Chapter Ten

Neve

After two days of walking—she assumed, at least, since they’d stopped to sleep twice, taking turns watching the unchanging horizon while the other dozed fitfully far enough away for the comfort of the other—the landscape up ahead finally changed. Neve was embarrassed by the way her heart leapt to see something other than flat, cracked ground.

It looked like a mountain range, cragged and rough, a darker shade of charcoal against the ash-colored glow of the sky. The range stretched from side to side, like the curve of a bowl’s edge, and seemed to grow larger as they walked closer, the only marker of time or distance she’d noticed since they left the inverted forest.

Solmir stayed a few yards ahead of her, but she didn’t have to raise her voice to be heard. The silence of a dead world made sure her words carried. “How big are the Shadowlands?”

“Big enough,” he answered, without turning around.

“And was it always like… this? Even before it started breaking apart?” The ground had stayed steady since the huge quake that shook magic from the depths of the earth, but Neve still stepped cautiously, prepared for the world to lurch at any moment.

“It’s never been exactly vibrant,” Solmir said drily, “but when the Old Ones first came here, with all their lesser-beast children, it wasn’t quite so dead.” His hand cut backward in the direction they’d come, then forward, toward the mountain range. “The whole of the Shadowlands is hemmed in by forest—the borders of the Wilderwood, though the exact measurements of the edges obviously don’t match up—but the Old Ones shaped it as they wished. They each made their own territories here. The Serpent underground, the Weaver in the forests, the Dragon out past the Endless Sea, where the Leviathan lives. They fought against each other, took territories over, lost others. Treated it mostly like they treated the surface, just without humans getting in the way.” He shrugged, dropped his hand. “It’s never been pleasant. But it’s been more than this.”

She couldn’t decide if the world he described sounded better or worse than the one they walked, but something else he’d said stuck out to her even more than the slapdash geography lesson. “The lesser beasts are the Old Ones’ children?”

“That’s as easy a way to put it as any.” Solmir shrugged, making his hair ripple behind him. He still wore it down, though it had to get in the way. “The lesser beasts are weaker copies of the Old Ones they come from. The Old Ones are their only parent.” He turned then, giving her an arch look and a wicked turn of his mouth. “Even the Old Ones that took lovers didn’t manage to procreate with them.”

Neve grimaced.

The only lesser beast they’d encountered so far was the three-eyed goat and that worm-thing with all the teeth. But Neve thought, unsettlingly, that what she’d been thinking of as worm could just as easily be serpent. “How long until we get there?”

“Patience, Your Majesty.”

Neve could very patiently tear him limb from limb, but she fell silent, following him across the cracked not-desert.

Then, a rumble.

Solmir stopped and barely had time to cast out a hand in her direction before the pitching earth sent them careening into each other. The runnels in the dirt widened, spider-webbed. The quake wasn’t as dire as the one before—no clouds of rogue magic bloomed from the chasms opening like hungry maws—but it still rattled Neve’s teeth in her skull.

On the horizon before them, one of those mountainous smudges began to sink. A cloud of dust bloomed into the gray sky, the sound of its collapse made soft by distance.

The quake was over nearly as soon as it began, leaving her and Solmir canted together on the ground, pressing into each other for balance. The world shuddered once more and then was still.

He pushed up first, steadying before she did. Solmir stretched out a courtly hand.

Neve eyed it warily before lightly placing her fingers in his palm, nails clicking against all his silver rings. Solmir pulled her up, hand dropping as soon as she was safely upright. “Last time I helped you up, you siphoned off a sizable amount of magic.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Neve muttered.

He cracked a sharp smile, then started out across the seemingly endless desert again. “We need to make haste.”

She chewed her lip as she followed, a nervous tic she and Red shared. But where Red would pull her bottom lip between her teeth, almost flirtatious if you didn’t know it was a mark of anxiety, Neve tended to gnaw hers bloody.

They walked on. Before long—minutes, hours, Neve didn’t try to keep it straight anymore—something rose up in front of them, a small interruption against the endless horizon. A hill, maybe, but irregularly shaped, with strange humps and curves she couldn’t quite make out.

It didn’t seem like an entrance to a kingdom or a territory or anything else. Neve assumed they would pass it, a strange aberration in a stranger land, but Solmir curved his path toward the hill.

She frowned. “Is that where we’re going, then?”

Solmir flipped his hand at the oddly shaped hill, the lazy imitation of a welcoming flourish. “Behold, the entrance to the Kingdom of the Serpent.”

Neve’s head canted to the side, trying to make this square with the image of the entrance she’d had in her head—something ornate, Temple-like, to mark the kingdom of a god. “Are all the territory entrances so… ordinary?”

“Depends on your definition.” Solmir shaded his eyes from the pale glow of the sky to look toward the mountain range, then pointed with his chin. “That’s the Oracle’s domain, where we’re going next. Does it seem ordinary to you?”

“Yes,” she bit out, irritated. “They’re just mountains.”

“Look again.”

With a sigh, Neve turned to the jagged line in the distance. This far away, the mountains were barely anything but looming shapes. She narrowed her eyes, squinting to bring them into focus.

