Poppy took it better than Rowan expected.
He'd thought she'd be upset. Or frightened. Or would at least need a minute to absorb the fact that her three friends had spent Saturday fighting venomous arthropods in the mountain passes above the Forbidden Forest. Instead she sat on the grass outside the paddock after Beasts on Monday afternoon, knees drawn up, field guide open across her lap, and asked questions.
"The matriarch surfaced from underground. How far underground?"
"Three or four feet. The structural webbing was laced through the soil above her."
"And the smaller ones were clicking before she appeared. Was it the same clicking as the ones in the trees?"
"Different," Iris said. She was sitting next to Edmund, who had been silent since they'd started talking. "The ground ones had a faster rhythm. More staccato. The ambushers were slower and they clicked in pairs."
Poppy flipped to a page in her field guide and ran her finger across a diagram Rowan couldn't read from where he was sitting. "That's summoning behaviour."
"Summoning what?" Iris asked.
"The matriarch. The clicking you described before she appeared, that's a different pattern from the one in the field guide. The field guide says thornbacks drive prey into ambush positions, and they do, but that's during a regular hunt. What you're describing sounds like the pack was holding you in place and calling her up at the same time."
Iris was quiet for a second. "I told them the pack was herding us. During the fight. I was quoting your field guide."
"That would have been right if it was just the ground pack and the ambushers doing their usual thing. But you'd already killed several of them and burned through their web. At that point the pack had shifted into colony defence, and colony defence means waking the matriarch." Poppy looked up from the diagram. "You're lucky she came up fifteen feet away and not directly under you."
"I don't feel particularly lucky," Rowan said.
"No, I mean genuinely lucky. Matriarchs can surface without warning if the prey is standing on the den web. The vibration from your feet would tell her exactly where to come up." Poppy chewed her lip. "The reason she surfaced at a distance is probably because you'd burned through the ground web between you and her chamber. The fire destroyed the precision of the signal. She knew you were there but not exactly where."
Edmund had been pulling grass out of the ground in short, agitated tufts. "And you're going back."
"Saturday," Lawrence said.
"Right. Into the mountains. Where the giant armoured spiders are."
"We killed the matriarch," Lawrence said. "The pack won't have reorganized."
Edmund looked at Rowan. Rowan could see him working through the objections and discarding them one at a time because he already knew none of them would land. He pulled out another tuft of grass.
"I want to come," Poppy said.
Everyone looked at her.
"I don't need to be anywhere near the fighting. I want to see the den after the matriarch's gone. A thornback colony restructuring after losing its queen hasn't been documented in any of the field literature. Professor Howan would give me extra credit for the rest of the year." She closed her guide. "Also, your descriptions of the clicking patterns are terrible. I need to hear them for myself."
"It could be dangerous," Iris said.
"I know what thornbacks do when they're agitated and I know what they do when they're mourning a matriarch, and those are very different things. A mourning colony retreats underground for days, sometimes weeks. They won't be aggressive." She paused. "Probably."
"You're not coming past the treeline," Rowan said.
"I'll stay at the den site. I'll document the web structures while you three keep climbing. That's what I actually want to see." She looked at Lawrence. "I can also tell you what species of flora the thornbacks avoid, which would give you a route that keeps you clear of their territory on the way up."
Lawrence almost smiled. It was the closest thing to a smile Rowan had seen on him since August.
Edmund pulled out one more tuft of grass. "If Poppy's going, I'm going."
"You don't have to," Iris said.
"I know I don't have to. I'm going."