’s blinding light wards away memories of those dark tunnels and webbed caverns, where right about now she would still be asleep in her mother’s nest. Her mother always wore a long shawl to bed. It was...blue? Purple? Or red, like the dress that has already slipped Hornet’s mind? She can’t remember what color it was, but she would have wrapped herself up in it while listening to the scuttle of spider legs outside.
The White Palace is comparatively silent, even with her father’s many legs scuttling against the floor. To fill in the quiet, she begins to hum.
She hums while the Pale King is at the stove. It’s still funny to see him cooking, with his sleeves rolled up and his four arms maneuvering the cookware and cutlery. He even knows Deepnest food: dirtcarver and goams and things that fell in from above, usually roasted or fried and then served with a thick, dark gravy that Hornet liked to dip mushrooms in. The mushrooms were her favorites, even the ones that made her pedipalps glow when she bit into them.
Hornet’s stomach growls just as the Pale King sets her plate before her. The food she ate back when she only stayed the weekends was always something like soup in a thin broth, or dishes with lots of vegetables that never quite filled her. Fairy food, she had called it, after a story where a bug went to a fae realm where, no matter how much they ate, they were never satisfied. She remembers her mother badgering the Pale King about how much protein spiders need, and apparently he took her advice to heart. The vegetables here are a side dish, whereas the main course is meat, real dirtcarver, diced into bites that even Hornet couldn’t choke on.
And there’s the jam and toast. She always spills it, no matter how careful she is.
It’s not that she cares that much about keeping her clothes fresh. She just hates wasting food. Jam can’t be eaten if it’s smeared down her front. The bib the Pale King has just fastened around her neck doesn’t make it better.
“I’m not a baby,” Hornet scowls. Did he just smile at her?
“You are still a hatchling, my child, and a very messy eater.” The Pale King sits across from her and folds his hands. “Now, tell me...What is the biggest number you can think of?”
Hornet’s fork stops right in front of her mouth. She doesn’t notice a drop of gravy land on her bib. “Um…fifty?”
“Hm. What if you compared that to a thousand?”
“How much is that?”
“Far larger than a fifty. Then there is ten thousand, and a hundred thousand...”
Hornet doesn’t know those numbers yet, and frankly, math is one of her least favorite subjects. She stops paying attention, and chases an errant fried tomato.
“If you can count to a hundred thousand, then I shall stop considering you a baby,” the King then says, which gets her attention. She looks up, eyes wide with anticipation, only for him to dab her cheek with a napkin. “Such a messy eater.”
Hornet tries to bite his fingers, but she’s not being serious, of course.
After breakfast, the Pale King takes her to his study, where a round jar filled with marbles waits for her on the play mat. It’s twice as wide as the cradle, and whenever it is set down, it means that her father has important work to do and that she’s not to leave the mat without permission.
“There are a hundred thousand marbles in this jar. Please count them all,” the Pale King says, and then goes to his desk.
Hornet opens the lid and sticks her hands into the marbles. Her mother and the other Weavers would have been teaching her how to weave, or how to hold a needle. There was counting involved there, but never counting just for the sake of it. There’s no apparent, practical reason why counting marbles will make her any better at hunting or weaving webs.
The marbles look like candy. Hornet takes one and opens her mouth wide, when the Pale King interrupts her.
“Do not put that in your mouth.” He apparently didn’t have to look over his shoulder to see what she was up to.
Hornet sticks her tongue out at him.
She empties the jar onto the play mat, and begins to arrange the marbles by color. It’s hard to find anything that isn’t grey or white or black here. Even the play mat, with its braided fringes and embroidered flowers, is grey. If not for her toys, clothes, and the books in the nursery, she would have forgotten which colors were which already. Hornet cannot get her father to share the same enthusiasm for anything other than pristine white.
One, two, three, four five. Each marble makes a satisfying plink against the glass.
Six, seven…Hornet wonders what the Pale King does at his desk all day. He writes, shuffles papers around, flips through books. He looks the way Hornet does, when she’s pretending to be busy. Eight, nine, ten. It’s going to take a long while for her to count to a hundred thousand. She glances at the Pale King. If he’s not as busy as he looks, maybe he’ll help her. However, she always feels hesitant to bother him when he’s at his desk.
Hornet labors through twenty more marbles before she gathers up the courage to speak: “Daddy?”
“Yes?” the King hums, pausing in writing on a long piece of parchment.
“...Nothing.” Hornet drops another marble into the jar.
It would be a long, long time before Hornet read anything the Pale King wrote, and only then after he was but an afterimage in her life: as much of a memory as her childhood home is. She would never have thought to salvage his work. To her, the White Palace was as eternal as kingdom had once believed. It’s not implausible that she was the only one left who thought of it this way.
When Hornet gets to the last marble, her mouth forms a surprised ‘o’ shape. “Daddy!” she squeaks at him, “I counted all of them, and there are only sixty!”
The Pale King looks over his shoulder, mandibles spread in a mischievous grin. “I know.”
“Come and look.” Hornet slaps her hands against the rug. “Only sixty. You tricked me!”
The Pale King sits on the wound-up coils of his tail. “Indeed. You are a gullible baby. My gullible baby.”
“Nooo,” Hornet whines as he picks her up. She twists in his arms to face away from him, arms crossed and face scrunched in a scowl. “You tricked me into doing math!”
“Yes, I did,” he coos. Hornet is still so small that even if she lets herself hang like a sack of flour, he has no problem at all supporting her weight. She does not get even a moment to sulk before his wiggling claws are upon her, drawing out shrieks of laughter. All of her frustration is forgotten; winning a tickle war is far more important.