The angles were strange. The edges of the mountains were pointed in odd directions, lumped up haphazardly. One bulge in particular looked uncannily familiar…

Her eyes widened. The bulge wasn’t a rock. It was a giant skull.

“Bones,” she murmured. “They’re bones.”

“Dead Old Ones.” Solmir turned away from the graveyard range, eyes glittering. “A nightmarish territory for a nightmarish god.”

“You don’t seem to like the Oracle much.”

“I don’t like anything here much.”

Fair enough, she guessed.

As they drew closer to the entrance, its features became easier to make out—the hill wasn’t made of rock. Skulls, again. Rows of them, melted together as if by a torch, cobbled into lines like bricks. A few of them looked almost human, but most were from creatures Neve didn’t recognize, the bones oddly shaped, the angles all wrong. “It’s all damn bones here.”

“One of the side effects of most things being dead,” Solmir said.

In the center of the cairn was a hole, deep-earth dark. No stairs, but the floor of it seemed to slump downward, like an entrance to a purposefully formed cave. It brought easily to mind a huge, muscled serpent, working its way below ground over eons to make its own kingdom.

Neve shuddered.

Solmir noticed. “I suppose I’m going first, then?”

“You are absolutely going first.”

He sighed, the breath of it stirring his hair. “Fine.” Blue eyes turned to her, no humor in them. “I know the prospect of being near me is not one that appeals overmuch, but you’ll want to stay close.”

“I think I can overcome my distaste for an hour or two.” Already, she stood closer to him than she ever had voluntarily, close enough to see a wink of silver through the strands of his loose hair—the ring punched in his earlobe. The man wore more jewelry than she ever had. “What will we find down there, other than the Serpent? More lesser beasts?”

“I doubt it. That thing you killed before we saw the Seamstress is the first child of the Serpent I’ve seen in years.”

So that was one of the Serpent’s children. Which meant that the Serpent must just be a larger, stronger version, probably with more teeth. Neve’s pulse ticked in her wrists.

“But if we do…” Solmir stuck his hand in the pocket of his coat, the one she was still wearing. Neve lurched backward, a retort rising to her mouth, before Solmir pulled his hand away with something clutched in it.

The god-bone.

He flipped it around his finger, then offered it to her, blunt end first. “You use this.”

Hesitantly, Neve held out her hand. He dropped the bone into it.

“I told you before that it won’t work on me, but I feel the need to reiterate, since I’m sure it would hurt anyway.” Solmir turned toward the dark. “You still need me, and I still need you.”

Neve hefted the bone, tapped her thumbnail against the ivory. “Watch your tone, and I’ll try to remember that.”

He huffed half a laugh as he stepped into the maw of the cairn, shadow and light striping his hair. For the second time, he offered her his hand. “It’ll be dark,” he said, in explanation.

And for the second time, she put her hand in his. His skin was slightly warmer than the air, the chill of his silver rings like spots of ice against her palm.

He grinned at her. “Ready to commit high blasphemy?”

“Always.”

Then Solmir plunged them into the dark.

Neve’s vision adjusted quickly to the gloom—the equivalent of days spent in gray scale had already altered her sight. But there wasn’t much to look at. The walls of the cavern were smooth stone, curving into a sloped ceiling. Flecks of mica glittered on the equally smooth stone floor, canted steeply downward. If she sat and pushed off, she could probably slide on it.

The thought made a nervous giggle rise in her throat; Neve clamped her teeth together to keep it in. Even though she could see, she kept one hand in Solmir’s, the other gripping the bone.

A sound breathed up from the depths of the cave. Neve clasped Solmir’s hand hard enough for his rings to dig into her skin; she pressed forward until the only thing separating their bodies was the bulky fabric of his coat.

“Jumpy?” he asked.

“I have reason to be.”

“Not as much as I do. You’re the one with the stabbing implement.” Solmir took a step farther into the dark, pulling himself away from her, though their hands stayed clasped. Neve made herself keep the distance as she followed.

Her thoughts turned, inexplicably, to Raffe.

Neve shook her head, a tiny shudder, just enough to expel the memory of Raffe’s kiss, his skin, his gentleness. Later, she admonished herself. She could think about him later, delve into that knot of feeling and pick it apart. Or she could leave it to freeze over, ossify, become something that would have to be cracked and broken rather than untangled. Keep shoving it down. She’d gotten so good at that.

An impatient tug on her hand—Solmir, tilting his head to the side to direct her gaze. A bloated, wormlike corpse lined the wall, as long as three grown men were tall. One of the Serpent’s children, a lesser beast long dead. The thing’s skin was a patchwork, like a snake in half molt, or meat left out too long.

And at one end, a gaping maw full of teeth.

Neve recoiled, fear making all the hair on her arms raise, before logic snapped in and told her the lesser beast was dead. She looked to Solmir. “Are you going to take its magic?”

“That thing has been dead for a while,” Solmir answered. “Whatever magic it had is gone.”

“To the Kings?”

