Chapter Thirteen

Neve

She didn’t remember the return to the surface, not really. There were snatches of lucidity—the crumble of rock against her boots, the way her bedraggled hem slid along the stone floor, the feel of cave wall beneath one palm and Solmir’s skin against the other—but for the most part, Neve was drifting, caught in twists of shadows that coursed through her veins to join the knot of cold in her middle, spinning like a black sun.

A god’s magic, made her own.

There were substances some courtiers indulged in, bought on dimly lit street corners at strange hours of night. Things with odd names and odder looks, powders to place under the tongue or liquids to be carefully plied with a needle into a vein. Neve had never tried any of them, not having them offered and not caring enough to seek them out—wine did well enough for forgetting. But Arick had tried once, and had told her that it felt like flying, like some huge hand had plucked you up and flung you into the places between stars, and all you felt was the rush with no fear of the fall.

This was better.

Forget being flung; Neve was the place between stars, a cosmos held beneath her skin, a galaxy in human shape. She’d held up her hands after killing the Serpent, and it didn’t matter that she hadn’t done this before, that she didn’t know how to absorb power from another creature—it came to her anyway, slid beneath her skin like a dagger into a sheath. There was a bite of pain at first, but nothing like what she’d felt when she first woke up, when she pulled magic from the Shadowlands itself. It really was different, taking power as death freed it from an Old One or a lesser beast.

And though her veins blackened as if her blood had run to ink and thorns pressed through her wrists like brutal jewelry, Neve felt safe. She felt infinite.

When the initial rush of all that absorbed magic began to wear off, making her aware of her body as flesh and blood instead of a conduit of shadows, Neve could’ve cried at the loss. Darkness was so much easier than the intricacies of humanity.

She paused right at the cairn’s entrance, the band of shadow where the lip of it blocked the thin gray light. Her palm pressed against her chest; she gasped, as if she’d forgotten to breathe up until this moment.

“Are you hurt?”

Solmir, worry hardening the edges of his voice, making the question a demand. He’d released her hand at some point, a fact she didn’t realize until she saw him reaching back toward her, skin striped by light and dark as he stood on the outside of the cairn. His beard hadn’t grown in the days they’d been traveling, she noticed. Still cut short, framing a strong chin. One more reminder that time didn’t run as it should here. That life and its markers held little weight.

“I’m fine,” Neve replied, and her voice sounded distant, airy. “More than fine.”

His hand still stretched toward her, a slight tremor in his fingers. “It doesn’t… it doesn’t hurt?”

“Hurt is temporary.”

A frown wrinkled his brow, twisted that blade-shaped mouth to the side. He grabbed her hand, a darting motion like a killing strike, and Neve knew he wanted her to let the magic go, to let it flow into him rather than live in her. But it wasn’t something he could make her do. He’d kissed her to take it once, the first time—but she’d been confused and afraid then, scattered. And that was just power from the Shadowlands, not a god.

Now Neve was focused. Controlled. He wouldn’t have this magic until she decided to give it to him.

His brows drew down farther, but Solmir didn’t say anything. After a moment, he dropped her hand.

“It feels so different,” she murmured. Neve looked down at her wrists, twisted them gently back and forth to admire her thorns. There was a delicate beauty to them, for all their sharpness.

“It is different.” An emotion she couldn’t name wavered beneath the surface of his voice. “The Serpent let you kill it, but you still did the deed yourself. Power you gain through your own actions sits differently than power that’s given.”

Didn’t she know it. How power conferred by nothing but name or title was never truly yours alone, always tugged at and picked apart by those who bestowed it. How power could be nothing but the strings that held you up; maybe it hiked you higher than others, but you were still a puppet.

All Solmir’s vitriol against the other Kings made sense, given that framework. Especially now that she knew Calyres was his father, that he’d had less of a choice here than she’d always thought.

Odd, how much more she seemed to understand him with all this shadowed god-magic coursing through her.

Neve cocked her head. She felt loose and strung thin, the weave of her made threadbare by the magic she carried. “You didn’t tell me Calryes is your father.”

His expression shuttered, all that worry choking itself out, becoming hard angles and arrogance. “I wasn’t under the impression you were interested in my family history.”

“I am if your family history is going to interfere with me getting home.”

