Chapter Four

Neve

The tower was beautiful. Brutal, and unnerving, but beautiful. Neve could admit that much.

Four open windows stood at compass points in the walls, their sills carved with sinuous lines reminiscent of shadows, twisting and curling over the wood. A nearly bare shelf was pushed against one wall, housing a collection of cracked ceramic pots. Next to it, a fireplace glowed with still-lit embers that hadn’t been teased into a full blaze. It was strange, to see fire devoid of color. The flames were nearly indistinguishable from the smoke.

Other than the shelf, the only furnishings in the room were a table, a chair, a cot pushed against the far wall.

And her coffin.

Neve froze at the top of the stairs, widened eyes fixed on the place where she’d awakened. The lid to the coffin, glass smoked with tendrils of darkness, was still half off the plinth where she’d pushed it.

Hello, Neve. You’re awake.

That was the first thing she’d heard here, and there’d been a moment—a scant one—when it’d been a comfort. Hearing the voice of another person in this alien landscape, knowing she wasn’t alone.

It wasn’t a comfort anymore.

Solmir went to the shelf, picking up one of the ceramic pots and scowling down into its contents. “Not much,” he muttered to himself, “but it will have to do.” A canvas bag hung on one of the shelf’s posts; he slung it over one shoulder and shoved a handful of whatever was in the pot into the bag. “Something convenient about this place,” he said as he worked. “You don’t need to eat here. One of the benefits of not being, in the most technical sense, alive. You don’t necessarily need to sleep, either, but I still do.” His chin jerked to the cot against the wall. “Old habit, I guess. Not like there’s much else to do.”

But Neve wasn’t listening. She was still transfixed by the coffin.

He noticed. Blue eyes tracked from where she stood to where she looked, and the slash of his mouth bent. “How much do you remember?”

“Enough.” It was scraped-sounding. “I remember the grove. The sentinels. The…” Her hand raised; she flexed her fingers, now pale gray, remembering when they were shot through with shadow.

She didn’t finish, but Solmir nodded. Something flickered in his gaze, hard and bright. “And you remember choosing this?”

A challenge, almost, like he expected her to deny it. But Neve shrugged. “Yes,” she murmured. “I remember that, too.”

Her eyes opening to smoke-fogged glass, a familiar face on the other side. Red. Tearful and tattered, dusted with dirt. Red slamming her fists against the glass, screaming for her. A small part of Neve had been meanly satisfied to see that, to see Red trying to get to her as desperately as Neve had been trying all those months. Back when it felt simple.

She remembered looking down at herself. The pulsing, external veins, pumping darkness, connecting her to the inverted grove of sentinel trees. Making her a doorway to the underworld.

There’d been another face on the other side of that glass, too. Raffe. Even now, it felt like a spear through her middle. Raffe yelling for her, Raffe trying to save her. Always trying to save her, even after she’d made her choice back in Valleyda, plunging headlong into the darkness of the Shrine and her blood on branches.

In search of her sister, yes. But in search of other things, too.

And when faced with another choice, there in the grove, she’d pulled all that shadow inside.

Neve lifted her hands again, finally tearing her eyes away from the coffin to look down at her palms instead. Still unblemished by dark veins, but if she tried to call up magic, like she had outside—

“It won’t work.”

Solmir had moved nearly silently; he stood directly in front of her, face unreadable. “You don’t have the magic anymore.”

Her eyes narrowed. “If you think you can control me by making me think I’m powerless, you’ll have to try a different angle. I haven’t been powerless a day in my life, and I won’t start now.”

His brow arched, a cruel smile curving his mouth. “I would never presume to call you powerless, Neverah.”

And that shouldn’t have felt like a victory, but it did.

“However,” Solmir continued, “using that power is going to take a bit more planning on your part from now on. Because it lives in me.”

Her hands still hovered in the air between them, open-palmed, like she was waiting for him to give her something. “What are you talking about?”

“You don’t remember that kiss?” His eyes glittered. “I’m wounded.”

That kiss, a kiss that wasn’t for heat or romance, but something cutting and calculated, a well-timed move in an intricate battle. The rush she’d felt, like something drained out of her.

Solmir tapped the center of her palm with a pale, elegant finger. “Pulling power from the Shadowlands itself is a dangerous game. It changes you, tangles up in you, anchors you here. Better to pull it from a different vessel. Something that can take in power and give it to you when you need it.”

“You.” Her teeth clenched on the word. “You’re the vessel.”

