Protector of the Small Quartet

by Tamora Pierce

  A lawkeeper flung a glowing net at Bone. That nearly caught him. He squalled his indignation and flew off down a street between market stalls, glancing back to check that the fountain group had not lost sight of him as they gave chase. He was pleased to see that some lawkeepers and the lawkeeper mage came with the mage woman, the jewelry seller, his guard, and the cart owners. They were the ones he wanted, the strong ones. Sellers of rags and pots would do no good with spidrens. Humans who thought they could fight anything, whether with magic or weapons, were best in this kind of fuss.

  The clumped gold around his claws pulled on him enough that he feared he would not reach the second-story window. It had been a very long time since he had been so weary. He reminded himself of the mage woman’s desire to own him and sell him somewhere. Life with her or anyone she might get to buy him would surely not be as interesting as life at the university with Lindhall. And those little humans needed him, too. They had no one else.

  The thought gave him an extra surge of strength. Up he climbed, clawing at the air, until he almost fell through the open window onto the gallery. As soon as he perched on the rail that overlooked the ground floor, he saw the double doors to the outside world explode inward in a blaze of magical fire. Both slabs of wood lay on the floor, smoking. When the air cleared, it revealed Bone’s pursuers.

  The female lawkeeper mage was glaring at the wealthy mage woman. “You’ll pay the owners of this place for those doors,” the lawkeeper said flatly. “And you’ll see the magistrate for property destruction by magical means without license!”

  The mage woman shrugged. “Bring on your writs and your laws,” she said, “but I have right of first sighting to that magical toy and I am claiming him!”

  Bone chuckled softly. She would be very cross when she learned that Lindhall had registered Bonedancer the Lizard-Bird as an intelligent being under the Immortals Laws. It meant, Lindhall had explained at the time, that Bone was his own person, and no one could ever sell him or hold him captive.

  “He’ll repay me for my cargo!” bellowed the man who’d had a cart full of melons. The crowd of sightseers was pushing farther into the warehouse.

  “My gold!” the man who’d sold the chains cried.

  The lawkeepers were all the way inside, looking around. The lawkeeper mage said something very quiet. A ball of light rose from her fingers to hang in midair, not too far from Bone.

  “There!” the wealthy mage woman cried, pointing at him.

  The spidrens attacked through two doorways. One, on the ground floor, led to the sewers. It was not the one that led to the nursery, Bone noted with relief. The other doorway was upstairs, across the gallery from Bone. He thought the spidrens must have raced up that way so they could jump from the gallery onto the humans. He readied himself to fly, should they see him, but all of their attention was fixed on the humans below. They jumped onto the rail on the far side of the gallery from Bone so they could shoot veils of green-glowing web from the spinnerets under their bellies over the fighting on the ground floor. They didn’t seem to care if their own kind got trapped along with the humans.

  Bone’s would-be captor glimpsed the web floating down on them. She flung darts of fire at it, burning the web before it touched any humans, then cast more fire at the spidrens on the gallery rail. They jumped, and burned as they jumped.

  The lawkeeper mage cast a growing wall of yellow fire between the humans and the monsters on the ground floor, giving the humans time to arm themselves. The jeweler and his guard drew swords. The cart driver found a sturdy length of wood on the floor and advanced with the two swordsmen. The remaining lawkeepers helped the other humans who’d been foolish enough to enter the building to escape back through the front doorway. Seeing that a spidren had crept around the gallery and was about to leap down on the lawkeeper mage, Bone flapped across from his railing, landing squarely on the spidren’s head.

  Spidrens could wreak all manner of harm, but they could not reach their own faces easily, particularly not when they clung to the worm-eaten gallery rail. Bone’s victim shrieked and squealed as he dug at its eyes with his foreclaws. Blind, it started to topple.

  Bone checked the floor below. If the monster fell straight down, it would miss the lawkeeper mage. He flew free of the spidren and croaked a “so there” as it struck the ground-level floor on its head. It did not move after that.