“I’ve wanted to kill the Kings for longer than you’ve been alive, Neverah. The fact that one happens to be my father is inconsequential.” Solmir crossed his arms over his chest. “We have no warm feelings toward each other. As I’m sure was made clear earlier.”

Earlier, when he’d been shackled by shadows, tortured by them. Kept busy.

She hadn’t thought of Valchior as the Serpent’s power settled into her veins, but now her conversation with the King’s projection came to the forefront of her mind. He’d called her Shadow Queen. Said the Kings knew why she was here. Said they welcomed it.

None of it made sense to her. If the Kings knew she was here as part of Solmir’s plan to bring them into the true world, where they could be killed, why would they welcome that?

The Kings were playing a different game than Solmir was. Same pieces, disparate moves. And Neve was caught in the middle.

It made her decision easy: She’d keep what Valchior said to herself.

“It was made perfectly clear that you and your father are estranged.” She crossed her arms, too, mirroring Solmir’s closed-off stance, still inside the lip of the cairn. “But you should’ve told me. If we’re supposed to be working together, you should tell me everything.”

Different games, different pieces, different rules. Just because she’d decided to keep secrets didn’t mean she wouldn’t try to tear Solmir’s out.

Still, Neve had no expectations of sudden honesty. So when the former King slid his blue eyes away from hers, softened his crossed arms, and sighed, it was as much a surprise to her as it seemed to be to him. “I’m a bastard. Calryes slept with my mother when he visited the walled city that became Alpera. Didn’t know I was a result until later.”

So he was from Alpera. It made sense—he looked like ice and snow, smelled like pines.

“My mother was the third-born daughter of the king. But once Calryes found out he’d sired a son—one who could use magic—he had everyone in the way of me becoming the heir killed.”

“Including your mother?”

His voice became slightly quieter. Still clipped, but roughened. “Including my mother. And my two half brothers.”

It made something in her chest simultaneously numb and burning, that he’d lost his mother, too. That he’d lived through that grief, and then let it be inflicted on her.

“We weren’t close,” he said, almost like he could read her emotions in the air around them. “To phrase it more kindly than it deserves. She wanted to forget I existed. My older brothers were cruel, to me and to everyone else—they would’ve made terrible kings. So when I realized what Calryes was doing, I didn’t try to stop him.”

The numbness passed, became only burning—sympathy or anger or something in between. Neve didn’t know if she was comforted or horrified to know that she and her villain had so much in common.

“The possibility of having a son ruling the land to Elkyrath’s immediate north was valuable enough to him to employ his famed assassins,” Solmir continued. “So yes, Calryes is my father, and the reason I’m one of the Five Kings. It wasn’t exactly my idea.”

The notion of Solmir being bullied into anything, even being a King, seemed utterly at odds with the man who stood before her now. But Neve knew about that, too. How family could crumble you, even when nothing else could.

So she wrenched her thoughts away from family. Refused to dwell on how the wounds in her and the wounds in him reflected each other, matching points of pain.

“It’s still so strange to me, to think of people just… born able to do magic.” Neve leaned against the cairn wall, tipped her head back to study the stone ceiling. It was almost comfortable to speak to Solmir like this, him in the light and her in the dark. “The world was so different.”

“So much worse,” Solmir muttered. He mimicked her, leaning his shoulder against the wall on the outside of the cairn. If the rock hadn’t been between them, their shoulders would’ve touched. “No good came of magic being loose, uncontained. There was no moral test to determine who could wield it and who couldn’t, and most people are terrible.”

“That reveals a rather bleak view of humanity.”

“I include myself in the assessment.” He slanted those blue eyes her way. “Are you saying you disagree?”

“That’s a trap.”

“Such a clever little queen.”

Neve worried her dry, chapped lip between her teeth. “Some people are good,” she murmured quietly. She thought of Raffe, steady and sure and kind. Of Red, who would probably never think of herself in such a way, but who loved so fiercely, so intensely that she was willing to walk into the Wilderwood in order to keep everyone safe. “I’ll admit that I haven’t met many of them, but I have to believe that people—most people—are good.”

Solmir was quiet for a moment. She couldn’t see his face, but she saw the way his body shifted, as he looked away from the cairn and out at the gray landscape. “For someone who has seen all the lies behind belief, you have a great capacity for faith, Neverah.”

