Chapter Eight

Neve

Because Neve’s most well-honed talent was torturing herself, she thought of Raffe as they walked.

The ever-present cold of the Shadowlands made his warmth easy to call to mind. Warm brown eyes, warm smile, warm mouth on hers for the one kiss they’d shared, there in her room with her mother dead and her hands iced from magic and Red still gone.

He’d kissed her like he wanted to pull her back from a cliff’s edge.

But there’d been more to it than that, hadn’t there? More than just wanting to save her and defaulting to what he thought might work?

Neve’s lips pressed together, trying to remember, to replay that kiss in her mind. At the time, she hadn’t thought of much beyond the feel of him, the purely physical rush of having something you thought was unattainable, even if only for a moment. That was the crux of what had always lived between them, potent and heady: the knowledge that it could never happen. But then it did, and what even was it?

A rescuing. Raffe throwing her a lifeline, something to cling to, as what she kept grabbing for slipped out of her hands.

It made her frown, to think of it in such stark terms. To try to recall emotion, when desperation was the only one she could name.

Long before she and Raffe had started orbiting each other like stars that might collide, he’d been her friend. And in the end, that’s what she’d felt in that kiss, as heat-filled and thorough as it was. The desperation of a friend, faced with the possibility of losing someone to a darkness they didn’t understand.

There is nothing you could do to make me stop loving you.

That was the way he told her he loved her. A confession, maybe, but not a surprise—of course they loved each other, that was never in question. But the specifications of it, the parameters and ways the corners fit… that was more complicated.

She hadn’t said it back. She’d thought of that more than once since it happened. She hadn’t said it back, and should she feel bad for that? It wouldn’t have been a lie, but it would’ve been a truth without context, and was that worse than no response at all?

Neve wondered what he was doing. She wondered what they’d say to each other, if she saw him again. She wondered what she wanted him to say.

Thinking of Raffe made her think of Arick, and thinking of Arick made her think of Solmir—Solmir-as-Arick, wearing her betrothed’s face, bending them all to his plans like they were nothing but tools.

She glowered at him, moving straight-backed and precise through the trees. All the weakness that absorbing magic had wrought in him was gone now, dark power packed down. A vessel, that’s what he’d called himself. It tugged at her mind, that word, like it should hold more weight, like it was a piece of something larger. But Neve couldn’t remember what.

“Watch your head.”

His voice came quiet, startling her from her thoughts. Ahead of her, Solmir had turned to face her, gesturing up at the lowest branches—roots—on the upside-down trees.

Webbing. It was strung fine as silk, nearly invisible, but still thick, clouding the air. Neve grimaced. “I hate spiders,” she muttered, low enough to be speaking to herself.

“Me too,” Solmir said, turning back around and ducking to avoid the webs.

Her mouth twisted. Other than a shared goal of sending her back to her own world—and, hopefully, killing the other Kings—common ground with Solmir was not something she wanted to find.

The strange moments of tenderness he’d shown back when she thought he was Arick still haunted her. The way he’d moved, careful and caring at once. She wasn’t sure how much of it had been his trying to make a convincing mask of Arick, to fill in the blanks of his being her betrothed. But not all of it felt like a mask.

Now that he was here, in his own body, that carefulness around her had stayed. Not as obvious, but there in glimmers, both in the way he treated her and the way he moved through this world. Giving her his coat. Humming a lullaby.

She couldn’t quite categorize him, and Neve hated things she couldn’t quantify. She’d always had a quick mind, able to decipher people within moments, know what they wanted and how she could use it. But Solmir eluded her, and that made her uneasy.

He needed her. And, for now, she needed him—she couldn’t navigate the Old Ones’ underworld on her own. Right now, Solmir was a necessary evil.

But if there ever came a moment when he wasn’t… well. Then other choices might be made.

The trees thinned, eventually, revealing an open vista of gray. It might’ve been a field once—in some places, the dried husks of dead grasses still clung to the earth, stubbornly rooted into the cracked ground. Now it was nothing but a flat expanse, stretching ever forward, vast and featureless but for the figure of Solmir walking up ahead.

