Chapter Text
— LACE —
She avoids Bellhart for a tenday, and then two, tucking herself away in the fluffy and gormless grottos of Mosshome, where she knows the spider rarely goes. The pilgrim camp here is composed mainly of those who decided to leave the holy Citadel once they saw it for what it was: a rotten, ruined morgue, gilded by dead bugs’ claws. They are in the throes of their tawdry crises of faith, agonizing over where to lead their tattered shells next, so they have little time to consider her. It is safe, if mind-numbingly boring. She has no reason to use any of the silkeaters in her possession. Tendays turn into a month, almost verge on two, before her boredom gets the better of her. She pokes her head into the Wormways, just for the feeling of different dirt beneath her claws, and gets herself gashed open by a mutated gromling before she can even swear by her mother’s name.
Pathetic. Useless. She heals herself through the Bind and spends an hour harvesting the disgusting threads from a bloated silkeater so she can heal again, before unwinding the last two in her possession. One fills the spool; the other she hangs next to it in a stubby skein for easy use. It takes one misstep and a tumble into some spikes, followed by bumping into an unsuspecting aknid, for that silk to vanish as well. That’s it. That’s all the silkeaters she has.
Lace presses her claws to her eyes, trying not to cry. She cries silk just like she bleeds it; it’s nothing but a waste of thread.
She also tamps down viciously on the sliver of her mind that is nothing but thrilled at the prospect of seeing the spider again. As Lace goes marching back to Bellhart, she resolves to stick her chin as high as she can into the air and not brook a moment of Hornet’s condescension. How dare the spider patronize her and try to make her decisions for her? How dare she think she knows what’s good for Lace? How dare she not fight to keep Lace at her side? She climbs through the bellveins, working herself into a fury, and doesn’t that feel good as well, the rush of righteous anger in her limbs? She hasn’t felt this good since she left. Since the last time she argued with the spider.
Lace arrives in Bellhart and discovers that Hornet left a month ago.
She’s gone back to her own kingdom, Frey tells her when she demands answers. She has affairs to resolve there. The same is disclosed by Pavo, who sadly presents Lace with the keys to her bellhome and says that their dear hero wished for her to have it in her stead. Lace gags at the bug’s adulation but takes the keys nonetheless.
The bellhome is untouched. All the materium vials and mementos are still strewn around her desk. The fairy lights are strung above her bed. The covers are made and tucked back, as though waiting for someone to come and rest; the only thing that is different is that the Shellwood flower is gone, likely withered long before Hornet even left. There is even a basket of silk eaters tucked away next to the tub, ready for Lace to use. Lace looks and looks and cannot find a single thing to mark Hornet’s departure.
She didn’t even leave a note.
Lace has more silkeaters now, so she does let herself cry. From the hollowness of the bellhome clashing with its dear familiarity. From how Hornet left so soon, without an apology or an explanation or a rebuke. From the frustration—the exhaustion—the all-consuming terror of the past year, spent in constant pain as her body frayed and withered beyond her control, becoming a ghost of what it used to be, and there wasn’t any recourse she could take between her own claws. Even from the fact that the spider knew that she would come back but didn’t leave a silk-damned note for her. It isn’t fair. Nothing, nothing is fair.
She cries until she feels sick from it, sobbing into the coverlet and kicking her heels. And then, when she’s made a mess of the bed and can’t breathe through her tears, she picks herself upright to start anew.
Lace had done precisely that when she was taken from the Abyss and shoved back into brutal life. Her memories of her time lost are sporadic: corrosive void digesting her living body, pain shot through with fury. The earth rumbling as her mother’s silk fought to protect her; a voice she almost did not recognize, screaming and pleading against the dark—for her, for her, for her. And then she was being hauled back into Pharloom, and the only thing she could do was laugh at the absurd impossibility of it, and at her sudden freedom, for which she had never dared hope. Her laugh hurt. It made her feel as though she was being shredded open, thread by thread, and it was the most glorious sensation she had ever borne.
The spider had watched her laugh without saying a word. Hornet has been with her through it all, her ringing triumphs and her worst and most spiteful days. Even now, she misses her.