A muscle feathered in his jaw, but Solmir’s slash of a smile didn’t waver. “Precisely.”

Her hands closed. “So I have to kiss you anytime I want to use my magic?”

She didn’t have to tell him how much she hated that; her tone, frost and fury at once, did it for her. She’d just as soon kiss whatever that toothy thing was outside.

“It’s not your magic, Neverah. It doesn’t belong to anyone or anything but itself.” Solmir turned back to the shelf and shoved a few more handfuls of whatever was in the ceramic pot into his bag. “And it doesn’t have to be a kiss, though that is the most efficient method of transfer, for reasons I cannot possibly fathom but assume have to do with the melodramatic nature of the Wilderwood and the Shadowlands and their making. Just a skin-to-skin touch will do.”

That was better, but not by much.

One last handful from the pot, then Solmir slung the bag over his shoulder. “I’ve done you a tremendous favor, really. Believe me, you don’t want to let the Shadowlands alter you any more than they have to.”

“So you’re going to let it alter you instead?”

“I know what I’m doing,” he replied, which wasn’t really an answer at all. “Why, are you worried about me?”

Neve crossed her arms, still uncomfortably aware that she was wearing his coat. It smelled like pine, like cold and snow. “More worried that you’re going to start growing fangs.”

“Not yet.” He turned, disappearing into the dark of the stairs and leaving her no choice but to follow. “The marks the Shadowlands have left on me are harder to spot, I’m afraid.”

If she trained her mind only to pay attention to the tree trunks, it was easy to pretend that this was a normal walk through a normal wood. Not that she’d spent much time in forests of any kind—not with the specter of the Wilderwood looming so large over her whole life—but it kept her thoughts mostly quiet, calmed the lurking panic just beneath her sternum.

Up ahead, Solmir made no efforts to keep to a pace she could match. Her bare feet scrambled over packed dust and slicing branches and the skeletons of dead plants, just keeping the whip of his long hair in view. Solmir moved like a soldier, controlled and steady, walking tall despite the uneven ground. Whatever he’d packed into the bag over his shoulder crunched unpleasantly with his movement.

She should probably keep him within arm’s reach. Just in case she needed to use magic.

Damn you, she thought at his back. Kings and shadows damn you to the deepest belly of the earth.

An ironic epithet. There was really no further damnation she could wish on Solmir than he’d already found himself.

Neve looked down at her hands, pale and cold and empty. Experimentally, she bent her fingers. The barest hint of a sting in her veins, but no darkness in her wrists, no frost on her palms. It was obscene, that the magic’s absence would make her feel bereft.

She’d told Solmir she wasn’t powerless, that she’d never been. That was true—she was a First Daughter, a Queen. And Valleyda, for all its innumerable faults, at least recognized that more than only those who were assigned men at birth and aligned themselves with the distinction deserved to chart their own course. Even now, with the magic she couldn’t stop thinking of as hers housed in a man she hated, she wasn’t powerless.

But having power wasn’t quite the same as being in control of it, and that was what she wanted.

It could be for the best, as much as the thought galled her. What Solmir had told her made sense, about the magic of the Shadowlands and the Wilderwood changing you.

After all, it’d changed Red.

The thought was an ache in her chest, like her heart had grown too heavy for her ribs to hold in place. Red, crouched on the root-riddled floor of the Shrine, feral, more wild than woman. Green veins and green around her eyes, the promise of more change to come. They’d mired themselves in opposite sides of a magic forest, in trees and in shadows.

Red entangled with a monster, and Neve with a fallen god.

Her eyes narrowed on Solmir up ahead. She’d followed him on instinct, sticking close to the devil she knew in the presence of so many here she didn’t, but the feeling in her chest was nothing like safety. “Where are we going?”

“To see a friend.” Solmir didn’t turn around. His lick of long hair was a smoke-colored beacon in the solid black of the trees.

“A friend.” She tried to keep the fear from her voice, hoped that the edge sneaking in could be mistaken for contempt. “A monster, or something worse? Or maybe all your talk of killing the Kings was a lie, and you’re taking me right to them.”

“If you believe one thing I tell you,” Solmir said, still not turning, “make it this: The Kings and I are not on the same side. Get that through your head, Your Majesty.”

“Stop calling me that.” She wanted it to be in the tone of an order, but it never quite hefted the weight. “Stop calling me that if you’re going to say it like it’s a joke.”

