Pin your hopes on a cruel deception

“Does his defiance inspire you, ****?” you ask. Lia raises an eyebrow at the question, which is not quite the reaction you were hoping for. To remedy that, you ready an open palm and mercilessly slap the catkin across the face. This surprises Lia, and finally earns you the glare you wanted. Next, you reach over and grab her by the chin. With your free hand, you caress the left side of her face and draw as much attention to her red, glass eye as possible. Before you get too distracted, though, you turn your attention back to Roy. The rogue is sitting right where you left him, although he appears much more agitated than before, and he’s getting less careful with the way he’s concealing his loosened bindings. Had you kept your eyes off of him for a few more seconds, he might have tried to do something dangerous. “This woman was like you, once, Roy,” you say. “A bright-eyed and bushy-tailed maiden with a happy future ahead of her.” You turn your attention back to Lia for a moment, so that you can look her in the eyes as you say, “She came from a wealthy family, you know.” Lia’s angry eyes soften in the face of such an egregious lie. The cogs turn quickly in her mind, and half a second later the catkin hardens her expression once again. You can only hope that she has pieced together your plan, and is now playing the part you need her to play. “Now she belongs to me,” you say, once again drawing attention to Lia’s glass eye by caressing her left cheek. Lia stiffens in response to your touch, and continues to glare at you in frustration.

Without turning your eyes away from either Lia or Roy, you back up towards the doorway and give it a knock. The spiders outside begin opening a hole for you right away, and you set one foot outside before saying to Lia, “Convince our guest to give up everything he knows of Evris’s fortifications. You know what will happen if you fail.” With that said, you remove the mana crystal from the wall, step fully outside, and watch as the spiders seal your catkin companion in with the adventurer. You’ve given her plenty of angles to work with, and you’re confident in her skills. You can only hope that the little show you’ve put on will be enough to ignite Roy’s chivalrous heart.

Go on, Roy, you think. Spill the beans to save the princess.

It’s up to Lia now, so all there is left for you to do is wait. You take a seat at the edge of the balcony, not wanting to go far in case the worst should happen. The thick cocoon of spider silk makes it impossible for you to eavesdrop on the conversation happening inside, but from where you’re sitting, you should still hear it if Lia screams for help — or feel it if there is suddenly a lot of movement going on inside the house. If anything like that happens, you have no intention of waiting for the spiders to neatly open a hole again.

But it doesn’t. An unsettling silence looms over you for nearly half an hour as you leave the interrogation up to Lia’s acting skills. You sit in quiet contemplation, watching over the comings and goings of the village below, until a knock and the shuffling of spiders behind you pulls you from your thoughts. You stand, and the fist-sized spiders tear away the silky wall to reveal your catkin companion on the other side. As soon as she is able, Lia steps through the opening and squares up with you.

And then she slaps you hard across the face.

“That’s payback for your improvisation earlier, Master,” she says. Despite the hostility of her actions, her smirking face and mirthful tone suggest that she’s not at all angry with you for what you did. To further support that conclusion, Lia throws her arms over your shoulders and pulls herself in to surprise you with a kiss. You respond to her affection in kind, wrapping her in your arms and returning the kiss until she pulls away a few seconds later. Lia looks deeply into your soul for a few quiet moments, and then says, “If you have to hurt me to trick someone, then fine. I trust you, Evan, but give me more of a heads up next time. My face is still sore from what you did.”

“Sorry about that. Hopefully it won’t happen again, but we can work out some signals just in case.” You give Lia an apologetic smile, which turns to a grin once it seems that the catkin is satisfied with your apology. “So, did it work? Did Roy tell you anything?”

Lia twists in your embrace to look back through the hole left in the doorway of the tree house. You follow her example and peer inside the dimly lit room. Inside the tree house, you see Roy sitting in pretty much the same spot where you left him. The only thing noticeably different about the man is his facial expression: rather than the confident bravado that he gave off before, Roy looks absolutely dumbfounded by what he’s seeing now. Your grin turns into a smirk as his reaction all but confirms that he fell for your ruse.

“I should have known it was a trick. Everything you said was a lie, wasn’t it?” asks Roy. “The eye he implanted to bind you to him. The terrible punishments you spoke of. Is he even threatening your loved ones, or did you make that up, too?”

“You’re wrong, Roy,” answers Lia. “There is a villain who has hurt me a lot. She is responsible for leaving my eye like this, and she is threatening the people I care about. But the villain of my story isn’t Evan. It’s Lady Anna.” Lia’s tone gets a little heated as she name drops the angel who sent the paladin your way.

She used half-truths to convince him that I was the source of her real trauma, you think, piecing together in your head how their secret conversation likely went. No wonder he believed her. “Don’t feel bad, Roy,” you say, as the spiders begin to seal up the doorway. “The information you’ve provided may very well lead to a brighter future for this forest and its community.” You get the last word in just as the hole is completely filled with a thick layer of spider silk. As the spiders leave the doorway to once again spread out over the web-covered building, you turn around and look out over the village.