Miss is too banal of a word. Lace is sick from her longing for her. She wants to spit from it. Wants to unravel, thinking of her stubbornness. Her self-centered, megalomaniac sense of conviction. Her gross, absurd sentimentality. The spider is a foolishly soft creature at heart, and the softness showed itself at the most inopportune times, along with her too-dry wit and the smile Lace could always hear she spoke of fluffy and gentle things. For centuries, Lace hadn’t been able to do anything in her own name. The spider was the first desire she had chosen of her own volition, the first thing she decided to want for herself—and she did nothing but reject her. How dare Hornet question her desire? How dare she condescend to think it false?
How dare she try to give up her life and leave Lace all alone?
Lace screams into a pillow thinking of loneliness in all its horrible and abject forms. Being alone in the crowded Citadel, surrounded by bugs who bowed to her face and spat behind her back. Having no one to talk to, no one to laugh with. The cavern in her fickle skull echoing in its hollowness, every bit as empty as the true Abyss. Death would be a fate thrice preferred.
How selfish the spider is, to try and take that for herself.
-----
Months pass. The spider does not return.
It is not as though she failed to set up safeguards for Lace, though. She did so, with her typical meticulous care, so much so that Lace sometimes now rankles with it. The mapmaker who had surely carried a torch for the spider now stocks silkeaters as well, for when their paths cross. She refuses to take rosaries for them, even though Lace has plenty of necklaces from Hornet’s stash. The merchant in Bellhart also carries them, and she takes the rosaries gladly, so Lace goes to her whenever she can. The big bug in the Halfway Home gives her draughts free of charge, and it is there that she has her first drink of nectar: fizzy-sweet and euphoric, with a rush that is much like how Lace imagines the sensation of having a blood-pulse. There is also an offputting little slug-creature who lives in the rafters of the Halfway Home, and she occasionally toddles up to Lace to give her bundles of silk she has gathered from her travels across Pharloom. The silk is covered in unspeakable amounts of saliva and slug-snot, but Lace gets most of her reserves from half-digested worm threads these days. She’ll take what she can get.
It is, on all counts, no different from Hornet hauling back silkeaters from Sinner’s Road. But it feels different. She is no longer some fragile thing penned up in the bellhome, waiting for her savior to come back. She travels now on her own terms, even if she cannot fight the remnants of the Abyss or the Haunting. She can buy her reserves with her own money. Never mind that it is the spider’s rosaries, handed to the spider’s old friends; it is still Lace’s claws which perform the deed.
One day, Lace even musters up the bravery, or the complacency, to venture into the Citadel. There are more old corridors to be wandered, more Silkfly lanterns to be smashed. Maybe a pilgrim or two to terrorize, for old time’s sake. She rides the Bell Beast to her nest in the Grand Bellway—abominable thing, it tried to buck her off until it was finally convinced that Hornet wasn’t coming back—and sits at the bench there for a moment, admiring the glittery metal of the hanging bells. The bench does nothing for her, since she cannot generate silk, but she imagines that she can still feel a humming nonetheless. The strings of the cosmos, being attuned around her. A curious Bell Beastling butts up against her shins, and she scratches its head indulgently.
It is peaceful here. Before, she would have never thought to apply that word to the Citadel, any more than she would use it to describe a fresh charnel-ground.
A whirr of bronze and white catches her eye. She glances up right as the Second Sentinel vaults itself from the ceiling and lands in front of her, scissor blades crossed. “Watcher in White, y-y-y-you came alone,” the construct declares in lieu of a greeting.
Lace eyes it suspiciously. The Second Sentinel is programmed to destroy all threats to the Citadel, and it had included the bugs of the Haunting in its catalogue of threats. She did not know until now if it prioritized the thread of her maker or the mark of her savior. Watcher in White, it had called her. Not an enemy, but a different name for a phantom.
Her silk, borrowed and patched as it is, still writhes at the very thought. Her recollections of Phantom are faded through time and deliberate forgetfulness. They are taller than the High Halls to her, soothing song and billowing cloak; ghost in name and memory. It was easier for Lace to go through her days when she did not remember that Mother had another child she threw away. When she pretended that she was the only one who had ever been honored with such love.
She tries to remember Phantom now and cannot summon anything. Not even their face.
“Sentinel,” Lace says slowly. Hornet had fought Phantom on the way to the Citadel. Put an end to their singing and suffering with her needle. “Do you know of the Exhaust Organ?”
The construct cocks its head. “B-b-b-been there, it has not. But within its d-d-d-directive, the waste disposal lies.”