“You’re a queen, Neverah.” The sound of her name was harsh in his throat as he finally turned to face her, stopping in the middle of the path. He’d hardly ever called her Neve, even when he wore Arick’s face. “You have a crown and a throne, and call me old-fashioned, but that requires some deference on my part.”

Something knotted in her stomach. “You’re a king.”

The line of his mouth flattened. “I was.”

Neve wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

Solmir shifted back, away from her. His arms hung stiff by his sides, his face implacable. A standoff, two rulers unwilling to give quarter.

He broke first. Solmir reached up, rubbed at the scar on his temple, then turned around and started forward, once again nearly nonchalant. “I realize this is a lot to take in,” he said conversationally. “But all I have ever been trying to do—yes, even on the surface, pretending to be poor, hapless Arick—has been about killing the Kings. Neutralizing their threat before they regain power the likes of which your world is not equipped to face. Could never be equipped to face.” He glanced back at her, quickly, like he was checking for her reaction and was irritated with himself for doing so. “All of it—Kiri and Arick, the grove—it was all a means to an end. The moment the others came through, I was going to destroy them.”

Another shudder rippled over the ground, not as strong as the one they’d felt at the tower, but close. Neve put a hand on one of the inverted trunks next to her, locked her knees against the pitch. Solmir didn’t balance himself on anything, but she could tell that every muscle in his body tightened, see it in the way his shirt stretched across his shoulders and his thighs strained against the nondescript fabric of the dark pants he wore.

Damn him for being handsome. Life would be so much simpler if all monsters looked the part.

He recovered first, once the ground stopped writhing. The line of his mouth actually looked worried now, instead of just mocking. “It’s getting worse,” he muttered, nearly to himself. “Must be only three left.”

Neve straightened on shaky legs. “It seems like the Shadowlands might end themselves if we just wait long enough.”

She’d been only half serious, but the look Solmir leveled at her was grave. “Even if the Shadowlands collapse with the Kings in it, they won’t be ended. Not really.” He turned on his heel, striding away over the branches cutting through the dusty ground. “It takes more than that to vanquish a god.”

They walked in silence. Neve shivered against the cold, tugging Solmir’s coat around herself before she thought through exactly what she was doing. Part of her wanted to cringe away, but a bigger part of her was just cold.

After a moment, Solmir sighed, as if her silence were something that weighed on him. “I did try to do this the easiest way possible,” he said. “Before your sister and her Wolf got in the way.”

If he kept bringing up Red, she was going to tear him limb from limb and relish the fact that he couldn’t really die here. “I don’t believe that you’ve ever done something for the benefit of someone else in your life.”

“First time for everything,” he replied.

“Is that why you took all my magic? To prove your noble intentions?”

He half turned, the gleam of his blue eyes bright as flame-hearts in all this gray. The corner of his mouth twisted up, not in a smile. “I’d never claim that my intentions were noble, Neverah. I know what I am.”

Her lips pressed into a tight line.

“I took it because the magic here rots your soul, turns you into a monster.” He started forward again, climbing with agile grace over the thatched branches hilling the unnatural forest floor. One of them sliced up from the ground; he stood on it, looked down at her. “I don’t expect a thank you, don’t worry.”

Neve glared up at him. “At least you know better than that.”

Another bend of that cruel mouth into a not-smile. Solmir inclined his head, almost courtly, then hopped down and continued weaving through the inverted trees. He didn’t offer Neve a hand to help her over the branch; she nearly stumbled, stubbing her bare toe against pale bark.

“If you want my soul to stay free of rot,” she said, glowering at his back and trying to ignore the pain in her foot, “what about yours? Assuming you have one.”

“Oh, I do.” He sounded almost angry about it. “Withered and sorry thing though it is. But I managed to disentangle it from magic some time ago.” His voice slanted low. “It was quite a feat, if you want to know the truth. The magic here likes to seep into every available place, take you over. Much like the magic in the Wilderwood, I’m told. But if I’m careful, I can keep the two from melding together.”

“Do you want a medal?”

Blue eyes flickered her way. “A moment of silence will suffice.”

And because her mind was already awash with things she couldn’t quite wrap meaning around, Neve gave it to him.

She craned her neck as they walked, peering at the snatches of sky she could see between the thready roots of the inverted trees. Something that looked almost like stratified clouds marked the gray, but when she squinted at them, she saw that they were just more roots, high enough to be obscured in shifting mist.