Idly, Neve pressed the pad of her finger against one of her thorns. A prick, a warm well of blood, crimson leached to charcoal in the monotone of the underworld. Already, she could feel the magic settling in, trying to make a more permanent home of her. Trying to anchor her to the Shadowlands, make these changes permanent. Make her something that couldn’t go home.

With a sigh, Neve pushed off the wall and stalked out into the flat gray light of a sunless land, thorn-wreathed hands rising before her. “Let’s get this over with, then.”

No kiss this time. Even a bruising, cruel kiss like the one they’d shared to transfer power before felt like too much closeness right now, with the strands of history strung between them, the ghosts of understanding hanging close.

He’d killed Arick. He’d hurt Red. He would’ve killed Red’s Wolf, and though Neve certainly had no love lost for the monster who’d married her sister, one more grudge to stack up against Solmir was a good thing to have.

She couldn’t forget who he was, no matter their similarities. No matter how the longer she spent with him, the less like a complete villain he seemed. He was a former King, a fallen god. A means to an end.

So Neve put her hands on either side of Solmir’s face, pressed all those thorns against his sharp angles, and let the magic of the Serpent go.

It left as easily as it had come, sliding out of her and into Solmir, though it took longer than it would have if she’d kissed him. The thorns on her wrists shrank as his eyes blackened, the veins in her arms paled as his darkened. The changes flickered, not permanent, only flashes as Solmir took the magic and stored it away, a vessel for power. He shuddered between her palms.

When all the magic had been drained from her, Neve dropped her hands. Solmir stayed with his head bowed, shivering a little before opening his eyes to hers. “I half believed you were going to keep it.”

He said it like he knew, like he’d mapped her thoughts on her face. Neve was less and less concerned with the changes this power wrought in her. Less and less concerned with what it might mean for her soul. It’d be so easy to keep the magic, keep the control it offered. To let herself become part of this dead world, mighty and untouchable, damn the consequences.

But Neve had a life waiting. People waiting, people the man before her had hurt. Who he’d hurt again, if he had to.

Neve turned, striding into the cracked desert. The world rumbled softly beneath her feet, as if it was past the point of ever being truly stable again.

“We only need one monster,” she said. “And you’re already so good at it.”

The mirror was gone.

Neve lay cradled in the tower of twisting tree roots, white bark threaded with veins of shadow. They’d shaped themselves around her—curled to her temple so she could rest her head, slithered around her back so she could lay on her side. The same long, white shroud shifted against her legs.

But the mirror was gone. At first, Neve thought maybe it was just too high for her to see, grown into a different portion of the trunk than last time. But in the lopsided logic of dreams, she knew it was gone. The only things here were Neve and the mist and the impossible tree she reclined against.

Was that supposed to make her panic? It didn’t. All Neve felt was puzzlement. Her head cocked to the side; the root cradling it slid away, job done. The others slowly shrank back into the labyrinth of their tower as she stood.

Neve craned her neck, peered upward. A faint hint of gold, miles above her head. It seemed brighter.

What had the voice called this, before? A place between. Between life and death, between two worlds. Red on one side and her on the other.

You’ve taken the first step.

The voice. Stronger this time, less timid, still familiar in a way she couldn’t quite name.

Even knowing she wouldn’t see anyone, Neve still whipped around, staring, searching the endless fog. “What do you mean?”

Exactly what I said. She could practically hear the eye roll. Did the owner of the voice even have eyes? You took in a god’s power. Magic, the inverse of what Redarys holds. A dark reflection.

“I didn’t keep it.” Neve flexed her fingers, surreptitiously checking for thorns.

But you could have. You just chose not to. So much of this will come down to choice, in the end. A rueful laugh echoed through the mist, from everywhere and nowhere. A lesson learned isn’t easily discarded.

Neve frowned. “So that’s why the mirror is gone? Because I took the Serpent’s power?”

You don’t need a compass when you are yourself a map.

Her frown deepened. Neve continued forward into the fog, though no matter how far she walked, the tower of tree roots behind her never seemed to get farther away. “And in your metaphor here, the mirror is the compass.”

Well done.

“And I’m the map.”

Not you alone.

Neve’s feet stuttered. She paused a moment before picking up her ambling again. “Me and Red, then,” she said quietly.

A first and a second and a third to take what is left. Something melancholy in the voice’s tone now, like the mention of Red weighed as heavy on it as on Neve. But you and Redarys only, for the Tree to open. Prophecies can come piecemeal.