That was where her sibling had been sent, to comb through the muck and filth the Citadel spat out. Lace’s instincts war within her—to forgive her mother instantly and forget about the injustice, and to seethe and rage with all her might—until they flatten into nothing but wistfulness. The Exhaust Organ would be dangerous for her to visit alone, from their proximity to Bilewater. But perhaps—
“What say you to a little adventure?” she asks. “Will you go with me, gilded one?”
The epithet is somehow both bitter and decadent on her tongue. She asks neither as the Citadel’s knight or as the spider’s follower; only as herself. The construct blinks as it considers her. Its blank white gaze is too familiar for comfort. Lace wonders if it finds her own eyes so uncanny.
“A-a-a-accompany you, it will,” it says at last.
They climb down the spiked passages to the Organ together. The Sentinel gallantly offers her its foreleg for support as it slingshots the both of them over razor-filled pits. Lace giggles as they fly through the air claw-in-claw. Mother never gave her wings. She often wondered what it would be like to dance with them. The main atrium of the Exhaust Organ is overrun by drapeflies. Lace takes great pleasure in skewering them with her pin; she isn’t above an easy enemy. The Second Sentinel doesn’t even lift its blades to the flies. The moment it enters the room, it drifts towards Phantom’s grand organ and stares.
After Lace vanquishes the last drapefly, she goes to join it. “S-s-s-skilled in their craft, this bug was,” the construct slowly says. It brushes its claw to one of the keys, and the pipes sigh, having lost their song but not quite forgotten it. “I-i-i-intrepid they were, to build a-a-a-all this.”
“They were,” Lace says. Her eyes prickle, too hot. “They were so good.”
There are the remnants of a battle all through the room. Pin-scrapes and shorn clothing. Silken chaff still glimmering months after the spin and cut. On one end of the room lies a corroded brass pin that looks much like Lace’s own, lovingly patched and reinforced until it is more solder than true metal. On the other end, a mask. Lace kneels down and picks it up with shaky claws. The white bone is worn grey and dull by time. It is cracked at the edges, crumbling to dust at her light touch. Phantom had tried to repair their mask as well. She turns it over to reveal the fruits of their final attempt: delicately spun white lace, lacquered over all the cracks. It hadn’t been enough.
Lace weeps there, crouched over Phantom’s mask. They had always tried to fix everything. To earn Mother’s love. To be better than the sum of the parts they and Lace shared. It was never enough, not for their mother, and not for her. The two of them were close when she was newly-made and still learning of the world, but the more Phantom faded, the more Lace learned to revile them. On the day they were exiled—she laughed at them as they left. She flaunted their mother’s favor. For centuries, she thought she was better off not knowing where they were rotting. Let them rot. She didn’t care.
She never even said goodbye.
The Second Sentinel wanders around the room and lets her lose herself in her regrets. Lace cries until her whole frame feels sore, as the silk drains from her bones to her tears. Her claw goes to the Reserve Bind to replenish her threads, but it suddenly feels a dirty coward’s way out. She releases it and pushes herself to her feet, woozy.
“Watcher in White,” the construct says. It zips over and catches her before she can fall. “I-i-i-injured, you seem.”
Lace waves her claw in airy dismissal. “Only ever by my own making.”
Slowly, reluctantly, it lets her go. Lace limps over to the seat before the organ, where Phantom must have spent much of their time. She remembers the song cylinders they once made from scrap metal, not to record any psalms but rather melodies of their own making. Even that was seen as heresy—insufferably selfish, to put their ditties where holy song should be. Lace finds them eventually, hidden even here behind a filigreed panel by the pedals: the records of Phantom’s creations.
“I have more to show you, Sentinel,” Lace announces.
They slowly make their way up through the Underworks next, up to the room of the old Vaultkeeper. The withered bug is coiled around its pile of psalm cylinders, mourning the loss of the divinity at the Citadel’s peak. It looks up as Lace walks in.
“The knight!” Cardinius gasps. “The true child of this gilded peak’s holiness, she returns to us in our hour of need—”
“Can it, old bug,” Lace says shortly. She thrusts the box of Phantom’s songs in its direction. “I want these played.”
The Vaultkeeper takes the cylinders. “But what does she have here?” it muses. A tremor travels through its body. “It does not understand. It does not dare to presume. These are not the workings of the Vaultkeepers for the memory of the holy one above. These are not sacred.”