“I don’t deserve your trust. I know that much.” Solmir resolutely faced forward, his tone and his stance casual in a way that seemed almost forced, like he’d been thinking the words over long before they escaped his mouth. “But, unfortunately, you’re going to have to give it to me.”

“I did trust you.” It came out almost wounded, and Neve hated that, but she couldn’t swallow the jagged sound out of her voice. “It put me here.”

His hand tightened on the strap of the bag over his shoulder.

Neve’s eyes narrowed at his back, something thorny and poisonous rising in her chest, despite the fact that all her power was housed in him now. “Maybe it’s unfair to claim I trusted you, since you were pretending to be someone else all along. You’ve lied to me since the beginning, Solmir. How can you ask me for trust?”

Solmir turned. He closed the distance between them, nimble as a dancer, striding over the irregular, branch-covered ground to loom over her, hands clasped behind his back like a general addressing a wayward soldier.

“And you swallowed the lies without question, didn’t you?” His gaze pinned her in place, spots of cold as chilling as his rings on her skin had been. “Even when the deepest part of you knew there was something happening. Even when you knew I wasn’t Arick.”

“I didn’t know that.” But that falling feeling in her stomach said she did, she did, she did.

“Don’t insult your own intelligence. You didn’t know the whole of it, maybe, you didn’t know exactly what had happened, but you suspected. You knew he’d changed, that he was being influenced by more than Kiri. And you said nothing.” He paused. “Not even when you knew they killed your mother.”

Another quake saved her from trying to defend herself, trying to pretend what he said was a lie. It shook through the ground beneath them, enough to knock her off-balance, to send her stumbling against Solmir’s chest. His hands came up to steady her, his palm against the sliver of her wrist his coat sleeve left bare.

Neve didn’t take a moment to think. She turned her hand and closed her fingers around his.

He realized what she was doing. She felt him jerk against her, try to pull away, but she pulled first, tugged at him like a planet to its moon.

And that dark, thorned power he housed spilled into her waiting veins.

It stung, ripping at her insides, carving familiar wounds. Her palm eclipsed, then her fingers, veins going inky and running up her shoulder, toward her heart, then down her other side to mark the hand that didn’t hold his.

Solmir wrenched himself away, but she was faster still. Neve opened a frost-laced hand between them like she was offering him something, and her offering was a bramble, flecked with dagger-long thorns, wrapping around his neck, a collar he couldn’t pull out of.

But Solmir didn’t look afraid, not in the slightest. Instead, he looked almost pleased. “Oh, yes,” he murmured. “It looks like this is going to work out just fine.”

“You told me you had nothing to do with my mother’s death.” Neve’s voice was so calm. That was a difference between her and Red, one of many—Red wore her emotions where everyone could see, making no attempt to hide them. Neve was skilled in burying them deep, far down and distant, something to be dealt with later if they were dealt with at all.

“I didn’t.” Solmir’s voice was just as calm, despite the shadow-made thorns digging into his neck. “The killings were all Kiri. But that was the moment you knew. The moment you were sure that whatever was happening was bigger than what you’d planned for. And you did nothing to stop it.”

“Neither did you.” Neve’s fingers twitched; the thorns around Solmir’s throat tightened, enough that she saw the flicker of a grimace at his mouth. “You said you tried to do this in a way that didn’t hurt me, but when you saw that it did, you did nothing.”

“Did you want me to?” His face was all harsh angles. “You never asked me to stop any of it.”

Her lips lifted back from her teeth. “I can’t be your conscience.”

A spark in his eye, a snarl to match hers. “And I can’t be your spine.”

They stood there, locked together by magic, a Queen and a King and the darkness of an underworld.

“It was always going to come to this.” Solmir shifted, his collar of thorns digging into his skin. One pushed in at his throat, enough to pucker, not quite enough to pierce. “It was always going to come down to you to stop them, to annihilate them so that they can’t make a world in their image. It was always going to be you and Redarys.”

“Not if she’d just run.” Neve shook her head, a shiver working over her at the contrast of this familiar argument happening in such a wholly unfamiliar place. “If Red had listened to me and not gone to the Wolf, none of this would’ve happened.”

“You know that isn’t true. You made the choices that led you here, Neverah. They’re yours as much as they are hers. You could’ve run from it, but the two of you are for the Wolf and for the throne, and such things have a way of finding you even if you hide.”

