Chapter Twenty-Six

Neve

The eye looked at her.

Neve had never felt so small. Not in the presence of the Serpent, its huge bulk unknown but felt in the dark, and not before the Oracle, an inhuman thing in a humanoid shape. Not even next to the Heart Tree, the nexus between this world and the real one.

That huge, dark eye seemed to see all the way through her, and though Neve had spent quite a lot of time in the company of gods in the past weeks she’d been in the Shadowlands, this was the first time she felt like it.

The paralysis that held her didn’t extend to Solmir. He cursed and splashed through the rising water to her side, grabbing her still-thorny arm and spinning her to face him, his other hand cupping the back of her head to press her face against his chest. “Don’t look, Neve.”

A laugh echoed through the shaking castle, worse even than the words had been. Neve clapped her hands to her ears, mindless of their thorns, and made a low, pained sound.

“Apologies,” the Leviathan said. “I thought she could take my true form. You can, after all, and you’re no god anymore.”

“I’m not enjoying it,” Solmir growled.

Another laugh, this one sounding truly amused. “You always were the rudest of them, Solmir.”

The water was at their waists, too dark to see through and ice-cold. Neve pushed herself as close to Solmir as she could, teeth beginning to chatter. He touched her carelessly now, with none of the distance he’d shown as they made their way to the Heart Tree. He’d given her all the magic and apparently didn’t want any of it back.

What had changed?

No time to puzzle over it now, not while they were stared down by the most powerful Old One left, not while her mind felt as if it were starting to winnow away at the edges as she was scrutinized by something so massive, so unknowable.

Solmir’s arms tightened around her. “Whatever you’re planning to do,” he snarled at the god, “do it.”

“As you wish,” the Leviathan said.

In an instant, the water rose, closing over their heads, drowning them in black and cold. The current rushed around them, trying to pull them away from each other; she clawed into Solmir’s back, held on to his hair. His arms felt stone-hard from the strain of his muscles.

Neve held her breath until it felt like her lungs would burst. They couldn’t die here, not ensouled as they were, but it still felt like death when her mouth inevitably opened, finally took in a drowning throatful of the dark, endless sea.

She choked on it, and knew nothing.

Neve came to with her head propped against Solmir’s bare shoulder. His skin was wet, made sticky with drying salt, enough to make it hurt when Neve peeled herself off him. Though he’d lost his shirt in the maelstrom, she’d kept her nightgown, kept the dark coat. Her hand delved deep into the pocket, heart in her throat. It only migrated back down to her chest when her fingers closed around the god-bone and the branch-shard key. Neve let out a thankful breath, tipping back her head to see where they were.

A cavern. Huge and salt-pale, ridged with coral on the floor and the wavy lines of erosion on the walls, but mostly dry, and full of breathable air.

But whatever relief she might’ve felt was eclipsed by the sight of the Leviathan at the front of the cavern.

It had changed—partially, at least. Made itself something easier to comprehend, something that didn’t tear at the border of her brain to contemplate. Before them, a figure on a throne, beautiful in the way a shark was beautiful, all paleness and sharp edges. Its black, flat eyes watched them with something like curiosity, though the emotion wasn’t quite so human as that. Like an animal trying to feign interest, imitating things it didn’t really understand or care about. The flesh, though pale, looked leathery, like it had been embalmed.

The Leviathan’s lover, she realized in a rush, remembering what the Seamstress had said about how the Old One had made the corpse into a puppet. The knowledge made the creature on the driftwood throne even more awful to look at.

Though it was still better than looking directly at the massive being behind it—the thing she’d seen peering into the castle, the thing that had spoken with the terrible voice. Vaguely sharklike, but large enough that Neve could still see only pieces of it at a time, flickering in and out of view like something hidden behind a gauzy curtain.

She was thankful for that.

The entire cavern was bathed in a pale glow that made both shapes hazy, and if she focused on the man-figure, the monster behind it faded to nearly nothing but occasional flashes, shadow and light seen from fathoms below the surface.

