There is a kind of helplessness a farmer knows. A calf comes wrong in the night, breech, and you have your arm in to the shoulder and you can feel the life in there and you cannot turn it, and all your strength is worth nothing because the thing needs a smaller, cleverer hand than God gave you. Bancroft had thought that was the worst of it. He learned better in the dark of the Black Forest, wrapped to the chin in web with the spider's poison thick in him, unable to move so much as an eyelid, hauled off through the trees like a sack of meal to be stored against a hungry winter.¹

The venom did not hurt. That was the strange thing. He was hardly scratched -- one bite that did nothing but put the stillness in him -- and inside the stillness his mind ran on clear as spring water while his body did not so much as breathe when he told it to.² He could not see. He could not turn his head to find Anister, though he knew the ranger was somewhere near, bound the same as he, having taken a few bites more than Bancroft had and being too tough to care. Time went the way it goes when you cannot mark it. Minutes. Hours. The spiders carried them, and Bancroft lay in his own body like a man locked in a cellar, and prayed.

He talked to the mace, too, for lack of anything else to do. It was still in his pack -- they had not troubled to take it, not knowing what it was. He asked it, in his head, whether it could make any sense of the chittering all around them. The mace could. It has ways. It listened a while and told him, sour as ever, that the creatures were rudimentary things with a rudimentary tongue, and that so far as it could gather they were carrying their catch to mother.³ It added that Bancroft was an idiot who could not even keep himself out of a spider's larder, and that its last owner would never have been taken so. Bancroft has heard that before. He let it talk. A man in web has time.

Then the carrying stopped. He was set down on cold stone. He heard the wet ripping of the web being torn from him, and the moon came into his eyes all at once, and he could see.

They had brought him to a ruin. White marble gone grey with age, long slender lines of it the way the elves built before men were much of anything, ivy grown over all of it and the pillars come down in pieces. A temple, and old past reckoning. In the middle of the clearing was a great flat dais, and Bancroft understood by the shape of it -- even choked with web and moss -- that he was lying in a holy place, and that the holy place had once belonged to the green god.⁴

Standing over him was a woman. Elven, or she had been; the forest had got into her the way it gets into an old fencepost, until you cannot say where the wood stops and the moss begins. White hair. Long fingers that moved wrong, too many joints in them, spider-fingers. And bound across her brow a bandana marked with the eight eyes of a spider -- and around the eight eyes, drawn in some faded hand, the outline of the Green Man. She had his god on her forehead with a spider looking out of its face, and she was looking down at Bancroft's mace as a starving woman looks at bread.⁵

"This is good," she said, mostly to herself. "This is very good."

Her name was Esmeralda, and she had dreamed of the mace before ever she saw it. She had been alone out here a long time -- long enough that she spoke slow and careful, like a woman who has to remember how. The spiders had woken her screaming that there were men in the wood, and she had gone to look, and found a priest of Sylvanus carrying a holy thing, and that, she said, was not nothing. She did not seem cruel. She seemed like what she was: a hermit who had learned the green god wild and alone, out of the spiders and the rot and the growing things, with no book to steady her and no one to tell her when she had it wrong.

They did not take her word for anything at first, being who they are. There was more evasion in the dark, more spiders, and Bancroft ran and hid and ran until the poison caught him again and put him out cold.⁶ When he woke he was on the dais with the others, and Esmeralda was pressing a small black bowl on him. Milk of the spider, she called it. It looked like no milk Bancroft had ever drawn -- a white, filmy syrup that hung off the stopper like something a wound would weep -- and it tasted worse than it looked, and it was making a slow fire somewhere down in him, something that wanted to come up and out and change him. He swallowed it and kept it down and held still until the fire banked. Esmeralda watched him do it and nodded. "Ah," she said. "Stout of heart, and of body." She looked at the mace when she said it, as if it had told her so.⁷

Irulan was there when the light came back to him properly, which was a mercy he had not looked for. She had been off on her own the whole black night of it -- she had gone down to Helix for rations, being the only one of them who could carry a load and buy it, and had never made it back, and while the men were being wrapped she had been stalked through the dark by a whole separate pack of the things, down to her last breath of strength, evading them by inches until she squatted in a bush and did not move till morning.⁸ The spiders brought her in after, unconscious but whole. She woke sore and short-tempered and alive. Bancroft has come to set a high value on that last part.

What followed was the longest talk Bancroft has had with anyone since he took up the mace, and the most of it was about killing spiders.

It comes down to silk. Esmeralda's grievance, when she finally said it plain, was that every summer the men of Helix pay parties of hunters to come into the Black Forest and kill the black spiders for the silk in them -- a fine thing, a rich man's cloth, woven up in town into cloaks that mean you have money.⁹ Bancroft knew the trade without knowing he knew it; there are folk in Helix who weave the stuff, and now he had names for them. Valerian, the elf who makes bows. Veena, the miller's wife. He filed the names away the same as he files everything.

And here was the thing that turned in Bancroft's chest like a key. The mace hates Saint Ygg's people with a pure and patient hatred, and wants nothing in this world but their temple burned and their paladins in the ground. And Esmeralda's spiders are dying under Saint Ygg's coin. The two griefs fit together so neat that a man could mistake them for one grief. Anister saw it too, and said so, pleased with himself: a perfect match, the mace that wants Saint Ygg dead and the woman whose children Saint Ygg is killing.

