Chapter 414 - Spider Logic

Chapter 414: Chapter 414 - Spider Logic

Saturday, early March, around noon.

Regulus left the castle under a Disillusionment Charm and flew toward the Forbidden Forest. After Apparating to the clearing outside Aragog’s lair, he found the forest still shrouded in fog, with the trees only beginning to recover from winter.

He came here twice a day, far more often than he visited the Library. Voldemort couldn’t interfere with his studies, but Baruk somehow could. By that measure, the spider was more troublesome.

Regulus usually came just to watch Baruk run around him. Once, Baruk had wanted Dragon meat, so Regulus had given it a slice. Since then, it had been obsessed with the little pouch, apparently deciding that Regulus was saving the meat for it.

Then Baruk came up with an even better idea: Regulus should make it smaller so it could come back to the castle with him.

Regulus refused. Baruk was still growing, and this was hardly the time to make it smaller.

All that forest, and it still wasn’t enough to feed you?

He’d barely finished waiting under the tree when the web ahead began to shake, a rhythm quick and dense, the sound of eight legs alternating across the strands.

Baruk came boiling up out of the hollow, dark red bristles catching the fog with a scaled shine, eight amber eyes swinging onto him at once, chelicerae rattling out a long string of clicks.

It launched itself the same way it always had, two metres of body accelerating flat out, though it had learned some sense about its own bulk now.

At the last instant all eight legs stabbed into the leaf litter and braked hard, stopping in front of him, spider head dipping in close.

The ring of white points around the eight eyes had brightened a good deal since the graft, and thickened too, glowing up from under the shell in a steady white halo that no longer flickered.

"...heard it..." Baruk’s voice came out coarse, tumbling to report. "...trees... talking... Baruk... hears clearly..."

Regulus laid a hand on the plating of its head and thorax and sent Magic Perception inward.

The Bowtruckle module had knitted fully. Around the graft point, the filament extensions had wound into the visual branch system until the two couldn’t be told apart.

The bridge nature magic had built between them held. Both sides passed their words across without trouble.

Magic ran smooth. No sign of rejection.

Regulus raised an eyebrow. "What did they say?"

Baruk’s chelicerae opened halfway and stopped. Eight legs shuffled in place. The spider head sank.

"...said..." The voice wilted. "...don’t like... spiders..."

Regulus’s mouth pulled up at one corner.

Baruk sulked for a bit, though not for long.

It had worked out a new angle.

"...Baruk... thought of something..."

He patted the big head and let it talk.

"...these trees... know Baruk..." One foreleg came up and tapped at the surroundings. "...those... far away trees... don’t know..."

He followed the logic of the daft little plan.

Since the trees nearby couldn’t stand it, go further out. Find trees that had never laid eyes on it. Maybe those wouldn’t know it, and if they didn’t know it, they wouldn’t mind it.

Baruk explained that it had made several long trips over the last few days, picking out strangers, going further each time, around the hollow, across a few gullies, until it found a stretch of wood it had never set foot in, and then trotted eagerly up to strike a conversation.

"And?" Regulus asked.

The chelicerae drooped again.

"...new trees... don’t like either..."

That patch of unfamiliar wood had no more use for it than the old one. It had asked them one at a time, and every answer came back much the same.

Which was to be expected.

Acromantulas had been nesting and hunting in this forest for rather more than a year or two. Aragog had bred a colony here across decades. How many branches had webbing snapped? How many roots had venom eaten through?

The trees remembered. One remembered, and roots met roots underground, so the whole forest remembered.

Baruk wasn’t finished. Changing trees hadn’t worked, so it had come up with something more ambitious.

Its head lifted, eyes rolling, voice climbing again with a conspiratorial edge to it.

"...Baruk... found out... Centaurs... trees like..."

Regulus watched it, his mouth curving.

It swelled with the triumph, chelicerae opening and shutting, all eight legs straightening a little. "...Baruk... learns Centaur... trees like Baruk..."

Baruk described it at length.

It had crouched well back behind a tree and spied on the Centaurs.

It was clever. It knew how to hide. They never spotted it.

It had seen how the Centaurs always tipped their heads back to look at the stars, hours at a stretch, muttering strangely.

It worked out that this was surely a skill the trees admired.

So it went home and taught itself.

Regulus already had the picture.