Her choices. Letting Kiri convince her there was a way to save Red from a fate she’d greeted with open arms. Bleeding on the sentinel shards to grow their inverted grove. Pulling in all that shadowed magic as she lay there in a glass coffin.

All these things she’d done for a measure of control, and it all led to the same place. To her choosing to go, the same as Red had, both of them trying to save the other.

It kept coming back to two women and the woods.

Solmir stared down at her, somehow still imperious even when collared with her thorns. His eyes were a sky-colored glitter in a place with no real sky, his too-long hair brushing the puckered scars in his forehead. “Are you going to release me, Your Majesty?”

“Can’t you release yourself?” If it came out mocking, so be it. Kings and shadows knew he’d mocked her enough today.

He shifted, the first real sign of discomfort he’d shown without attempting to hide it. “Not until I absorb a few more shadow-creatures,” he answered. “Our magic supply is running low, since we’re unable to pull from the Shadowlands themselves without rather dire consequences. Pain and unraveling for you, the further rending of an already tattered soul for me.” He tapped a finger against a thorn. “This was shamefully wasteful.”

She scowled, fought the urge to clasp his arm and pull out more of their limited supply of magic just so she could curve one of those thorns into his mouth. Instead, Neve stood pin-straight and queenly and let her hand fall away, releasing her hold on the magic in the same instinctual way she’d unspooled it from him in the first place—the moon releasing a comet from its orbit.

Slowly, the thorns around Solmir’s neck withered, retracted into themselves. They curled into plumes of gray smoke before dissipating into the air. It reminded her of when they killed the worm-monster from before, but these shadows didn’t make any noise. She’d drained the magic out, stripped it of use.

Solmir stood close until the last of it was gone, close enough for her to feel the skate of his breath across her cheek.

Then he turned sharply on his heel, striding forward again. “Come on. My friend is waiting.”

“You still haven’t told me who your friend is.”

“I don’t know what her name was, before. But here, she’s called the Seamstress.” A glance over his shoulder. “I think you’ll like her.”

The forest grew denser before it thinned, inverted trunks growing close as threads on a loom, waiting for a weaver. The branches on the ground dipped and wove around each other, hard to navigate. In some places, they stacked almost like a madcap staircase, canting up and then down, and she’d nearly tripped into Solmir’s back more than once. He tensed every time she came close, like he expected her to grab his arm and siphon magic out of him again. Neve tried not to relish that too much.

Both of them kept one eye to the reaches of the forest as they moved, wary of noise. The memory of that toothy wormlike thing was still extremely fresh in Neve’s mind, and she had no desire to come upon something similar. Or something worse.

But the inverted forest was silent. It seemed like they were the only two sentient things for miles.

Another rumble, reverberating through the ground. They paused, braced atop latticed branches until it passed. An uneasy, wordless look passed between them. It was close to companionable, and they both seemed to notice that at the same time—Neve scowled, and Solmir’s lip lifted, and they turned away from each other and back toward the path without another glance.

Slowly, the inverted forest tapered away, the upside-down trees growing farther apart. They came to a clearing, open enough so that Neve could see what passed for a sky, see the cloud-like smudges of faraway roots in the gray horizon. The branches on the ground thinned, snaking over the dry dirt like roots might, weaving together and lying flat.

In the center of the clearing sat a cottage. It looked so normal that Neve had to stare at it a moment, to see if her mind was somehow playing tricks. A perfectly ordinary cottage, log-built, with a plume of smoke twisting from the chimney into the gray sky. There was even a damn goat in the yard.

Her brow furrowed as she stepped forward, passing Solmir, drawn by the sight of something nearly normal. “The Seamstress seems to have made a cozy home for herself, all things considered.”

What was meant to be a throwaway comment seemed to strike Solmir more heavily than she meant. He nodded, lips contemplatively twisted. “She did, before.”

In the yard, the goat turned to look at her. Only then did Neve notice it had three eyes. It bleated, and the sound was like a crying child.

Neve’s heart jumped into her throat; she started backward, nearly colliding with Solmir, then reversed direction, her nightgown knotting around her legs.

Solmir looked at the goat, shrugged. “Another lesser beast. A rather useless one.”

“Useless, maybe, but damn unsettling.” Her heartbeat slowed; Neve straightened. “Five Kings.”

“It’s extremely disconcerting that you use that as a curse,” Solmir muttered.

But Neve wasn’t paying attention. Her eyes had gone to the cottage, to the slow creep of the opening door.

Pushed by something that was decidedly not a human hand.