Bancroft did not like how well it fit. He said little while the others talked it round -- and they talked it every way there was. Warriors of Sylvanus to guard the spiders in the wood. A quiet trade in silk gathered without killing, so the demand went somewhere clean. Black-scaled riders on the backs of the great spiders, which Esmeralda thought a fine picture and Bancroft thought was a war dressed up as a picture. She would not hear of harvesting her spiders like a man harvests wool. They lived free, she said, and died into the ground, and grew mushrooms, and that was the whole of what the green god asked -- the turning of the wheel, life into death into life, nature against the works of men. Not conquest. There is no expansion in Sylvanus, she said. Only the harvest.

Bancroft thought about the farm he grew up on while she talked. The green in the fields. The bees that need a meadow full of flowers or they die, and give you nothing but honey if you let them live. He thought that Esmeralda, wild and half-mad and alone, had a truer hold on the green god than the ancient relic in his pack, which knew only the one thing and the one enemy.¹⁰

They asked her about treasure, of course. Anister asked, mostly. A man has to eat when he gets back to town, and shinies are how you do that, and Esmeralda could not for the life of her understand why they wanted them. The ruins were just ruins, she said. Surface stone, no cellar she had ever found, no secret she had ever tripped over in all her years of sleeping in them. But she went and fetched something wrapped in burgundy cloth, and unrolled it, and it was a pair of elf-forged short swords, clean and lovely and worth twenty gold the two of them, and she gave them over as if they were nothing.¹¹ They took them. They searched the temple after, and found what she'd promised: nothing. A smashed altar at the back, and beneath it a stair going down into the dark, choked to the roof with fallen rubble -- a week of pickaxe work, and no telling what at the bottom. A tomb, most like. A dead priest of the green god sleeping under his own ruined house.¹² Shacknub, the half-orc wizard who has fallen in with them and takes his notes on everything, said the temple sat square on a ley line running north and south, a road of dead men's magic. It meant nothing to Bancroft. Shacknub said it only because it was true.¹³

But it was the mace that decided him. He had Esmeralda ask it whether it remembered this place. It did not -- it only said it had felt the temple would be here, on the strength of old tales that its long-dead owner had carried, a man named Hildreth Forsgreen whose voice it speaks in without seeming to know that he is dead and it is only a stick with his temper baked into it. And so, standing in the ruined temple of his own god, Bancroft did the one thing he had not thought to do in all the weeks he had carried the thing. He knelt on the broken dais and he prayed. Not to the mace. To the god. He asked, plainly, whether the war the mace wanted was the god's will or the mace's own grudge -- whether Sylvanus hated Saint Ygg, or whether that was one dead priest's hatred wearing the god's face.

The answer came back clean as anything Bancroft has ever felt. The god had no quarrel with Saint Ygg. The god had never had one. The hatred was the mace's, and the mace's alone.¹⁴

That settled a thing in him that had been unsettled since he found the mace. He rededicated himself to the god of green and growing things -- not to the mace, not to Hildreth Forsgreen's old war, to the honest turning of life and death. It is a small ceremony, out here where the god is worshipped wild.

Irulan did too, and that was new. Esmeralda made an effigy of the god's true self in the nature of the wood, and hung it about with spider silk, and gave it to Irulan to keep with her. Irulan swore to follow the green god, though she was bored stiff through the whole of it and only wanted to be gone without a blindfold of spider silk on her face. Bancroft understood. Faith is not a thing you can put in another body. But it settled in his, and it felt fitting, the way turned earth feels fitting in spring. His heart was not in war.

Esmeralda took him aside and named him her eyes and ears in Helix, for the green god's sake. She wants him to go to Valerian and to Veena and try, only try, to turn them off the silk. She set up a way to send word -- a black spider courier once a week, Sundays out and Mondays back -- and she taught him one single word in the tongue of the spiders. It means peace. Bancroft has never had a head for languages, and mangles it a new way every time he says it, and Esmeralda winces every time, and says a little practice will fix it.¹⁵ He is not sure it will. But it is the word that keeps a man from being eaten in the Black Forest, so he means to learn it if it takes him a year.

Getting home was its own long trouble, and most of it did not touch Bancroft directly. Because he had sworn to the god, Esmeralda let him and Irulan know the way back; Anister, who keeps to Hearn the Hunter -- the green god's own hunting sister, near enough -- got webbing on his eyes for a mile out and no offense taken.¹⁶ Clarisse had it worst, and none of them with her. She had slipped the ambush the night before and been running loose in the wood ever since, lost, half-starved, sleeping in trees with her nails in her own arm to stay awake, going north for a whole wasted day because she could not find the sun through the canopy.¹⁷ The forest threw the strange at her the way that forest does: hairy net-throwing things with bat ears and yellow grins that she slipped by inches; a hill in the dark that got up and walked; and, last and worst, three goblins gone through the wood dressed top to tail as giant black spiders, spiders from above and goblin feet below, which is the kind of thing that makes a person wonder what the Black Forest is really for.¹⁸

They came back to Helix a day apart. Bancroft paid for the rooms, Clarisse's among them, before Bolo's man could clear their gear out into the street. The two elf swords are still a mystery -- none of them can say if there's magic in them, for the party has no one who can look, and the only wizard in town who could is a man named Mazzah who charges them more every visit because he cannot abide them, and who cannot be told a word about a hidden temple of Sylvanus anyhow. That is a knot for another time.¹⁹

Bancroft came out of the Black Forest with a pair of swords he can't read, a spider-word he can't say, and peace in his heart. On the whole he counts it a good trip. He is alive, and so are his people, and he knows now the difference between the god and the stick that carries the god's face. A man could go a lot further than that and come home with less.