I Read Stories: The Poet And The Spider by Cynthia So

The Poet And The Spider by Cynthia So in Anathema

The second person narrator saw the Empress once as a child and the great yellow train of her dress and following hours later the Court Poet writing on the train, the great poem of the land. And then, when the narrator is grown, the Court Poet dies, and there will be examinations to chose a new Court Poet.

The narrator is not a good poet, and her parents want her to marry the tailor’s son. She wants to know more, to have more than just the scraps of the poem of the land. Amongst those scraps are the spider sisters of the west, who are great poets. So she goes to see them to ask them to tutor her for the examination. There she makes a bargain with the Spider of Bruises and Plums, a perilous bargain. Like all such bargains it is specific and at the end they may all be looking for loopholes.

Read This: For the love of poetry and how a prickly mentor may become something more
Don’t Read This: If the classic fairytale cute-grim one-two is not for you