Chapter Fourteen

Neve

He was not being facetious.

The walk to the mountains was surprisingly easy. The ground was flat, making the distance look simultaneously closer and farther than it really was, and for once the earth stayed still. Being in the Shadowlands meant they didn’t need food or water, so they didn’t have to stop, and despite walking untold miles, Neve barely felt it in her muscles. It should’ve been disturbing, maybe—this reminder that, here, she wasn’t necessarily alive, at least not in the sense she was used to—but mostly, it was convenient.

Until they got to the edge of the range.

What had seemed like the smooth side of a hill was ridged and spurred with bone up close. Had there been a sun, this would’ve blocked it out, a huge shelf of piled ivory that looked somehow precarious, despite its size and age. She couldn’t shake the memory of what they’d seen on the way to the Serpent, the huge piece of mountain tumbling down to the ground in a cloud of bone dust.

And there was the matter of its height.

Solmir, apparently, had no such misgivings. One booted foot found purchase on what looked like a jutting tibia; his hand curled around the dome of a misshapen skull. “It’s not that far. We’re only going to the top of the first ridge.” His head jerked up and to the side—a promontory speared out over the side of the bone-mountain, made of what looked like the massive knot of a vertebra. “And the way down the other side is easier than the way up.”

But the shudders had already set into her shoulders; Neve’s fingers were numb in the sleeves of his coat. “It’s tall,” she said in a small voice.

“Is that a problem?”

“Not a problem, no.” But the lie was in her tone, and Solmir heard it.

He looked up, sighed. Jumped down from where he hung on the bones and turned to her, quirking an eyebrow. “Neverah Valedren, are you telling me that you—the Shadow Queen, stealer of sentinels, killer of gods—are afraid of heights?”

She scowled at him in answer.

Solmir laughed. He tipped his head back, scars darkly shadowed on his forehead, and he laughed at her.

Neve’s scowl deepened. “Glad it entertains you.”

“It doesn’t entertain me so much as shock me.” He shook his head, messy braid swinging. “You don’t seem scared of much, Your Highness, and the fact that something so pedestrian as heights is what finally gives you pause is deliciously ironic.”

Her arms crossed, tugging his coat tight around her. “I fell off a horse as a child. A tall horse.”

“Yes, I’m sure it was very traumatic.” He waved a dismissive hand. “But you don’t really have an option here. We need the power of two gods to get to the Heart Tree. And the Oracle will be easier to kill than the Leviathan.”

She knew she didn’t have options, knew that she had no choice other than to climb up this massive pile of bones and kill the god at the top. Neve flexed her fingers back and forth, like the mountain was something she could fight.

Solmir watched her, hands hooked on his hips, face unreadable. “I won’t let you fall, Neve.”

Reassurance still sounded so odd, coming from him. She turned away from the mountain, looked at Solmir instead.

A moment, then he shrugged. “I need you.”

Simple truth, uncolored by emotion. She nodded, one jerk of her head.

“This section is secure.” Solmir kicked at the tibia he’d been using as a foothold. “The Oracle lives on top of it and can’t leave. The mountain won’t fall as long as the god is there.” He inclined his head toward the bones, stepping aside. “You go first. I’ll tell you where to put your hands and your feet.”

Her insides were simultaneously tense and shivery. Neve mimicked what she’d seen him do—one foot on the tibia, then gripping the skull. Her hand trembled, slightly, but Solmir made no mention of it.

“Pull yourself up,” he said, low and even. “Then, you see that piece of rib sticking out above your right hand? Grab that next…”

And so, directed by the former King at her back, Neve climbed the bone-mountain.

When they reached the top, her limbs felt like limp strings. Neve managed to walk over to a chunk of unidentifiable bone and sit down, breath coming heavy, all the fear she hadn’t let herself feel as she climbed pouring into her nervous system at once. She buried her head in her hands and shuddered.

It was ridiculous, her consuming fear of heights. The fall from the horse started it, and it had only been nurtured the older she got—such a pedestrian fear, just like Solmir said. But being the First Daughter and then the Queen didn’t give one much time to climb walls, so the fear remained, swelling and unconquered.

And it was refreshing, almost, to fear something so simple. Heights instead of forests, climbing instead of loss.