A two-meter spider sat among the dead leaves, all eight eyes fixed on a patch of sky between the trees, trying to look solemn as it watched the stars.

It knew nothing about them, of course, and the forest paid it no attention.

So Baruk moved on to learning the Centaur walk. Eight legs moved slowly and seriously, trying to imitate the rhythm of four hooves. The result looked less like a Centaur and more like a crab trying to walk like a horse.

The trees still ignored it.

Then Baruk discovered Unicorns. Wherever they went, the forest seemed to come alive beneath their silver-blue glow. Naturally, Baruk decided the trees must like Unicorns and tried rubbing itself against one of their favorite spots.

The Unicorn caught its scent, tossed its mane, stamped twice, and left.

The harder Baruk tried to make friends, the more thoroughly everyone avoided it.

"Why?" Baruk sounded thoroughly wounded, the white light around its eyes dimming. "Centaurs... trees like... Unicorns... trees glad... Baruk learns... trees don’t like... Baruk goes... Unicorn runs... why?"

Baruk had no idea what was wrong with it. All it knew was that everything in the Forbidden Forest disliked it, except Regulus.

It pushed its big head against him.

Listening to Baruk’s latest schemes, Regulus could barely keep from laughing.

The spider’s reasoning wasn’t entirely wrong. Unicorns really did have a stronger connection to the forest than Centaurs, but they were also the purest creatures in it and had little tolerance for being touched. Baruk had simply picked the one creature least likely to put up with it.

There was no point explaining that to a spider. If Baruk took it as encouragement, it might try ambushing a Unicorn next.

The forest favored Centaurs and Unicorns because they had belonged to it for generations. Centaurs had lived there longer than Hogwarts had existed, while Unicorns were practically part of the forest itself. Acromantulas, by comparison, had only been there for a few decades. They spun webs, claimed territory, hunted, and wrapped trees in silk. The forest remembered all of it.

Perhaps after a few more centuries, when the old trees had died and new ones replaced them, the forest might finally accept the spiders as part of its order. For a spider, though, a few centuries was far too long to wait.

Regulus became more interested in the Centaurs’ stargazing. Their ability to read the stars was genuine and, in some ways, more reliable than wizard divination. He wondered whether it was a skill passed down through generations or something they were born with.

If it was innate, perhaps the Centaur body itself had some magical connection to the natural world, allowing them to draw information from the movement of the stars.

That possibility interested him.

If the ability could be broken down into its magical structure, perhaps he could reproduce part of it himself. It might even have something in common with his Star Guided Meditation.

Unfortunately, he had no Centaur sample to study, and getting one would be far harder than catching a Bowtruckle. Whether such an ability would even work with his star system was another question.

As for Unicorns, he decided to leave that alone for now. There was too much involved to make it worth investigating.

He pulled his thoughts back. Baruk was still waiting, eyes fixed on him, hoping he’d say something.

It needed placating.

"You can squat there watching stars all night." His voice softened. The words didn’t. "The trees still won’t spare you a glance."

Eight eyes swung onto him, thoroughly miserable.

"...why..." The confusion filled its voice. "Centaurs look... trees like them..."

The question made him want to laugh.

"Centaurs have lived here a long time," he said, putting it on the scale of years. "Longer than the trees. How many days have you been here?"

Baruk’s chelicerae folded slowly against its lower jaw, the head dropped, and eight legs churned through the leaf litter with one low click.

Then it arrived at its own conclusion. "...Baruk... not old enough."

Regulus let it stand. Put that way, it wasn’t wrong.

New trees no good, Centaur imitation no good. Both roads blocked, and Baruk was out of ideas.

It slumped onto the leaves, the white light around its eyes dimming further. Legs run ragged, unwelcome everywhere it went.

"...Baruk... good spider..." It made one last case for itself. "Trees... don’t know..."

Regulus reached out and patted the big head. "Give it time. Trees have long memories. They’re slow to know you, and slow to forget you once they do. It can’t be rushed."

Baruk quieted. The legs drew in, the head settled onto the forelimbs, and the white light stopped reaching outward, pulling back into a thin layer against the shell.

Regulus stayed with it a while longer and watched it come round.

It went down fast and came back fast. Before long it was flipping beetles out from under the leaf litter with a foreleg, playing.

He told it to stay put, got to his feet, Apparated, and left the forest.