  With all the shouting and screaming, Bone realized the young humans in the hatching chamber might be frightened. He dropped down to the big room, keeping a watchful eye on the mages and their fire and the spidrens and their webs. The lawkeepers at the gap that had been the main door had driven off the sightseers. Now the lawkeepers turned back to fight the spidrens that had not fled.

  Bone was trying to remember which door led to the cellar when a wave of glittering magic billowed into the big room. It froze both the lawkeeper mage and the lady mage in place, as well as the spidrens. It even froze the pieces and waves of other magic in the air. Bone sighed with relief. Numair had come. Bone was very familiar with his magic, having seen a great deal of it. Numair would settle all that went on in this large chamber with its noise and fighting.

  With a moment to think, Bone recognized the doorway that led to the captives and glided to it. Carefully, watching for spidrens, he flew down to the cellar, the metal still dangling from his feet.

  When he entered the hatching chamber, two of the children screamed.

  “Shut it!” the biggest boy commanded.

  “But it’s the skeleton monster!” a girl protested, shrinking away from Bone.

  Bone clacked at her, cross that anyone, even a human, could describe an elegant creature like him as a “monster.” He was not the one draped with dirty and bouncy meat and hair. Every line of him was pure and perfect. But she was human and could not understand.

  The boy looked at him, then at the ceiling. “Was that you? Lissen!” he ordered the others. “It’s people up there, yellin’!” He looked at Bone. “You come, an’ then you left, an’ now they’s people up there, yellin’ an’ fightin’. You brung help?”

  Bone nodded.

  “He understands!” said the little girl who had called Bone a monster. “Will they find us?”

  Bone nodded again. Numair would not rest until he had searched everywhere in the building.

  The children stared at him, silent and wary. Bone sighed, considered the noises he had available to him, and combined two. Then he voiced the mingled sound. The shackles on the children broke. He wished he could do the same for the metal on his feet, but gold was a very different metal from iron, magically. There were so many flaws in iron that it was easy to persuade it to break, but not so with gold.

  While the children rubbed their wrists and inspected the pieces of their fetters, Bone inspected the room for changes since his last visit. The lamplight was as poor as before, and the children still had not been fed. It was odd that the oldest girl sat on the floor, knees up, head cradled on her arms. She had looked sidelong at Bone at first, but not any longer. Now she hid her face.

  There was also a change in the eggs. The one that had been ready to hatch had done so. The shell hung in its net, shredded. Now one of the other eggs was close to hatching, the shadow of its occupant visible against the thinning case around it.

  Bone looked for the already-hatched spidren. It wasn’t anywhere in the net. It was not in any of the corners. He was about to walk out to the stair to see if the newborn was hidden underneath it or had strayed to any rooms beyond when he heard a faint peeping under the children’s sobs.

  Bone had very good hearing. He also knew the difference between a human voice and one belonging to a different kind of creature. The other children fell silent as he hobbled over to the sitting girl.

  She refused to look up. Finally, Bone scratched the closest arm with a finger claw.

  “Ow!” she cried, raising her hand to slap him. Doing so, she revealed the young spidren in her lap. Puppy-sized, it cuddled agai
nst her chest, gripping her hair with two of its minuscule claws. It stirred and cheeped. “Looka what you done, you monster!” she whispered softly to Bone as she caressed the spidren’s head and back. Bone realized she kept her voice gentle so that she wouldn’t frighten the young creature. “Jest when I got ’im t’ stop talkin’, poor bitty thing.” She looked down at her charge. “Yes you was, jest peepin’ away like a little bird.”

  The spidren crawled farther up her chest and around, hiding under its nursemaid’s tangled mop of hair.

  “Lookit ’im,” said one of the other children, a boy with hair cropped almost to his scalp. He blew his nose on the floor. “Mebbe ol’ Bones here be funny-lookin’, but he don’t seem t’ mean no harm.”

  “Quiet!” the oldest girl ordered in a whisper. “Y’want the big ones down here? They’ll take the baby from us like they took the others, and they’ll kill ’im if he don’t go mean like them.”

  “So it’s all this monster’s fault.”