After a moment, she felt Solmir come sit beside her. She steeled her shoulders, waiting for him to make some cutting remark, but none came.

“Would you look at that,” he said, stretching out his legs and propping his arms up behind him. “You did it.”

“I did,” she replied.

He sighed. “And now for the hard part.”

“Could we take a minute first? Going right from mountain-climbing to god-killing might be a bit overwhelming.”

Solmir snorted, reaching down to pull out his carving and small dagger from his boot. “Take five, even. The end of the world can spare that much.”

Neve closed her eyes, took a few deep breaths. When she felt a bit steadier, she glanced at him from the corner of her eye. His knife dug at the wood in his hand, though the curve of his palm still kept her from seeing what exactly he was carving.

“What is that?”

A flinch; he hadn’t seen her looking. Solmir’s hand closed around the wood, as if he’d hide it from view, but then he opened his fingers on a sigh. “It’s not finished,” he hedged. “And it’s not very good.”

“Horseshit. Let me see.”

“Such a mouth for a queen,” he muttered, dropping the wood into her palm. Neve turned it over.

A night sky. He’d carved a night sky, a moon and scattered stars.

He shrugged again, looking out over the gray horizon instead of at her. “I didn’t realize how much I missed the sky until I saw it again.”

She rubbed her thumb over the whorls of stars, along the dip of the crescent moon. “I miss it, too,” she murmured.

“Keep it.”

“No.” She turned to him, holding out the carving. “You said it wasn’t finished.” A smirk picked up her mouth. “An unfinished carving is hardly a gift fit for a queen. Give it to me when it’s done.”

“Assuming I have time to finish it before the Shadowlands collapse.”

“You will.” She said it like a command.

They looked at each other, half anxious and half confused and wholly trying to hide both feelings. Then Neve turned back to the horizon to see where all her climbing had taken her.

They sat on a shelf of bone, the vertebrae of some impossibly large thing, pockmarked and shining white in the gray-scale dimness. Behind them, a gigantic skull, the eye sockets big enough to drive a carriage through. It took her a moment to comprehend its shape, blown into such epic proportions, but there was the long snout, ending right before the vertebrae on which she stood, and the remnants of fang-like teeth below it.

A wolf. A giant wolf.

“Another dead Old One?” She sounded so polite, though her eyes felt as if they were going to fall out of her head.

“The Wolf.” Solmir stood up, went to kick the toe of his boot against one of the oversize teeth. “The real one. Ciaran killed one of its whelps. That’s how he got his evocative nickname.”

Ciaran. The first Wolf of the Wilderwood. Even knowing that the monster of legend was technically her sister’s father-in-law, hearing him spoken of like a peer still made her thoughts stutter.

Solmir looked at the wolf skull with only vague interest, but there was something in his eyes that said his mind was turned toward the same story hers was.

“You’re the villain in that one, you know.” She said it lightly. “The tale of Ciaran and Gaya.”

Another kick against a giant tooth. “Every story needs one.”

“Having become a villain myself, I assume there’s more to that particular story.”

One knife-slash brow raised as Solmir turned to face her. “Do you consider yourself a villain?”

It’d been a jibe, not an invitation for scrutiny. Neve shifted uncomfortably, tugged at the loose thread on the hem of her tattered sleeve. “I’m sure Red does.”

“I think Redarys’s feelings about you are a bit more complicated than that.” His finger twisted at the silver ring on his thumb. “You were trying to save her, after all.”

“When she didn’t need to be saved,” Neve murmured. “When she told me to let her go. If I’d just listened…”

She trailed off, not needing to finish the thought. If she’d just listened, she wouldn’t be here. If she’d just listened, the cosmic question of the Kings and their souls and the Shadowlands and the Wilderwood could’ve been left for someone else to deal with.

“It takes more than not listening to make a villain,” Solmir said. “With the caveat that I’m not an expert on the subject, having left most of my humanity behind long ago, that sounds mostly like human nature. We’re rather predisposed to think we’re always in the right.”

Neve made a rueful sound. “What about you, then? Were you actually the villain?”

He crossed his arms, staring out into the gray sky. “It’s a more complicated story than you’ve probably heard. But yes, I was undoubtedly Gaya’s villain.”

She didn’t ask him to elaborate. But she did give him one arched brow, similar to the expression he turned on her when he wanted an explanation.

