Chapter Thirty

Neve

Tell me a story,” Neve said.

Time was a slippery thing at best in the Shadowlands, hard to hold on to, its passing difficult to mark. But in the utter darkness of their coral prison, it was completely impossible. They could’ve been there days, hours, and would have no way of knowing. There wasn’t even hunger or thirst to go on. The only things that ever changed were the occasional rumbles through the ground, the echoes of larger quakes elsewhere.

The shudders of a world breaking apart.

Solmir tilted his head back against the wall. Her eyes hadn’t adjusted enough to make out his facial expressions, but she knew one knife-slash brow was arched over one blue eye. “What kind of story?”

“Anything.” Neve shifted on the floor. It was impossible to find a comfortable angle in here, but it didn’t stop her from trying. “A fairy tale.”

He snorted. “A fairy tale.” A moment of thoughtful silence. “Did you ever hear the one about the musician’s lover?”

“Doesn’t sound familiar.”

“It’s old. Probably long fallen out of fashion.” A sigh, the rasp of his boot heels over stone as he stretched out his legs as far as he could. “And it’s sad. Just a warning.”

“Most of them are, if you look at them hard enough.”

A grunt of assent. “I’m no storyteller, but the tale goes like this: Once, there was a musician—I don’t remember what instrument he was supposed to play, take your pick—who was deeply in love with his wife. But she got sick and died.”

“Starting out strong with the sad part.”

“Hush, Your Majesty. Anyway, she died, and he was very upset, moping about the village, as one does. Until he was approached by a wise woman who could harness the magic in the world.”

Neve sat up a bit straighter. Tales about the time when magic was free—before it was bound up in the Wilderwood and the Shadowlands, when anyone who could sense it could bend it to their will—were fascinating to her. She couldn’t quite wrap her head around the notion of power being free to everyone. The Order said that it had been a time of discord, people using magic for petty reprisals and selfish gain more often than not. But the stories and the historical accounts didn’t paint it that way. More often, it seemed people had used magic for good, small amounts to make a crop grow strong or a child stop coughing.

“Anyway,” Solmir continued, “this wise woman said that a person’s essence never really died. It lingered on in the places they loved, in the elements that made up the world, the air and earth and fire and water.”

“Their soul lingered, you mean?” Neve asked.

Solmir shook his head. “Essence doesn’t translate to soul in the old languages. If you want to get technical, the closest translation would be reflection. The word used implies multiple parts of someone remaining after they pass—a faint impression of their emotions, their thoughts, the deepest parts of them. According to this story, at least, a soul isn’t the only thing that can stick around.”

Her lips pressed together. “Makes our plan to get rid of the Kings seem less than ironclad.”

“It’s different,” Solmir said. “The Kings aren’t whole people anymore. They’ve lost themselves in bits and pieces.” A shrug, jostling her shoulder. “There isn’t anything left of them to reflect, once the soul is gone. Everything else has already been subsumed into the Shadowlands.”

“So if you keep your humanity,” Neve murmured, “you’re more than a soul.”

A pause. She felt his arm tense against hers. “You’re more than a soul,” he agreed.

Silence, for a handful of heartbeats. Then Solmir picked up the thread of the story again. “So the musician gets an idea, and asks the wise woman if someone could manage to coax the essence back to life somehow. She told him it wasn’t likely, but if he went to the place his wife loved most and played her favorite song—reminded her of all the things she loved in life—he might be able to call her back. There was one caveat, though. He had to start playing at sundown, and keep his eyes closed until sunup the next day. Otherwise, she’d fade.”

He’d said he wasn’t much of a storyteller, but the low cadence of his voice was soothing. Neve leaned her head against the coral as she listened, shifting it back and forth until she found some kind of comfort among the jagged edges.

“So the musician went all out. He made his wife’s favorite foods and packed them in her favorite blanket and went to the hill outside the village where they’d always go to watch the stars. He picked up his—well, whatever instrument it is he was supposed to play—and as soon as the sun went down, he started playing, eyes closed. He played for hours and hours, played until his fingers ached. When he’d nearly lost track of time, he felt his wife. The barest brush of her hand across his shoulders, the whisper of her voice at his ear. He kept his eyes closed. He kept playing.”

Why were her eyes burning? Neve blinked. The thought of someone calling after the person they loved, doing the impossible for just a chance at seeing them again, made her heart feel too big for her ribs to cage.

“When hours had passed and he was sure dawn had to be close, he saw a flash of light from behind his eyelids. And the musician, sure that he’d finally played through the night, opened his eyes, ready to see his wife.” Solmir paused. “He did. For a moment. She stood before him as hale and whole as she had been before she got sick. But then she vanished, and he saw that it was still night. The sun was still down. The light he’d thought was dawn was the glow of a torch—the villagers had come to check on him.” He shifted against the rock. “The end.”

She swallowed past a throat that suddenly wanted to close. “That was sad.”

“Told you,” Solmir murmured.

His silver ring hung heavy on her thumb, just loose enough for her to twist. “So what’s the moral?”

“Do all stories need morals?”

“They don’t need them, no, but it seems like most have them.” She frowned, spinning his ring. “And most of them aren’t particularly good, now that I think about it.”

He huffed a rueful laugh. “Then I’ll make one up.” Neve heard the slight thud of fingers drumming on his knees as he thought. “I guess ‘make sure it’s actually the sun and not a torch’ is too on the nose?”

It was her turn to make a rueful noise. “A bit.” The heavy ring turned around and around her thumb. “The moral,” she said finally, “is to make the most of the time you have, because chances are it will be shorter than you think.”