They are Phantom’s. In this moment, there is nothing more sacred than that to her. Lace is about to draw her pin and stick it in the old bug’s neck when a glitching metal voice interrupts her. “But r-r-r-refusal is not its d-d-d-directive.”
Lace startles. The Second Sentinel takes a resting position atop the pile of cylinders, blades held loose in its claws. “To guard this Citadel’s history, its prayers, and its secrets across the ages, it was told. S-s-s-seeking knowledge is its purpose.”
It taps lightly at the box with one of its scissor blades. “Is this not k-k-k-knowledge to it?”
Cardinius regards the Sentinel first with suspicion, then with slow and begrudging wonder. “The construct has a keen circuit. It senses a true Master’s craft in this one.”
The Sentinel only nods. The Vaultkeeper turns back to Lace and sighs. “Little choice have you allowed it, Pale Knight. It will play the melodies as you request.”
They spend the whole afternoon in that underground room, listening to Phantom’s songs filtering through the Vaultkeeper’s gramophone. Some of what they made is joyous, little melodies about the movements of the clouds and the dance of the silkflies. Many of them are mournful. Lace leans against the dusty walls and listens to her sibling sing. Her whole face hurts from what she cannot cry out. The spider was right. Their voice is beautiful even here.
She finds herself aimlessly humming one of Phantom’s songs as she and the Sentinel ascend from the Vaults. Lace imagines the ghost of them walking beside her, as she once knew them—a child in a cloak that was too big, but one they were proud of nonetheless. The construct deposits her by the bellway. She is tired enough to consider sleeping in the Bell Beast’s nest. The beastlings shuffle up to her, herding her towards their mother so she can be carried home. Lace glances back at the Second Sentinel. It is still looking at her with its uncanny eyes. Maybe it is not such an ill thing, to see herself within them.
“Thank you, gilded one,” she says softly.
It bows before flying away.
-----
The next time she arrives in Songclave, night is approaching. The settlement is bustling with pilgrims and lit with lanterns all around. In their midst, the little fool stands, directing deliveries and pitching tents with nothing but whole-hearted cheer. He sees her and excitedly beckons her over.
“Hoy, White Maiden!” he calls. “Evening falls, so come into the light of our lamps and take shelter with us!”
Lace gives him the customary package from Bellhart, and he hands her the requisite rosaries for it. She’s been getting better with the courier deliveries since the spider left. With silk as scarce as it is, Lace has been forced to learn caution. She doesn’t like it, but she can grudgingly admit to its benefits. Since the Ventrica stations were reopened, travel through the Citadel carries the same danger at any hour. There is nothing keeping Lace in Songclave, but she nevertheless watches the pilgrims at their evening prayers for a while before she sits down in their midst. Prayer makes her hackles rise, but she cannot remember the last time she was one among a crowd. The bugs here—they do not fear her, and they do not hate her. She is not known enough for either. They see her being trusted by their Caretaker, so their gazes only hold a friendly curiosity.
Every five paces, there are lanterns set on the pavement, bathing it in brightness. Lace leans into the one closest to her. The silkflies inside circle each other in lazy loops, lethargic and listless. When she still had command over silk at the tips of her claws—mere residue from her mother’s glory, but command nonetheless—she delighted in playing the conductor over them. Making them dance for her, at the whims of her song. It was her right, after all. They were dregs of silk, and she was Silk’s daughter.
Dregs of silk. Dregs of a life. Lace holds her claw over the glass and traces the path of the silkflies’ flight, up and down and up and down.
The little fool sits down next to her, chattering with the other pilgrims who share the sphere of light. Lace regards him in silence. Sherma’s cheer is incomprehensible to her. Even after he finishes his conversations with the others and she has not said a word to him, he still hums happily, beaming at her.
“Why do you call me White Maiden?” Lace finally asks him. “I am no maiden fair.”
She is no soft, docile thing to be protected. Lace has fought long and hard, and sometimes to her own detriment, to prove that point at any cost. Sherma only giggles at her question, as though she is indulging him in a riddle or a jest. “Because you are friends with the Red Maiden, of course! And I called her Red Maiden long before I knew the truth of her, but she said that she grew accustomed to the hail from me and would not ever want it changed. So it became something we shared!”
A creature of incomprehensible habit, the spider is. Sherma’s eyes suddenly widen. He looks aghast. “Have I offended you in presuming you would want to share it too?”