  Bone turned as the children, screaming and weeping, threw themselves into a pile around the girl and the baby spidren. An adult spidren stood in the doorway.

  Bone did not know the newcomer by sight, but he recognized the cold voice of one of the first three spidrens he had seen before, the hard creature who had swatted the small one. Where had it been until now? Not on the main floor, or it would have been caught by Numair’s spell. Bone called himself an empty-headed hatchling for never checking the far side of the stair. Instead of looking for other chambers or halls, he had come straight to the sounds of living creatures both times. His carelessness may have doomed these children.

  “Where did you come from, monster?” the spidren murmured. It rose onto its feet, trying to clear its spinneret so it could shoot web at Bone. Slowly, an inch at a time, it advanced, its yellow eyes fixed on the lizard-bird. “Who gives you shelter? Who gives you the magic to walk in the world?”

  Bone had not thought so quickly since the last time he’d fought others of his kind. He could go for the thing’s eyes, but it could still hurt him or the children or the eggs. The spidren rose a little higher still, almost to what on a human would be his toes.

  Bone leaped for the join of leg to body and grabbed the soft, stretchy leather that linked them with both paws, digging all six claws into the joint. The spidren screamed, a horrible, ear-cutting sound that made the children in the room beyond scream, too. Bone ignored everything but the muscle under his claws, ripping and cutting until the leg it attached collapsed. The spidren lurched sideways. It struggled to grab Bone with its offside legs, but now Bone darted under its body, straight for the spinneret. Before the thing knew what Bone was doing, Bone was at the spinneret—not one, Bone realized to his horror, but several.

  There was no time to panic or run. Glad all at once for the mage’s attack, he stamped one spinneret with a gold-clumped foot and another with a gold-chain foot. That hurt. Bone added his screams to those of the children and the spidren. Then, as he grabbed for another spinneret despite the pain, bending it back on itself, he saw three children each seize one of the spidren’s flailing legs. The boy, the talkative one, pushed in next to Bone and shoved a soft silvery material up against the remaining spinnerets: the empty eggshell for the spidren that had hatched.

  All of them clung to the spidren, staring at one another frantically as if to ask, Now what do we do?

  Bone realized the spidren was getting weaker and weaker. The fluid that leaked out from under his gold-covered claws was clear, not silvery. Finally the thing quit moving completely.

  When they heard feet descending the stairs, all of them struggled free of the corpse, ready to fight. The newcomer was Lindhall, with a pair of torches in his hand. Bone squawked with glee and threw himself at his friend’s legs.

  “Bone, Bone, stop it, I’ve got a torch!” Lindhall protested, trying to keep the light away from him. When he saw Bone skid, he quickly knelt. “What in Mithros’s name have you done to your feet?”

  Bone croaked impatiently. His feet weren’t important just now.

  Lindhall looked at the dead spidren, and then at the children. “You killed it yourselves.”

  “He showed us how,” said the talkative boy. “The bone fellow. Is that ’is name?”

  “Bonedancer,” Lindhall said. “And I’m Lindhall. Are you the only ones down here?”

  The others shook their heads and led the way into the cell.

  Lindhall followed them through the open door and set his torches in the available brackets, where they added to the light cast by the glowing spidren eggs. Then he crouched, taking a water flask from his belt. “You look like you’ve had the Trickster’s bad time of it, but it’s over now,” he told them, offering the flask to the littlest girl. “Just a couple of mouthfuls, mind. It has to last for all of you. We’ll have more shortly.”

  Bone watched. He had never before appreciated the quality of his friend’s gentle manner and breathy, soft voice when it came to dealing with other humans. The younger children, who had bunched up around the oldest girl as the bigger ones fought the spidren, relaxed slightly, their faces less terrified. They knew they would take no harm from this big man with the flyaway hair. The oldest girl still did her best to hide the young spidren from him.

  Bone tottered over to her and squawked.

  Without looking away from the boy who was using the flask, Lindhall said, “I see, Bonedancer. She has a young spidren, and it trusts her.”