Strings of seaweed, leached of color like everything else here, wound around the man-figure’s ankles and wrists and neck, snaking backward into the haze. The leash by which the vast, sharklike thing manipulated the marionette it had made of its former penitent.

Neve fought down a shudder.

The stone of the cavern was damp; barnacles clung here and there, shells scattered, holding tiny pools in shining upturned centers. Spikes of glittering rock thrust up from floor and ceiling, still speckled with waterdrops. Neve glanced behind her—the back wall of the cavern was open, and beyond was the black ocean, glassy and endless. The water stopped right at the cavern’s lip, held back by some invisible force.

She thought of drowning, swallowing cold water. The Leviathan could snap its hold so easily, let all that immense sea come rushing in on them.

Next to her, Solmir pushed up on shaky legs. He didn’t look at her, blue eyes fixed on the man-monster-god, but when he held out his hand, she took it, let him pull her to standing beside him.

“Welcome.” Still that reverberating, terrible voice, but softened somehow. Forced through a throat that had once been human, and thus made easier for her mind to comprehend. “So pleased to have the pleasure of your company.”

“You didn’t exactly extend an invitation we could refuse,” Solmir said drily.

Strings of seaweed tipped the corpse-puppet’s head back, unhinged its jaw. Laugher rolled out, a slithering tone that hurt Neve’s ears. “Come now, once-King, you didn’t think you could sail through my kingdom without my knowing? I may be diminished, but not so much as that.” The thing rose from its seat, fluid as a current despite its seaweed articulation. “I assumed you knew I would call on you.”

“You know what they say about assuming.”

“Manners, manners.” The Leviathan’s tone was distracted, its shark-black eyes fixed on Neve rather than Solmir. With a subtle twitch of his shoulder, Solmir put himself between the two of them, chin tipped up, wet hair dripping down his back.

The Leviathan smiled, showing razor rows of teeth. “Step before her all you want, boy,” it said quietly, “but you can’t hide that kind of magic.”

And for the first time since he’d given it to her, before she stepped into the Heart Tree, Neve truly looked at what magic had made her.

Before, it had only darkened the veins at her wrists, her neck, places where skin was thin and the nexus of blood showed through. But now, as she pushed up the sleeves of Solmir’s coat, her arms were dark-laced all the way to her elbows. And when she shrugged the coat off her shoulder, all the veins there were black, too, coalescing in a knot of shadow right over her heart. Thorns made vambraces around her forearms, studded the jut of her collarbone.

She looked up at Solmir and saw the reflection of her own eyes in his. Black, the whites swallowed, with only a slight hint of brown at her irises. Her soul, still in there.

She thought of how Solmir’s eyes had flickered in those moments when he took in so much magic, like his soul wanted to sink into it, become part of it. Neve didn’t feel anything like that, didn’t feel anything that might be a sinking soul, and she didn’t know what that meant.

“You held all this?” she whispered. “But you didn’t look… I didn’t…”

A swallow worked down his throat. “I’m rather accustomed to holding shadow, Neverah.”

Another chuckle from the Leviathan, standing before its driftwood throne. “And this isn’t even the power of a god. You’ve only killed two, correct? The Serpent, the Oracle? And you had to use that up to get to the Heart Tree. So this is just all that magic from the lesser beasts you’ve slaughtered along the way.” It shook its head, bones clicking. “It appears you had a practical reason for holding it all, once-King, if she changes so with such a small amount of power.” Black eyes narrowed, and the seaweed tendrils attached to either side of its mouth pulled rubbery lips into a sinister, too-wide smile. “More than one practical reason, I mean.”

Solmir’s jaw clenched beneath his beard.

“You had a change of heart.” The Leviathan’s bony hand rose to rest over where its heart should be. “Or should I say a change of soul?”

Neve’s brows drew together. “What is it talking about?”

“Yes, Solmir.” The Leviathan steepled its fingers, smiling again. Behind it, the flash of a massive dark eye, there and then gone. “What am I talking about?”