Lace mulls over the question. Yes, is the most obvious answer. She is offended. But she has also half grown used to it, and perhaps she can see that there is something sweet as well, in the innocent address coming from the gallant little fool.
“I do not mind it overmuch from you,” she says.
“Still, I want to hail you as you wish,” Sherma insists. “Would it be better if I called you Lace instead?”
It is, frankly, strange to hear her name in his bell-like voice. But it is also better than the alternative. “Yes,” she admits.
“Then I shall call you Lace,” Sherma declares.
He taps on his chime, as though to seal his promise. Lace scoffs, but with no ire. She looks back down at the lantern holding the dark at bay. When she speaks next, she does not know if it is compassion guiding her, or a vicious sense of curiosity. How far does the little fool’s optimism go? How far does his piety?
“Tell me. Do you know the origins of the silkflies?” she asks him.
Sherma considers it long and hard before shaking his head. “Truth be told, I do not. But I have always thought that they were the lingering spirits of the blessed, guiding us to where we need to be.”
Lace throws her head back and laughs. He is not as wrong as he should be. “These are grim creatures, little pilgrim.”
“Grim?” he echoes. “But how can they be, when they are so bright and pure?”
She tells him then, about the rooms in the Whiteward where bugs were taken when they can no longer sing. Their souls were siphoned from their flesh and distilled into the silkflies, and their bodies were sent to the morgue rooms, for whatever experiments the mortician-bugs wished to conduct. Some went willingly, with strength of soul left in them, and the silkflies spun from them are the ones that empower the circuits of the Architects, the Choruses, the Sentinels. Many did not, and they still ended up bottled and caged, forced into cleaning automata and cogwork guards and lanterns by the thousands. Forced to dance forever by another’s will.
“Each little light is a being bound past death,” Lace tells Sherma. It’s loud and matter-of-fact; she is not telling a ghost tale. Only the truth. “Bound to service. Before my mother tumbled into the Abyss and this Citadel started to fall, this was the fate of every pilgrim in Pharloom whenever they grew too frail to work, whether they wished for it or not: eternal servitude.”
Sherma is silent after she finishes speaking. His eyes are huge, teary with distress and also something strangely like guilt, as though he had anything to do with centuries of the Citadel’s edicts. “I—I am thankful to know,” he says faintly. He sets his chime down. “But we must have lanterns when it goes dark. There are still bugs possessed within these halls. The light keeps them at bay.”
Lace shrugs. She hadn’t told him in the expectation that anything would change, only to see how he would react. “Then have your lanterns.”
She taps on the lantern with the hilt of her pin. The silkflies break themselves from their lethargy to thrash, throwing themselves against the glass. She adds, “But know their cost.”
Sherma shakes himself from his daze. “That—that is—”
He breaks off, reluctant to heresy even now, but he does not stay quiet for long. “That is a grievous cost. None deserve a fate so cruel.”
Sherma’s voice wobbles, but he squares his shoulders nonetheless. “And if they are pilgrims, then it is my duty to take care of them as well.”
Little fool indeed. Brave even when he doesn’t have to be. As Lace watches, he takes up his chime once more and breaks the lantern with the heel of it, letting the silkflies free.
Songclave is thrice as bright the next time she comes to visit. Lace hears Sherma before she sees him. He is singing, bright and happy. When she drops down into the settlement, she sees that he is surrounded by silkflies. There are hundreds of them buzzing about, freed from their lanterns and constructs, the shells of which lie in heaps around the perimeter of Songclave. The pilgrims here must’ve retrieved every lamp in the Choral Chambers; there are somehow enough broken lanterns for twice the number of silkflies now in the air. The rest must have flown away, then. Gone to distant lands, to freedom or a clean end.
“Lace!” Sherma calls.
She startles. She has never heard so much open joy in the syllable of her name before. The little fool bounds up to her, silkflies dancing around his head. “Look how our camp has grown!” he exclaims.
Lace stares at him. They are not pilgrims. They are dead. They are the dregs of lives compelled to flutter helplessly. But they do flock around Sherma nonetheless, less listless than she has ever seen them, twirling in time to his laughter. They seem to love him, as everyone does, but do dead silk-dregs love? Do they remember what that is? A few of the silkflies even peel off from him to circle wonderingly around her. She reaches out instinctually, attempting to tug on the threads of them. There is no answering pull.