“Unfortunately.”

Neve kept her neck craned as they passed the corpse, unwilling to completely turn her back on it until the path curved and it was lost from sight. Even then, she couldn’t shake the gooseflesh rippling over her shoulders.

What started as one tunnel into the earth expanded the deeper they went, more corridors bored into the stone walls at irregular intervals. Some of them were large enough to walk through, but others were so narrow that you’d have to crawl. Neve didn’t let herself look at them for too long. Just thinking of inching through the earth like that made her palms clammy.

Finally, their path leveled off, terminating in a circular cavern. Tunnels branched in all directions, too dark to give a clue to what they held. Solmir stopped and dropped her hand, turning to glare at each tunnel in turn.

Neve crossed her arms. “Well? Where to now?”

“Give me a minute.” For the first time she could remember, Solmir looked completely unsure. He shook out his shoulders, making his hair sway over his back. A moment, then he flexed his fingers, wiggling them as if he could coax some direction from the air. Trying to feel out the Serpent’s power.

Trying, and apparently not getting very far. “Are you finding the right tunnel or calling a wayward dog?”

“Your Majesty, I beseech you for the gift of your silence.”

She shifted back and forth, looking warily around the circular space while Solmir tried to figure out which tunnel to take. Her vision was somewhat hazier down here. Shadows curled around the stone walls, thick and dark and ominous, and she fought the urge to slink closer to Solmir again, just for the solid reassurance of not being alone.

For all her mocking, she understood the principle of what he was doing. Power attracted power, he’d said, and he was full to the brim. So was the Serpent. If he listened to the magic within him, all that power he held so she wouldn’t have to, it should pull him toward the dying Old One.

Hopefully, before the dying Old One was pulled to the Five Kings, stuck in their Sanctum.

The Seamstress had told them that the Serpent was holding on, purposefully trying to avoid being absorbed by the Kings, increasing their magic with its own. But there was no way to know if it had been successful. No way to know until they went down one of these tunnels and found either a god or more empty darkness.

Both options made her wrap her arms tighter around herself, cocooning in Solmir’s coat.

After what felt like an hour, Solmir’s hands dropped. He turned to her, and Neve had been wrong—it wasn’t surprise or even fear that looked most alien on his sharp-boned face. It was defeat.

“I don’t know,” he said, like it was as much a shock to him as it was to her.

For a moment, Neve stood in confused silence. Then she advanced a step, hands curling tight against her arms. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“Exactly what it sounds like.” Solmir reached up, nervously rubbed at the puckered scars on his forehead. His pointer finger turned the ring on his thumb round and round. “The magic isn’t telling me where to go. The power should call me, but it’s… it’s just not. Or, rather, it’s trying to, but…” He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s like the Serpent doesn’t want me to find it.”

She was right next to him now, glaring up as if she could use her eyes as daggers. “You mean you took us all the way down here, and you don’t know—”

His palm over her mouth muffled the rest of her poison, and Neve had her hand half raised to try to twist from his grip before she saw why.

The shadows at the edges of the room were closer. Thicker, almost opaque. A small circle of unshadowed stone surrounded Neve and Solmir, but other than that, the whole room was covered in viscous darkness.

And emanating from it—a low, gibbering sound.

Shadow-creatures. Unfettered magic, like what had burst from the broken ground, like what had seeped out of the lesser beast as her thorns made it unravel. But there was something different about these. They were still, uniform, as if they were being controlled.

As if they’d already attached to something bigger, their magic directed by something stronger than they were.

Solmir turned slowly, dropping his hand from her mouth when it became clear she’d stay quiet. But his other hand found her wrist, squeezed so hard it hurt.

“Magic from the Serpent?” Her lips barely moved with the question, like sound would shatter the shadow-creatures’ stasis. Even as she asked, though, she knew the answer was no. If the Serpent was dying, it wouldn’t have the strength to hold all this raw power at attention.

“No.” Barely sound, more a breath into her ear.

“Then can you take it?”

Slowly, Solmir shook his head. “It’s already claimed.”

Cold shot from Neve’s sternum, down through her middle. A numbing kind of fear.

The wall of darkness stood, impenetrable, pressed close. Then, in the darkness, a glint of white.

Teeth.

Teeth in the shadows, sharp and elongated, a hundred maws filled with fangs. At first, they just hung there, but then they all dropped open and spoke.

“The prodigal.”

A voice from everywhere and nowhere, layered and discordant. It took everything in Neve not to clap her hands over her ears. She tightened her grip on the god-bone in her other hand, wondering if it would work against something incorporeal.

All the teeth clicked together, a tandem fanged smile, before speaking in sync again. “Solmir, boy, we’ve been waiting for you. Welcome home.”

“Calryes,” Solmir breathed. Fear gleamed in his blue eyes, in his blanched face, and a terrified former god was the most terrifying thing Neve had ever seen.

But he recovered. Schooled his expression to cold, to haughtiness and impassivity. Almost casually, he turned, his death grip on her wrist his only tell.

Solmir shot a bladed grin into the shadows. “Hello, Father.”