The cold knot in Neve’s middle felt suddenly heavy, like she carried lead behind her ribs. That place where she pushed everything, guilt and shame and every other emotion she didn’t feel like dealing with, the convenient cage where she held all her true feelings about everything that had happened since she and Red turned twenty. Her hand pressed against her stomach as if she somehow had to keep it from escaping, from ripping her open in its desperation to be known.

Such things can’t be pushed away forever. Mournful, tired. All truths must face the light, in order to have the power to get to the Tree. To get the key.

“But we know where the Tree is,” Neve said. Then, almost begrudgingly, “Or Solmir does, at least.”

The location is not everything. You need the power of two gods, one for each of you. And then, when you find the Tree, you must make your choice. To become what the stars have promised, or to leave the burden to those who come after.

Neve shook her head. “What do you mean? Make what kind of choice?” But even as the words left her mouth, they grew thin, faded, the tree roots and the mist blanking out.

“Neverah?”

Vision gray, swimming up out of her head, out of sleep. Neve sat up, wincing—sleeping on the hard-packed desert dust wasn’t doing her bones any favors. “What?”

Solmir sat a few feet away, back against a rock, legs stretched out in front of him as he whittled that piece of wood again. “You made a noise.”

She rubbed at the back of her neck, tried to run her fingers through her tangled hair. “Did you sleep?” she asked, because she didn’t want to ask what kind of noise she’d made, and she didn’t want to think about him paying close enough attention to be concerned at whatever kind of noise it was. Didn’t want to think about how she’d done the same, in those scant moments they stole for sleep, watching his face twist and his brows furrow when she should’ve been watching the empty landscape.

There was no night here. The not-sky was the same dim gray, no change in the monotonous horizon. But still, when Neve could barely keep her eyes open and grew unsteady on her feet, Solmir had insisted they stop at an outcropping of stones—real stone this time, not soldered-together bone. Neve had been asleep nearly as soon as she stopped walking, the fatigue of carrying a god’s power and then releasing it so draining that such vulnerability didn’t seem something to worry over. She knew Solmir would watch her back.

At some point, against all her better judgment, she’d started to trust him.

Valchior’s words, whispered in the dark. He’ll burn you in the end.

Not if I burn him first, Neve thought, a rebuttal to a memory. But it sounded hollow, even inside her own head.

Solmir’s sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, revealing muscled forearms as he carved. The rips in his sleeves gaped around the band of the tattoo circling his bicep.

“What’s that on your arm?” Neve drew her knees in toward her chest. She might be awake, but she wasn’t ready to start walking again just yet. And she was curious.

“Clan tattoo,” he said, clipped. “Old Alperan custom. They needled it into me when I became king.” He gestured to his arm with the knife, pointing at each band in turn. “Thick one is for the people. The one with all the lines is for the king before me—some uncle, I suppose, I didn’t really know the man before Elkyrathi assassins gutted him. And the thin one is for me. The least important part of the whole equation.”

He went back to his whittling. Neve bit her lip.

Here was another spit of common ground between them, unwelcome and unable to be ignored. The mantle of rulership, how it gave you power while stripping you of personhood. Especially when it wasn’t really something you wanted.

Neve had been raised knowing she would someday be Queen. The fact hadn’t held any sort of emotional weight; it was just what would happen, her inevitable trajectory. And once she did become Queen, she didn’t view the position as anything more than the means to an end. The circumstance of Red’s birth had condemned her to be sacrificed to the woods, and Neve resolved to use the circumstance of her own to save her. Queendom was something that had happened to her, not something she’d sought out.

Solmir was the only person to talk to here, but he was also one of the few people who would understand that.

She tucked her chin against her knees. “When my mother betrothed me to Arick, she didn’t even tell me before the announcement.”

The soft snick of Solmir’s knife against the wood stopped. “That’s less than ideal.”

“Quite.” Neve snorted. “It was… embarrassing, to be honest. He was so clearly in love with Red.”

“Hmm.” The sound of knife against wood grain picked back up, but slowly. Giving her space to talk about the man he’d inadvertently murdered.

But Neve didn’t think about that. Not right now. “I think that’s when I realized how little it mattered,” she said quietly. “The title, the power… you’re just somewhere for it to rest. The wheel of the kingdom keeps turning, whether you sit on the throne or someone else does.”

