"Take your mate and get out." Regulus glanced at the nest. He didn't raise his voice, and he left no room in it either. "I need the place for a while."
Every one of Aragog's eyes went wide, the great pair on top widest of all.
There was no sense in it!
This was its nest, its throne, spun with its own body over decades. It remembered where every load-bearing thread sat. Every spider in this hollow had come from it.
And now this wizard stood in its territory and used that tone, telling it to take its mate and leave?
Its front half reared up, thick forelegs lifting clear of the ground, chelicerae spreading wide to show the dark red inside and the ugly rows of barbs.
Rage climbed up through that enormous body. Offense burned in every eye, and a hiss forced its way out. "That is my nest!"
It pressed half a step forward, eight legs thudding dully on the webbing, and the whole hollow stirred with it, a black tide surging closer.
Regulus didn't react and didn't speak. He looked up at it.
The same look he'd given it before. No pressure, no threat. Only attention.
Aragog's chelicerae eased shut.
It remembered Baruk standing in the fire, stretching out a leg. It remembered orange flame coiling around this wizard the first time he came. It remembered a death threat cut into its blood like something bottomless.
Its eyes lingered on Regulus's face, then slid aside to the dark red bulk of Baruk behind him.
That was its offspring. The wizard meant to remake its offspring here.
In its own nest.
Let him use it, then.
Its front half lowered by degrees, raised legs settling back down, and the swarm coming forward stopped and drew back.
"Take it, then!"
The roar came out coarse and low, and it lost none of its volume. Then, without hesitation, it turned and crawled toward the depths of the nest.
Two steps in, it glanced back, apparently satisfied that the shout had carried enough authority to leave a leader's dignity intact.
Regulus was still watching. It turned around and kept crawling.
Mosag was summoned out from the deep chambers, a size smaller, her abdomen heavier, her eyes half-lidded with a dull sort of wariness.
Aragog touched her carapace with a pincer and produced a rapid string of thin, rhythmic scraping. Spider speech, presumably.
Mosag gave no sign of understanding. She simply followed him out.
She didn't know what was happening and didn't need to.
The two of them crawled from the nest one behind the other.
Outside, the swarm churned. Dozens of adult Acromantulas crouched low on the webs along the basin walls, eyes trained on the nest mouth.
When Aragog and Mosag withdrew, the rest gave ground too, retreating to the outer edge of the hollow.
They pressed flat against the silk in a black ring, countless eyes glinting through the fog, none of them daring to come closer.
Regulus watched them go and let his magical senses spread out across the nest. Empty.
Any patch of the Forbidden Forest would have served for this modification. He'd chosen here so Baruk could stay behind once it was done.
Bowtruckles weren't Salamanders.
A Salamander's magic pointed inward. The fire affinity ran inward too, and once grafted it filled the core on its own and the job was finished.
A Bowtruckle's scrap of magic pointed outward: sensing plants, connecting to green things.
As magic went, it was still simple. The structure wasn't complicated, only more roundabout than a Salamander's, with more functions attached.
That came down to the nature of the magic. This was what its operation produced. The magic itself was nothing remarkable.
In theory there'd be an extra step. Once grafted, Baruk would have to use the new magic to build connections outward, and getting it attached wouldn't be the end of it. That would be the beginning.
How long that step took, he couldn't say. First time working an outward-facing module.
Through all of it, Baruk had better stay at full size.
Which meant it couldn't come back to the castle. No fitting a two-meter spider into a dormitory, and no hiding it anywhere either. Too big. Legs would stick out of whatever you stuffed it into.
Turning it loose to wander the Forbidden Forest was worse. A lone spider against a herd of Centaurs was finished, and Centaurs weren't the only thing out there.
Then there was feeding. Bigger meant hungrier, and food was already a problem in the castle. He could hardly send it off to hunt for itself.
Hunt what?
Young witches and wizards?
The colony was the safest answer. Finish the work and leave it here, curled up in the nest, wandering out when it got bored. Safety in numbers, food guaranteed.
Even if Baruk had no interest in hunting, he doubted Aragog would dare let his spider go hungry.
Certain things would still need saying, of course.
He pulled his senses back and turned toward the entrance, but Baruk had already slipped out from behind him.
Eight legs churning, it shot to the nest mouth, clicked back at Regulus once, and dove inside.
Regulus followed. Hermes came after, the armful of Bowtruckles clutched to his chest.
The interior was bigger than the outside suggested.
Grey-white silk had been woven into a labyrinth of passages and vaulted ceilings. Thick pillars of thread ran from floor to roof, splitting into countless side branches, and the walls held layers of old web beyond counting.
At the center lay an open space, the floor carpeted in a thick, compacted plush of silk, soft and tough underfoot. Room enough for a dozen full-grown spiders to lie down at once.
The pad still held the depression Aragog had worn into it over years, with a few shed bristles caught in the silk around the rim.
Baruk went straight for it, paused at the hollow, and looked back toward the entrance to confirm Aragog hadn't followed.
Then it lowered itself in with great ceremony and fitted its body into the shape.