The rumbling started slow, crawling through the ground, making her borrowed boots shake. She looked up, found Solmir staring at her, blue eyes wide.

“Get on your knees,” he said, and though the words were something she certainly would’ve given him an earful for in any other circumstance, Neve obeyed.

Just in time.

The ground shuddered like it was trying to break apart, raising a roar into the still air, making her teeth clatter together. Then it did break apart—fractures split the dry, dusty ground, shuddering open, yawning chasms of deep darkness.

A hairline crack appeared next to Neve’s hand, widening rapidly into a fissure. She tried to scramble away, but the shuddering earth made directing movement nearly impossible, and more cracks ruptured around her, making an island of rapidly deteriorating safety where she crouched.

“Neverah!”

Solmir lurched toward her, bounced over the ground like a coin in a tin cup. He skidded around the opening chasms, kicking up clouds of gray dust. The whole not-quite-sky filled with the sound of breaking earth, collapsing dirt. A world shuddering itself apart.

He launched across the ground, landed next to her in a crouch. “Forgive me for the impropriety, Your Majesty,” he hissed, then scooped her up and jumped across the growing fissure to a larger piece of solid earth. The landing made him stumble, and they sprawled onto the dirt, his arms braced next to her temples. The back of Neve’s head slammed against the earth, hard enough to make her vision blur and pain spangle through her skull.

Wafts of black smoke billowed from the chasms like smoke from yawning mouths, curling up toward the gray mist that made the false sky. The chittering sound of it cut through the groan of the shattering ground—loose magic, untethered from the world by its breaking.

Solmir sprang up, standing over her like a predator defending its kill. His hands arched in the air, and with a roar, he called all that rogue magic in.

It was like watching someone be attacked by a swarm of wasps. The senseless, formless chittering sounds grew to a crescendo as the magic swooped toward Solmir, flowing into his open palms and shadowing him from fingertip to elbow, then higher. It came and kept coming, a seemingly endless wave billowing up from the ground and into his waiting hands.

He screamed as it happened, a harsh sound that could’ve been pain or anger or both, and it scared Neve more than anything else she’d heard in this underworld, anything else she’d seen. It was the sound of someone unraveling, and she closed her hands over her ears to drown it out.

Through it all, the ground kept shaking. The solid island where they were stayed intact, but the edges crumbled slowly, safety sloughing away as Solmir stood there and screamed and absorbed more darkness than anyone should be able to hold.

And then, finally, the rush of shadows stopped. Solmir crumpled, knees and hands hitting the dust, back heaving as inky darkness slithered over his skin, flickered like inverse fireflies. Thorns, finger-long, pricked through his arms, ripping up the fabric of his shirt. Claws curved where his nails should be.

A fallen god made a monster.

Neve scuttled backward, away from him, away from the twisted shape he was saving her from becoming. She thought of that strange dream she’d had in the cabin, the reflection of herself in the mirror.

Slowly, Solmir looked up. Fangs dug into his bottom lip, his teeth grown long and sharp. Black had swallowed the whites of his eyes, but his irises were still a burning, terrible blue. The signifier of his soul, still within him, still fighting.

But as he looked at her, the blue flickered.

He lurched to stand on unsteady feet, legs grown longer than they should be, strangely jointed. Even so, Solmir retained his stately grace as he stalked across the broken earth toward her, expressionless except for the involuntary sneer his too-long teeth pulled his mouth into.

Desperate to put space between them, Neve slid over the dusty ground, hands behind her. But one hand fell into empty space, almost making her lose her balance—nowhere to go, nowhere to run.

So she made herself stand, pulled to her full height, hiding the tremble in her jaw as the monster came closer.

Bare inches away from her, Solmir stopped. Shadows writhed in his eyes, but the blue held on, though she could see from the shudder of his muscles that it was a physical effort.