Solmir set down his knife and the piece of wood, looking out over the gray horizon. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “you would’ve been an excellent queen, in other circumstances.”

“I doubt it, to be honest. Though it probably would’ve been easier without you taking the form of my betrothed and twisting my desire to save my sister to your own ends.” It could’ve come out poisonous. Instead, Neve just sounded tired. Anger was a hard thing to sustain, even righteous as it was.

“Can’t argue there.” Solmir rubbed at his scars again.

She gnawed on her lip, pulling her knees tighter, a physical rendering of the anxious knot her stomach had become. When she finally managed to ask the question, it was quiet. “Why did you act like you cared, when you were him?”

He froze. Stared down at his hands as if they were alien things. Solmir’s brows knit, then his eyes closed, then the bitter line of his mouth pressed thin and tight. “At first, it was because I thought that was the part I needed to play.”

It ached to hear, even though she’d known it. Part of her was glad that at least he wasn’t lying. At least they’d arrived somewhere near honesty.

“He was your betrothed, and I didn’t know what kind of relationship you had. Even though he’d bargained with me to save your sister. But then…” Another tightening of the mouth, his hands knotting self-consciously into fists, and the next words sounded like he had to force them out. “Then I acted like I cared because I fucking did.”

She didn’t know how to respond to that. So she didn’t.

For a moment, it seemed like Solmir would leave it at that, leave the explanation bare and unadorned. But then he closed his eyes, opened them. Sighed. “You’re easy to care for, unfortunately,” he said. “You’re strong. You’re good.”

“I’m not good.” Neve nearly snarled it. “And I had to be strong. You made it so I had to be strong.”

“I did,” he said quietly. “So all your hatred is warranted.”

Something certainly burned in her middle, an alchemy of emotion that made her want to hunch over. But she couldn’t tell if it was hatred, warranted or not.

Solmir tugged all that long hair over one shoulder and started twisting it into a smoke-colored braid. When it was done, he let it drop onto his chest. “I didn’t kill Arick, there at the end.”

“Is that supposed to exonerate you?”

“Nothing can exonerate me. I know that.”

All that not-quite-hatred in her middle coiled tighter.

“If my plan had worked—if I had been able to bring the others through, destroy them—I would’ve let Arick go,” Solmir continued. “It was Red who killed him. To close the door.”

She and Red, both with blood on their hands. It should’ve been a surprise, but instead it was just another thread in their tragedy. All Neve could manage to do was nod.

They sat there a moment in silence, neither looking at the other. “Tell me about being a King,” Neve said finally. “When you were human.” She didn’t want to talk about herself anymore, whether she was good or strong. Better to hear about him, to learn what she could while she was trapped here with Solmir as her only way home.

Solmir tugged on his hasty braid, lips pressed together in thought. “Alpera wasn’t much, back then. Centuries ago, I’ve stopped trying to count how many. Just a handful of people in the snow, surviving. Holding out against the Oracle.”

The Old One they were going to next. The hair on the back of Neve’s neck prickled as she thought of the Serpent’s last confession, land laid to waste and water poisoned. “What did it do?”

“The Oracle isn’t like the others.” Solmir picked up the whittled wood he’d laid aside, twisted it in his hand. It was starting to take shape, though Neve couldn’t quite tell what it was supposed to be yet. “Monstrous, but in a subtle way. The Old Ones weren’t really the kinds of gods that garnered worship, but the Oracle did—peddling truth in exchange for sacrifice.” He swallowed. “Worshipping the Oracle always ended in letting it devour you.”

“Wonderful thing to find out right before we pay it a visit.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem.” His voice was dark, not trying for any kind of levity. “In fact, I can’t wait to kill the thing.”

With that, he stood, pushing his carving knife and the piece of wood back into his boot. Neve swung his coat over her shoulders again, patting the pocket to make sure the god-bone was there. It was a comforting weight against her hip.

“How much farther is it?” she asked as she slid into her borrowed boots.

Squinting, Solmir raised his hand, pointer finger leveled at the bone-mountains in the distance. It wavered in the air for a moment before he settled it over one particular shape—more rounded, with a jutting promontory that extended level to the ground. “There,” he said, letting his hand drop. “That’s where we need to go to find the Oracle.”

“Looks like quite the walk.”

“Looks farther than it is.” He started forward, long legs eating gray ground. “And it’s not the walk you should be worried about. It’s the climb.”