  That set one of the other girls off. “They all do, when they hatch! They come an’ they cuddle and we sing ’em songs. An’ then the big ones come an’ get ’em an’ they take the one of us the new baby likes best and they hurt us an’ scare us an’ make the little ones drink our blood. An’ they beat the little ones if they don’t hurt us, till they do, an’ then they start likin’ it.”

  “And they get bigger fast,” one of the boys said. “The bigger they get, an’ the more they hurt us, the more the grown-up spidrens like it.”

  Lindhall looked at the wall with the eggs. “They must be taught cruelty,” he murmured. “They are left to form ties of affection.…” He turned his eyes on the oldest girl and her spidren charge, who had come out to play with her fingers. “And then they are taught to win approval and food by learning to kill.” He examined the eggs again. Two more were thin enough to show the shadow of their occupants. They would hatch soon. “Well,” he said, “we need a cart, I think.”

  Bonedancer sat on the rim of the cart as Lindhall drove it through the university gates. He repeatedly flexed his feet, relieved to feel air on them again. Numair had freed them of the gold and returned it to the jeweler, while threatened charges of kidnapping had sent the mage woman on her way.

  Numair and Lindhall were arguing about the spidrens. “I don’t understand why you insist on bringing these young creatures here,” Numair complained. “They’re as vicious as their elders.”

  “It’s not like you to make a statement with no facts to support it,” Lindhall replied sternly. He had once been Numair’s teacher, and there were days when they both talked as if they had never left the classroom. “The only spidrens we have encountered before this have been those that are old enough, and big enough, to hunt and feed with the adults. We have yet to look at very young spinners, particularly newly hatched ones. Now is our opportunity. These young people have been around the newborns, and they say they are not vicious when first hatched.”

  The children looked around, awed by the buildings and the gardens. They had been promised meals and baths while their parents were sought. The adult spidrens—many if not all of them dead by now—had kept them in that room for days, even weeks. It was possible the creatures had killed their parents. Something would be done for the children, either by the university or the Crown.

  Each of them had charge of a sack that concealed a spidren egg, except for the oldest girl, Masa, and Bone. Masa hid her young spidren in a covered basket, and comforted it with nursery songs. Bone had a ver
y young hatchling on his back. He knew it was a female. She insisted on wrapping her thin legs around his folded invisible wings and body, which tickled, and propping her head on his. Bone crooned to her as, ages ago, he had once crooned to his chicks. He listened to Numair, who rode on the seat, fuss with Lindhall about the risks of rearing immortal young.

  “They only bite after their parents whip them and starve them,” Masa said, her soft voice stubborn. “The prisoners before me, they said the big spidrens killed the hatchlings that wouldn’t bite.” She looked at the others. “We couldn’t fight the big ones, but we won’t let you hurt our hatchlings.”

  Numair groaned. “Lindhall, you and Bonedancer have gotten me into trouble again, I can just tell.”

  “If I were you, Numair, I’d hope Bone and the children are right about these spidren hatchlings.” Lindhall did not sound at all concerned. “It might signal the beginning of the end to the spidren menace. It’s not as if the gods can keep them in the Divine Realms.”

  Bonedancer the living lizard-bird skeleton croaked a gleeful laugh. A moment later, his spinner baby tried to make the same sound.

  It had been a very fine day out.

  TAMORA PIERCE first captured the imagination of readers with her debut novel Alanna: The First Adventure. Since then, her fast-paced, suspenseful writing and strong, believable heroines have won her much praise: Emperor Mage was an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults, The Realms of the Gods was listed as an “outstanding fantasy novel” by Voice of Youth Advocates, Squire was an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults, and Lady Knight debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Trickster’s Choice, another New York Times bestseller, was an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults. Trickster’s Queen was also a New York Times bestseller, as were the books in the Beka Cooper trilogy, including Bloodhound, which hit number one. Ms. Pierce’s books have been translated into many languages, and some are available on audio from Listening Library and Full Cast Audio. In 2013, she won the Margaret A. Edwards Award for her “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature.”