One clawed hand stretched toward her face, frosted with thin ice, stopping just before it touched her skin. Neve refused to flinch, refused to look away from Solmir’s eyes, blue flickering to black and back again. She didn’t know what he would do, swallowed up in darkness, the barest threads of humanity he’d held on to fraying under the strain. She didn’t know, but she wouldn’t show him fear.

Calculation in his eyes, a familiar emotion in his changed face. Solmir’s claws fell away from her, as if a decision had been made. In the same moment, he turned, hands thrusting out into the gray air, and a shower of brambles pulsed from him, as thick and fast as blood from a sliced artery.

The flow of it lessened gradually, thorns dissolving into gray smoke as they left his hands. Solmir crumpled, knees hitting the cracked earth, back heaving as magic-made brambles poured from his fingers. The claws retracted, the darkness of his veins faded away. She didn’t have to see his face to know the black eyes were blue again, his teeth blunted.

He’d become a monster, then bled the monster out. Humanity was such a transient thing here.

“Why did you do that?” Neve asked, a whisper that carried in the empty plain. “Why did you absorb all that magic if you knew it was going to do… to do that?”

There was worry in her voice. She didn’t have the energy to try to hide it.

“Because if I didn’t, it would’ve gone to the Kings.” Solmir straightened slowly. He ran a hand over his hair, like he was afraid the minutes he’d spent as a monster had mussed it. “This way, even if we had to waste some of it, it would at least be used up so they couldn’t have it.”

He looked like himself again, a too-handsome man with too-cold eyes. “What were you doing?” Neve asked, still quiet, still worried. “When you came over to me…”

Solmir blinked. Turned his eyes away, just by a fraction, looking over her shoulder instead of at her face. “I was going to give you some of the magic,” he said, clipped and emotionless, despite the slight tremor in his jaw. “It was too much, nearly to the point of overwhelming me, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to let it go.”

“Why didn’t you?”

A pause before he answered, the column of his throat bobbing with a swallow. “Because you were terrified, Neverah,” he said. “And the magic was such that I could only pass you enough to make any difference by kissing you. I wasn’t going to do that. Not with the way you were looking at me.”

Then he brushed past her, headed into the endless gray horizon. Neve frowned after him a moment before following.

Carefulness, consideration. Things he’d shown her on the surface, things that felt somehow dangerous here. She didn’t want his care—it made things too complicated—but she was afraid of how this world would be for her if she didn’t have it.

They walked in silence for a while before she spoke again, not quite sure how to phrase the question. “Your eyes…”

His pointer finger worked at the silver ring on his thumb as he walked, turning it in nervous revolutions. “What about them?”

“They almost went black, too.”

A shrug. “Holding on to a soul and that much power at the same time is quite a feat. Souls and Shadowlands magic aren’t things that can be held simultaneously—at least, not if you plan to keep them both.” His head cocked toward the gray sky, the wispy impressions of faraway roots looking like smudged clouds. “Maybe I do want that medal.”

The reference to an earlier jibe might’ve made her roll her eyes if she hadn’t been so focused on the matter of magic and souls. “Is that what happened to Red?”

Solmir stopped then and turned to look at her. His arms crossed over his chest, the diffuse light of the Shadowlands limning his frame. “No,” he said finally, almost soft, or at least as soft as his voice could get. “The magic of the Wilderwood is different. It… harmonizes with a soul, is the best way to put it. Amplifies it, instead of consuming it utterly. Redarys still has her soul.” His brow climbed, a smirk playing at his mouth. “Just as stubborn and irritating as its always been.”

Neve cracked a tiny smile despite herself. “Good,” she murmured. “That’s good.”

He watched her a moment more, face unreadable, still twisting that ring around his thumb. The arms of his shirt were hopelessly torn from the thorns he’d grown, the tattoo circling his bicep visible. Three lines, the one at the top thickest, the one in the middle marked through with tiny vertical dashes, the one on the bottom simple.

Solmir turned on his heel, walking into the wasteland again. “I’m glad you think it’s good,” he said. “I’m sure Redarys has more use for hers than I do for mine.”