Legs tucked in, chelicerae laid neatly out front, amber eyes rolling once around the chamber. A rattling string of clicks bounced off the walls.
Lying in the leader's place, pincers working fast, it swung its head left to right and back again, sweeping the whole central floor.
Then it burst upright and went tearing around the open ground in circles, ran itself out, scaled a silk pillar, and flipped off it in midair.
A line of silk shot out and slung it to the opposite pillar, then one more swing carried it back to the floor. The impact boomed through the padding.
It covered every inch of the center, sniffing here, rubbing there. All this space, the place it had grown up in, and now it was all its.
It was the only big spider here!
Regulus let it run.
Hermes held out the nest of Bowtruckles, seven or eight of them, all still unconscious, curled into a knot of brown-green twig bodies stacked in his palm, thin limbs hanging slack.
Regulus took them. Hermes stepped back to the wall of the chamber and leaned there, watching.
He'd understood the exchange outside well enough. A modification. The second one.
He'd seen the result of the first. Baruk didn't fear fire. What this one would do, he had no idea.
Bowtruckles, limp little sticks of wood. What could they possibly give an Acromantula?
Put the two together and nothing about the pairing made sense.
Puzzlement, anticipation, curiosity. His eyes stayed glued to Regulus without a blink.
Regulus ignored Baruk's rampage and made no attempt to shield the work from Hermes. He'd let the boy come, so there was nothing here he couldn't see.
The source of all this, Transfiguration: Beyond Form, was legitimate knowledge sitting in the Library, nothing to be ashamed of.
If Hermes could pick up a thread of it, work something out for himself, Regulus would take a certain satisfaction in that. It would mean the boy was useful for more than hitting things.
He began the extraction of the magic seed.
His palm settled over the Bowtruckles, natural magic seeping out, entirely non-invasive, wrapping the faint magic inside them and drawing it outward along the paths it already ran.
Their magic answered at once, as weak as the Salamander's, with nothing in it capable of resistance. But the texture was nothing alike.
This ran cool and outward, fine tendrils feeling their way in every direction, drifting toward his natural magic of their own accord wherever they brushed against it.
A ball of pale green-white light gathered at his fingertips, quiet, neither flickering nor jumping, its edges fraying into thin filaments like fog frozen in place.
A whole nest, taken in one go, tidy work. He drew the magic from each of them and let it merge in his palm.
The little clouds of green light drifted together, scattered at first, filament testing filament, then recognizing kin and fusing into one.
The seed that came out was steadier than any single spark, and far fuller. About the size of a pea, the green-white deeper now, those questing tendrils along its edge more pronounced.
Cradling it, he shut his eyes and reproduced the structure in his mental space.
The Bowtruckle's magical structure was simple too, though not the straight line of the Salamander's. It carried a short branch that forked outward, and the end of that branch stayed open. Unclosed. Inclined outward.
The structure itself gave him no trouble. Half a minute and the replica was done.
The difficulty lay in that outward inclination. That was the heart of Bowtruckle magic, the whole of its talent for speaking to green things.
It had to survive the rewriting of the operating path. Lose it and the rest was worthless.
He rewrote the seed's path from plant-oriented to arthropod-compatible.
With the Salamander he'd shifted the route from running along the spine to running along the inner face of the exoskeleton. That wouldn't transfer here. This one had to lean toward Baruk's outward-facing organs.
Near the eight eyes, at the root of the branching visual system. A perception faculty belonged there if it belonged anywhere.
He reworked it piece by piece in his mental space, preserving the outward lean.
When it was finished the seed hung in his palm, its green-white glow drawn in tighter, all those searching filaments combed into a single direction, waiting quietly.
He opened his eyes.
Baruk had crept over at some point and lay facing him, legs folded at its sides, head resting on its forelegs, amber eyes fixed on the light in his hand.
It had seen this before. Last time the light had been orange-red.
It knew what came next.
Regulus beckoned, and Baruk scrambled up and came over on those long legs, the silk padding popping softly under its feet.
It dropped into place in front of him without fuss, spreading itself across the silk, legs tucked in obediently, motionless.
Only the eyes misbehaved, tracking the light in his hand as one. The two main eyes on top: the left thrilled, the right delighted.
Regulus pressed a palm to the carapace and sent his senses inward.
He knew this structure well.
The Salamander module had grown fully into Baruk's own magic. Venom glands to silk glands, eyes to legs, Fire affinity ran through all of it now, inside and out, no longer separable.
What he needed was unoccupied space.
Eight visual branches ran in parallel, and between them sat structural gaps, one of them wide enough to take a seed.
That was the site.
He raised his wand, aimed at the gap near the eight eyes, and spoke.
"Facultas Herbae Mutare Aranea Corpus."
Power of green things, alter the spider's body.
The syllables landed and the wand tip answered, magic drawing together along a specific bearing. The direction was right.
He turned his wrist, dipped the tip, and poured the magic in.
The spell opened a passage at Baruk's cephalothorax, and the green-white seed sank through, past the shell layer and into the magical channel beneath.
Baruk shuddered once, legs tightening, bristles rising a fraction.
That was all.
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