There was a clatter, and Claire looked at the floor to see the ladle had been thrown between them. “Stop talking!” the other girl shouted frantically. “We need to get out of here. And, um …” She scrunched up her face, then quickly spun a new rhyme. “Spyden, your feet shall stay on the floor. You will not follow us out the door!”

Claire hurried to where she’d left her Hollow Pack, then raced toward the exit.

“Faster!” the girl called from the cottage’s stoop. “Come on!”

“Free me,” the Spyden sighed, its rasp threaded with melancholy. “I know so many things, and I have no one to share it all with. I know how to spin miniature worlds, weave stone, hide your deepest secret so it can never be found. So many things, but no one ever asks …”

Claire almost felt bad for the giant spider. Almost. But strands of spiderweb still stuck to her boots. “Maybe if you didn’t go around wrapping people up for dinner, they would ask a question,” she said, trying to scoot around the Spyden’s bulk. There was not enough room to pass by without brushing against the spider’s bristles. The creepy-crawly sensation that had been limited to her shoulders burst across her arms, but now she was only a step away from the threshold.

“If only someone asked,” the Spyden continued, as though it hadn’t heard her at all, “I could tell the person how to stop change. How to prevent a transformation of a girl into a unicorn so that she could be by your side forever. I have seen many a great transformation in my time …”

Claire hesitated. “I don’t believe you,” she said faintly.

The Spyden swelled. “I was there when the guilds and unicorns first forged the Crown of Arden and made Anders king! I was there when—”

But Claire had stopped listening.

Forged a crown … and made Anders king.

Only a queen can defeat a queen … That’s what the Spyden had said.

Could Claire make a queen? Crown someone new, someone who could defeat Estelle?

The image of a woman with white fluffy hair and kind eyes herding chimera ahead of her through Woven Root’s camp flashed through Claire’s mind: Aunt Diana. Known there as Mayor Nadia.

Claire was a Gemmer princess, but her aunt was the eldest Martinson in Arden, which meant that by those rules, she was next in line to the throne.

What if Claire helped her aunt become the new queen? Would she save Arden and defeat Estelle?

But if she was wrong …

Claire paused a moment, wondering how to shape her question so it wasn’t a question. She pulled the pencil from her hair once more and gripped it like some sort of royal scepter, then carefully stated: “Queens are made. They are crowned. I can defeat the queen by creating a new queen of Arden who can defeat her.”