Arturo knew what these rings were for. It couldn’t wait. He had to see Esmerelda.
“I just don’t understand why we have to leave like this, in the middle of the night, without a word to our parents.”
“Fine, we can leave them notes.”
Esmerelda crossed her arms. Her eyes darted to her bedroom door, as if her parents might be on the other side listening in.
“You know what I mean,” she said.
“I don’t think you understand how serious this is, Esmerelda. In another week, I could be off fighting, and then it won’t matter how much we love each other or whether we have our parents’ blessing.”
Esmerelda bit her lip and scowled. It was the face she often made when she was reading a book and came to a part she didn’t like.
“This all sounds very dangerous, Arturo.”
“That’s exactly why I thought you’d be excited.”
“It is sort of exciting, isn’t it?” she said, cracking a smile. Then she seemed to remember where she was. “But how will we make any money? What will we do?”
“We could sell these rings,” Arturo said.
Esmerelda looked down at the ring on her left hand. Arturo had taken his mother’s ash-wood box — the one in which she stored needles in one end and thread in the other — and placed the ring that looked more like Esmerelda in it. In the other end, he’d written her a note, so that she could read, rather than hear, the question: Will you marry me?
“I don’t want to sell the ring,” she said finally. “I only just got it.”
“Then we’ll figure something else out. Esmerelda, you have to trust me.”
Neither of them could imagine the web that had drawn them in from that night onward. A web as old as war and as deadly, too.
In accepting these rings, Arturo and Esmerelda had forever changed the course of their lives. They believed they were embarking upon a new story, when in fact they had been drawn into a story already long in place.
“For that is the blessing and the curse of youth, you must understand,” Arturo told Maria now. “Believing that no one else has lived your story before, and no one else will live it again. But I have been where you are now, Maria. I used my powers without regard for the consequences, and I was found out, just as you have been.”
“Found out by you?” Maria asked.
Arturo sadly shook his head. “I wish it were only by me. I am not your enemy. But the Black Widow — the Black Widow knows you have the ring. She killed Esmerelda … and now she is after you.”
She’d held off through his entire story, but now, at the end, Maria finally sat down.
“So you and Grandma Esme were married?” she said.
Arturo didn’t respond. He spun his ring around his finger.
“I still don’t understand. Who is the Black Widow? A person?”
“In most senses, but not all. The Black Widow is the most powerful and treacherous of all in the Order of Anansi. For years, she has been hunting down the other members of the Order and killing them for their rings.”
“Why?”
“The rings all draw their power from the spiders, but they each have their own special qualities, as unique as their species. A person who has more than one ring increases her or his power exponentially. According to legend, a person who collects all eight rings will have power to rival that of Anansi himself.”
“‘Legend’ meaning that book?” Maria said, nodding toward the leather tome.
“Well, yes, I suppose so. But that book contains the knowledge of many generations of the Order. I myself have annotated it with the things I have learned. In all that time, no single person has obtained all eight rings. As of right now, the Black Widow has six.”
“You mean, the only two rings she doesn’t have are yours and mine?”
Arturo nodded. Finally, Maria could see why he looked so sad.
“How do you know all this? I mean, I’m guessing you didn’t write that book yourself.”
“You guess correctly. Esmerelda and I didn’t sell our rings, of course. We discovered their magic after joining the Rimbaud Brothers, and it was only a short matter of time before we had climbed the ranks from cleaning the elephants’ slop to starring in the show, putting our powers on display as if they were cheap parlor tricks. When we were first confronted, it was not by the Black Widow, but by the Orb Weaver.”
Maria remembered the drawing of the orb ring from the book. She tried to imagine the kind of person who might have worn it, but the problem was, the rings could belong to anyone. It’s not like there was any meaningful connection between the nature of the rings and the nature of the people who found them. She had to believe that.
More importantly, whoever had worn the orb ring back then couldn’t be the person still wearing it now. The Black Widow had the ring. Maria gulped.
Arturo continued his tale. “The Orb Weaver was a well-meaning gentleman named Adrian Eberly. Our troupe was in Sion for a week of performances, and this man, Mr. Eberly, had read about Esmerelda and me in the paper. He guessed right away what we were meddling with. I’ll never forget it — he found us in our tent, claiming to be an admirer and wondering if he could speak to us privately. But no sooner had we welcomed him in and offered to hang his coat than he turned to us and said, sure as death, ‘You have rings, don’t you?’
“At first, we pretended to have no idea what he was talking about. But Mr. Eberly was no fool. He beckoned his orb weavers, one by one, and they came hurrying into the tent in an obedient line until they had filled every inch of the ground around us.
“‘Do you know why humans fear spiders?’ he’d said, and for all that I’d seen through my own ring, I found myself afraid. ‘It is in part because they can move in any direction without warning. But in larger part because, for all their quickness, they choose to wait for their prey. A patient spider can defeat even the most powerful lion.’
“His orb weavers climbed the walls of our tent, and they began furiously spinning a web to enclose us. Esmerelda and I were terrified, but we dared not move. Mr. Eberly was clearly more powerful than we were.
“‘In this book,’ he’d said, removing from his coat the tome you discovered tonight, ‘you will find the terrible history of the eight rings of the Order. Wealth, power, greed, and deceit are etched onto these pages. The powers of Anansi have led countless unsuspecting victims astray. But there is no one more greedy or deceitful than the present possessor of the Black Widow ring.’
“It seemed the Black Widow had been seeking out the other ring bearers and obtaining their rings at any cost. As Mr. Eberly put it, if he had found us so easily, the cunning Black Widow couldn’t be far behind.
“I’m ashamed to admit it now, but Esmerelda and I thought Mr. Eberly was insane. It was not that his story made no sense, mind you — at that point, we’d begun to wonder ourselves whether these magical rings were entirely decent. It was more that his manner was so frantic, so absurd. He was a bad performer. We didn’t know yet that the rings had that effect on everyone in the end. We were young, and this man was old.”
This last line had been aimed squarely at Maria, surely. And true, she’d been thinking more and more that Arturo sounded crazy — paranoid like Grandma Esme always had been — even when his story explained so many things. But then, she herself had become a bit less sane since she first put on the Brown Recluse ring. Her behavior at Claire’s party seemed proof of that.