Sword Sisters by Alex Bledsoe, Tara Cardinal

it?”
    “You should be dead,” a woman muttered as she passed us on the street.
    Without looking, Amelia said, “Yeah, well, you should be pretty.” We both giggled again.
    People gave us a wide berth as we reached the center of the village. Women drew water from the large community well while a bunch of teenage boys hung out at the door of what I assumed was a tavern. I searched their faces for kind, brown eyes. I found none. We kept walking.
    This was my first glimpse of the place. I’d been unconscious when Amelia brought me to her family’s home. It wasn’t that different from the little human settlements all around the castle, not even in the way they stared at us as we passed. I was used to that. Amelia, clearly, was not.
    “You’d think these people had never seen girls before,” she muttered, echoing her father.
    “Probably not too many that came back from the dead,” I said, inconspicuously searching the crowd for an elderly hunting dog or some other sign of him.
    “Well, there’s that.”
    I noticed a small altar beneath a little shelter across from the well. It was a public shrine to Lurida Lumo. The interesting thing was, he wasn’t depicted as the spider we knew him to be. Instead, the image represented him as a glowing human form with his right hand raised in either salute, friendship, or on its way to a firm parental slap.
    A crowd hovered near this shrine, mostly older people crying or muttering among themselves. It was the first time I really thought about what killing their god meant to these people. Reapers believed in a single, all-powerful god, but s/he was a pretty distant figure who started the universe and then essentially stepped back to see what would happen. It certainly wasn’t a deity we could implore on our behalf. Its wishes came to us from the Teller Witch, and since she was presumed dead, we’d had no updates from the celestial realm in quite a while. If the prophecies were true, that Teller Witches received their first prophecies at puberty. Then in my case, the Creator was late. Maybe s/he was on vacation.
    The women at the shrine saw us, pointed, and whispered. Some made little hand gestures. One kissed her fingertips and touched the face of Lurida Lumo on the shrine.
    “Don’t make eye contact,” Amelia seethed. “Just keep walking.”
    They fell silent as we passed, and I expected them to throw rocks or vegetables at us. But they did nothing.
    “Well,” Amelia said as we stopped, “this is Cartwangle. Every last bit of it.”
    “It’s nice,” I said.
    “No, it’s not. There’s not a person here who wouldn’t like to see me as spider food right now.” She looked down and scuffed her toe in the dirt. “Will you come with me to see Connell?”
    What if Connell was actually Aaron? I could have misremembered his name. What if they were the same boy? I looked at Amelia, lovely, with her human-colored brunette tresses and blue eyes. Of course. A boy like Aaron would want a girl like Amelia, not me. “Wouldn’t you rather do it alone?”
    “I’d rather not do it at all. But I’d like you there.”
    I didn’t really want to be along for this particular scene, but I could think of no graceful way to bow out without hurting her feelings. Was this what guarding a human king would be like? Following them around while they did things I had no desire to witness? Or worse.
    Before I could answer, Amelia grabbed my arm. “Uh-oh.”
    A man strode toward us. And I mean strode, the same way Andre or Adonis did when they were in high dudgeon. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and had a narrow beard that outlined his chin. People naturally got out of his path. His long, black hair bounced importantly. And he was different from the other villagers in one very significant way: He was the only one I saw who wore a sword.
    Amelia looked around as if for a way out, but we were trapped in the middle of the courtyard. With nowhere to run, I turned and faced him, my expression