One silkfly comes to perch in her outstretched claw nonetheless. Lace freezes as it lands and settles, as though content. It is warm against her claw, like cradling a coal. Lively, despite it all.
She eases herself down to the ground, claw carefully outstretched, and lets the silkfly rest for as long as it wishes.
-----
Lace and the map-bug are not on easy terms with each other. Shakra relentlessly offers Lace things—defensive combat training, silkeaters, the odd paints and parchment—and Lace just as relentlessly turns her down. She knows that it is not for her sake that the map-bug is doing it, and it stings even now, to reckon with the persistence of the spider’s magnanimity. Shakra also speaks of Hornet with such fondness that Lace cannot help the ugly envy that bubbles up in her at every mention of the name. Hornet didn’t see Shakra as a project to fix. Hornet never worried about abusing her power over Shakra. No, of course not, Hornet and Shakra had a perfectly normal and balanced friendship—and likely a dalliance as well, Lace would bet rosaries on it—which is something Lace has never known. She is no different from the new pilgrims gazing up at the splendor of the Citadel, unable to comprehend it from its sheer foreignness.
It is so grand and distant. They are so small.
Lace is not so mad that she thinks the enmity exists anywhere but the confines of her own head, but that does not keep her from taking pleasure in the resentment. Nevertheless, the tendays pass, and Lace finds herself encountering the map-bug more often than not. She and Shakra sometimes spar, and eventually, she loses some of her rancor at how transparently Shakra pulls her blows. They sometimes journey together, when their paths align. The map-bug has trinkets from across Pharloom on sale, and Lace never tries to buy them, because Shakra never takes her money, but she listens to Shakra’s stories about where she got them nonetheless. Despite being the progeny of its god, Lace has never traveled much within the kingdom. It is strange, that this is the closest she has come to seeing its spread.
The map-bug is strong. The map-bug is capable. The map-bug has never shown anything except goodwill to her, and Lace might not understand the intent of that goodwill, but she is more than willing to exploit it.
“Map-bug,” she declares one day after summoning her with a clash of her hanging rings in Bellhart. “I wish to journey to the Far Fields.”
Shakra settles on her haunches and looks askance at her. Even while squatting, she is as tall as Lace. It is infuriating. “The Far Fields have been lost to the voided abominations, and you scarcely escaped with your shell the last time you came against the Abyss. Why do you wish to venture there now?”
“Can’t a bug wander where she wishes?” Lace grouses.
When Shakra does nothing but stare at her without a change in expression, she sighs. “The Abyss has taken over Far Fields,” Lace says, suddenly struggling to string together her own rationale. “My mother died in the Abyss. I—I know that she is there no longer, but I still want—”
She trails off with a frustrated snarl. Her words tangle and fray, no better than her silk. “Just refuse me already, Shakra,” she hisses, turning away. “I know you are not helping me from the kindness of your heart.”
Behind her, Shakra is quiet for a while, before she makes a harrumphing noise. “Do not presume to tell me my intentions.”
Lace is about to stalk away when Shakra’s claw falls on her shoulder. She jolts, startled. “I shall go with you to look upon the void, Lace Wielding Pin,” the map-bug says. “For my own purpose as well as yours. Let us guarantee that this trip is a successful one.”
They travel slowly, cave by cave, so Shakra can record the changed rivers and lava flows. It is agonizingly slow going, and Lace hates how she is grateful for it. The map-bug clears out most of the caverns by herself, leaving Lace to take cover and throw the occasional borrowed ring. It would be humiliating, except for how it is the most useful she has felt in months. Whenever an area has changed too much for Shakra to recognize, Lace looks for silkflies to navigate by their light. The terrain is so eroded and treacherous that it takes them a whole tenday to reach the abyssal lake that used to be Weavenest Cindril. An unbroken plain of black waters stretch to the horizon, seething with a rage all their own.
Lace sits on one of the rocks dotting the gray sand shore and stares down into the murky depths. There is nothing left to see.
Some days, she still reels in disbelief at the fact that Mother saved her in the end. She feels sick from it, from the debt she will never be able to repay, from the proof of love she had wanted her whole life being given to her so wholly and so late. Other days, she rages at it. If she loved Lace, then why did she spin her mad and broken? Why did she make her have no choice, no understanding, but to obey?