Solmir took the hint. He pulled in his knees, rested his forearms on them. Making himself smaller, almost subconsciously, before starting the tale that she’d heard so many times before.

“Gaya and I had been betrothed since we were children. I didn’t ever imagine a life that didn’t have us together. I assumed she didn’t, either.” A rueful noise. “I was wrong.

“She used to sneak out,” he continued. “Pretend at being common. Valchior didn’t really mind—he didn’t give much thought to his family, anyway, and Tiernan, as his oldest daughter, was his heir. Valleyda wasn’t strictly matrilineal then, but the oldest child inherited, regardless of sex or gender.” He picked at his thumbnail; nerves always sat strangely on Solmir, built for arrogance and cold. “That’s where Gaya met Ciaran, out in one of the villages. And I didn’t know anything was happening between them until they ran off to the Wilderwood, after we’d created the Shadowlands.” A pause. “It was my fault, I think. Assuming she was happy in the role she’d been given. Assuming she didn’t want more.”

Neve shrugged but didn’t refute him. He was right. “Were you angry, when she fell for Ciaran?”

“I wasn’t thrilled,” he said, “but I wasn’t the scorned, furious wretch I’m sure the story paints me to be. I wanted Gaya happy. And if that was with Ciaran, I would make myself fine with it. My anger was reserved for the Wilderwood. For trapping her.”

“Is that why you wanted to kill Eammon?” His name still felt strange on her tongue, this monster her sister loved. “Because he… he is the Wilderwood?”

“Eammon needed to die for my plan to work,” he said simply. “The fact that he’s the Wilderwood—that he’s Gaya’s child—has no bearing on it.”

But there was enough of an edge in his voice to make that explanation too simple. Neve narrowed her eyes. “But you’d feel guilty. If it had worked, you would feel guilty.”

She expected him to scoff at that, but Solmir only went on picking at a thumbnail. “Maybe,” he said finally. “But I have so much to feel guilty for already. What’s one thing more?”

“I don’t believe you really think that.”

“Don’t try to dupe yourself into believing I’m remorseful, Neverah.” He snapped out her name, rising to stand, looming over her and blocking out gray light. “All of this is means to an end. Remember that. It will go better for you if you do.”

Neve stood, too, glaring up at him. “Don’t mistake understanding for forgiveness.”

“As you say, Shadow Queen.”

They stood there, the air tension-thick between them. She was the one to break, to turn away. He wasn’t worth her anger. He kept trying to tell her that.

Neve turned to look out over the emptiness of the Shadowlands, over the remains of the gods they stood on, searching for a subject change. “There must’ve been a great many Old Ones, to make a whole mountain range from their bones.”

“Not really.” Solmir seemed as grateful to change the course of the conversation as she was. “This is the remains of three, I think, plus some of their lesser beasts. The Wolf, the Rat, the Hawk. They all had territories near here.”

Three Old Ones, making false mountains that would put the Alperan Range to shame. Neve tried to imagine the sheer size of them, but it made an ache begin in her temples. “So they didn’t get pulled to the Kings’ Sanctum to die?”

He shook his head. “These three died early,” he said. “When the Kings could still leave the Sanctum, before they mired themselves in so much power they were stuck there. They stabbed these Old Ones for their power and left their bones here after they absorbed it. The Oracle took up residence soon after.” A feral smile twisted his mouth. “And I made sure it couldn’t leave.”

“Why didn’t you kill it then?”

“Believe it or not, god-killing is only something I’ve taken up recently. Each Old One that dies makes this world a little more unstable.”

“Then why were the Kings doing it?”

“Because they want out,” Solmir said, turning away from the horizon and toward the mounds of bones beyond. “When the Shadowlands are gone, their souls are free. The Kings welcome the Shadowlands’ dissolving.”

We welcome it. Valchior’s voice, whispering in the dark.

To Neve’s right, stark against the gray sky, something jutted out from the side of one of the bone-peaks. Its dimensions made it difficult at first for her to realize it was another skull, as large as the Valleydan palace. The Hawk, apparently. It looked vaguely avian, with a short beak thrust out and pointed down toward the ground, like the Old One was screaming across the cracked landscape.

With a shudder, Neve turned to follow Solmir farther into the mountain made of corpses.