Silence in the cavern, other than the drip of salt water from the ceiling.

Solmir’s eyes closed. He pulled in a breath. He shifted forward in front of Neve, so no part of him touched any part of her.

“I changed my mind about sacrificing you,” he said finally.

For a moment, Neve stood motionless, thoughtless, as much a marionette as the corpse before the throne. When she found her voice, it wasn’t articulate, wasn’t anything but wounded. “What?”

He’d tensed as if he expected her fist, but the broken sound of her question seemed to wound him more. Solmir kept his eyes closed, reached up to rub at the puckered scars on his brow. “The easiest way to bring the Kings to the surface is with a vessel,” he murmured, like he didn’t want the Leviathan to hear, like he wanted this confession to be between them alone. “Something to hold their souls and take them to a place where they can be killed. And magic and souls… you know how that goes. It’s hard to carry both.”

“But you did. I am, currently.”

“Hard, not impossible.” He dropped his hand, finally looked at her. His expression… she’d seen Solmir look pained, but this was different. His eyes were almost beseeching, a shine in them that spoke of deep aches unable to be hidden, no matter how he wanted to. “I was going to let them use you as a vessel. When the Heart Tree opened and they were drawn to it, the one of us with no magic would’ve been the easiest for them to take.”

He said it quick and harsh, almost like he thought it could hide that look on his face, the way his hand kept twitching toward her and falling.

Neve swallowed. She knew how to keep calm when receiving terrible news, knew how to remain poised even in the worst circumstances. So she tilted her chin and steeled her spine and hoped that was enough to hide the burn in her eyes. Foolish. She was so foolish, to have thought he…

She didn’t let herself finish that. “And what changed your plan, once-King?”

The use of the term from her hit home. Solmir flinched, just slightly, just enough for her to see it. “What changed my mind,” he said, “is that I realized I couldn’t kill you. Not even to save the fucking world.”

Neither one of them moved. Neither one of them spoke. They only stood there, the confession thrown between them like a gauntlet.

At the front of the cavern, the Leviathan clapped its hands. “Well,” it said, “that does make things interesting.”

Solmir turned away from her, the movement heavy, like something weighed him to the spot. “Happy?” he spat at the Old One. “Is this why you brought us here?”

“No,” the Leviathan answered, its tone nearly giddy. “Just an added bonus.”

“Then why?”

“Curiosity.” The Leviathan tapped one bony finger against its jaw. “I felt the Heart Tree open. I felt someone enter. But then I felt them come back out.”

There was something calculating in its tone, something that told Neve the god didn’t speak the whole truth, only a piece of it. But maybe that was just how gods talked.

“Odd, that a quest to find the Heart Tree would be successful, only to fail right after,” the Leviathan continued. Its fingers twitched. Around Neve and Solmir’s feet, a ring of coral began, slowly, to grow. “Odd, that someone would enter the nexus between worlds, their only way home, and then decide to stay.”

The coral grew faster now, nearly to Neve’s knees. She tried to step over it; a thread of seaweed wound from between the stones and tangled around her foot, holding her in place. When she stumbled, Solmir grabbed her arm, and she shook it off. She couldn’t take him touching her, not right now.

“The two of you fascinate me,” the Leviathan mused as the coral grew taller, now at Solmir’s neck. “The once-King and the Shadow Queen, tied together and yet separate, trying to bring things back into balance when you’re both so riddled in darkness. The Shadow Queen, especially. You chose the mantle; now I want to see how you’ll wear it.”

“By keeping me here?” Panic clogged her throat, the tiny prison the coral built making her breath come too fast, like her lungs couldn’t find enough air.

“For a time,” the Leviathan replied. She couldn’t see it anymore; the coral blocked everything but a circle of light above Solmir’s head. “Besides, it seems like you two have things to discuss. Enjoy the privacy.”

Then the circle of light closed, the coral prison complete, and they were plunged into total darkness.