Shakra settles down next to her and takes out her draft map. They sit for a long while, the silence between them broken only by the scratching of Shakra’s quill.
The map-bug finishes her annotations. She sets her parchment aside. When she speaks, it is steady and level. “The mother of my shell did nothing to nurture me,” she says. “She was not cruel, but she did not care for me. Even by the time I grew old enough to wield practice rings, my mentor was far more a mother to me than that bug ever was. She died not long after I started my path as a warrior.”
There is no sadness in Shakra’s voice, only a cool acceptance. The map-bug mourns for her old master still, Lace knows. She makes a trip to the Pale Lake each month to light sweet-scented branches and sing to her spirit, in the custom of their tribe for the first year after death. Lace wonders if she did the same for her mother after she first passed. Whether she felt guilty if she didn’t.
“Do you hate her?” Lace asks.
Shakra tilts her head, considering. “I do, on some days. And on some, I try to understand her, and on many, I do not think of her at all. And I have found my peace with each of those.”
Lace nods, staring into the void. It teems and lashes, gnawing away at the rocks which border its expanse. Any trace of her mother is long gone from its depths. Soon, this beach will be gone, consumed by the Abyss. Her next question is slow to come. “Do you forgive her?”
“I do,” Shakra says easily. Lace flinches, and Shakra sends her a sharp look. “But forgiveness is for the living, Lace Wielding Pin. I forgave my mother in the name of resolution in my own mind. You need not forgive yours.”
“But she saved me,” Lace says, hating how small and shattered she sounds. “In the end, she gave her life for me.”
“Aye, she did.” Shakra’s tone gentles. “But our lives are more than the endings they contain.”
Lace knew her mother mainly from her dreams. She was already deep in slumber by the time Lace started to patrol the Citadel as her knight. Mother Silk appeared to her in radiance and splendor and told her that she was her favorite among her children. The worst part is that Lace doesn’t even think she lied.
“She did love me,” Lace says at last. “And that is what I hate the most.”
She hates that love did not save her from centuries of loneliness, or her mother from the Abyss. That she could not hate her mother in peace, but had to contend with her love as well. That love was not enough. It is never, ever enough.
Lace was forced to learn that lesson all over again in the fiasco with the spider. Once, she would have dreamed of all that Hornet promised her. A god’s unfettered care and love, given transparently and earnestly, without a single condition. No, it would have been more than she could know to dream in her blinkered life. The daughter of a Weaver and a Pale One, letting her stay in her home, tending to her wounds, watching indulgently as she smashed every Silkfly lantern in her path. Teaching her songs and giving her vases for her flowers. Plunging her claws into her, to make her anew.
Putting her immortal life in Lace’s clumsy grip, to do with as she wished.
Oh, but wasn’t she a fool for turning her down? Wasn’t she every bit the mindless, insipid fool she was made to be? How could she ever presume to want more than that? Lace should have played the Elegy and ripped Hornet’s heart from her chest. She should have laughed as she did it. She should have taken her chance and won. There had been a moment when she wondered what the spider’s heart would feel like between her claws. It would be bloody, with all the dirt and iron of feral, beastly instinct she tries to hide. It would beat slow and studied, in proof of a long and measured life. Red blooms, for how she favors the color. White plumage, for how she loves soft things. A fluttering bird of a heart, warm and lovely. It would be beautiful.
The very thought of it makes Lace want to retch.
“It takes great strength to look within one’s own shell to see the truth,” Shakra says. “You are to be commended for that, Lace Wielding Pin.”
Lace is not strong; she is selfish and stubborn, and she will do anything she must to cling to her new life. “I cannot keep living within her shadow,” Lace mutters. “Least of all when she’s already dead.”
“And you are already forging your own path. A warrior through and through.”
The map-bug is delusional in her pretensions, as always. Lace is still not a warrior—she will never be a warrior again, not even if she decides to snatch an Old Heart for herself. The only thing she can do now is get better at saving her own shell. Look for different ways to grow. The Abyss reaches for her with hungry tendrils. Lace rises to her feet and turns her back on the black waves. Love alone is not enough. The rest, they have to do themselves.
“Shakra,” Lace says slowly. “I have another request to make of you.”
The map-bug strides behind her, a steadfast presence. “Speak, and I will answer, if it is in my claws’ grasp.”
“What do you know of Hallownest?”