Silence, broken only by the soft sounds of their breathing. “Neve,” Solmir said finally, a breath above silence, “I—”

Whatever he’d been about to say was swallowed in the sound of rending stone. Their coral prison cracked open, seeping hazy gray light that made them both throw hands over their eyes. A gash appeared in the ceiling, wide enough for a tentacle to snake through.

It wrapped around Neve’s waist. Tugged.

Solmir was on his feet, teeth bared and eyes watering, lashing at the tentacle with the fist she’d just set back to rights. It did nothing—Neve felt her stomach flip as the tentacle pulled her through the crack in the coral ceiling, scraping her spine, the prison sealing itself closed again with a boom.

Her eyes stung and her vision blurred, unable to quickly recover from untold hours of utter darkness. The tentacle pulled her through the air and sat her down, her watering eyes unable to pick out anything but vague gray shapes.

Slowly, her eyes adjusted, feeling coming back into muscles made numb by close quarters. She sat on a finely upholstered chair, only slightly damp. Before her, a table.

Across from her, the Leviathan.

The god sat with long corpse-fingers folded beneath its rubbery chin, shark-black eyes avid. Thin ribbons of seaweed trailed off into the dark.

“Shadow Queen.” A wide smile, sharp teeth, black eyes. “We should talk.”

Gradually, her vision acclimated to light again, dim as it was. Gleaming place settings before her, surrounded by sumptuous foods the likes of which she hadn’t seen since a court dinner. The Leviathan—its corpse-puppet—sat across from her, watching her with blank, dead eyes.

But the sense she got from the massive god that pulled its strings was one of hunger. Hunger and curiosity.

The food before her, wine and bread and cheese, all looked perfect. But none of it was real. Illusions crafted by the god across from her, made to look like idealized versions of themselves. It was meant to comfort, Neve thought, but it did the opposite. That perfect wine was the exact opacity of blood, and in the gray-scale gloom, it was easy to imagine it would taste of copper instead of alcohol.

The seaweed threads at the corners of the Leviathan’s mouth pulled its lips back into a wide, sharp-toothed smile. “I know you’re not hungry, but I thought you might miss wine.”

Neve sat up straight, pulling the poise of a queen around her like a cloak, despite her tangled hair and bedraggled nightgown. “Good wine, yes.” She tapped a finger against the glass. “Not… whatever this is.”

“Thorny thing, you are. Both literally and figuratively.”

Her fists closed. Thorns pressed out from her forearms, tracking up darkened veins, catching the threadbare fabric of her skirt. She’d grown nearly used to the roil of shadowy magic in her center, the chill of it crouching at the edges of her mind, but the changes it wrought in her were still a shock every time she saw them.

The Leviathan’s sharklike eyes were hard to read, but she saw its head tilt toward her hand as if it noticed something. Solmir’s silver ring, glinting on her thumb. “What a hold you have on each other,” it murmured.

“I don’t know what you mean.” Not her strongest rebuttal, but Neve couldn’t let something like that hang in the air unchallenged. It was too vulnerable, like an organ pulsing outside the boundaries of a body.

“Oh, but I think you do.” One of the Leviathan’s hands dropped to the table, the other propping up its tilted head. It was a posture one would adopt while speaking freely to a friend, and seeing it on the corpse of the Leviathan’s once-human lover made her stomach knot. “You were there, Neverah Valedren. In the nexus between the worlds, with the sister who would do anything to bring you home, and you chose to stay.” Its smile widened. “Strange, how you and she toss roles back and forth. Savior and saved, villain and victim. Though you’re the only one who’s ever truly been a villain, aren’t you?”

Her jaw firmed. She didn’t respond.

“So I suppose it’s not that odd, after all, how you and the once-King are drawn together.” The Leviathan lifted a piece of bread, bit into it with those rows of shark teeth. The glamour on it wavered just as it entered its mouth—a gray, spongy mass of seaweed, making Neve glad she hadn’t tried the wine. “You both have experience being villains in complicated stories. Shouldering complicated mantles. Like that of the Shadow Queen.”

The god fell quiet. For a moment, silence, then the slam of something colliding with stone.

Neve’s head whipped around to follow the sound. The prison the god had built for them in an instant was a knot of spiking stone and coral, impenetrable and solid in the middle of the cavern. Another slam came from inside.

“Let him out.” It seethed from behind her teeth, an order she hadn’t meant to give. “It’s cruel to keep him in there.”

“You care enough for him to be treated kindly? After everything he’s done?” The Leviathan sounded positively delighted. It took a sip of not-wine. “No, I believe I will leave our once-King where he is for now. Let him cool off.”

A swallow worked down her dry throat. Neve almost reached for the wineglass by reflex, but then remembered the mess of seaweed the bread had turned into when the Leviathan ate it. Her hand curled back in on itself, empty.

“You’ve complicated things for him,” the Leviathan said quietly, with an air of someone thrilled to be delivering bad news. “Made it all so much more layered. This was never going to be an easy thing for either of you, but you’ve made it positively tragic.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve brought me out here to tell me anything useful.” Spine rigid, voice cold, a queen to her dark-wreathed bones. “I’d think gloating was below a god.”

“And I’d think you’d have learned enough of gods in your time here to realize that nothing is below us.” The Leviathan shrugged, the movement made jerky by the seaweed filaments attached to its shoulders. “Divinity is less complex than humans would like to think. Half magic, half belief. You don’t become a god until you think of yourself as one.” Another shark-sharp grin. “And I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think myself a god, worthy of worship.”

“You haven’t been worshipped in eons.”

“You’d be surprised.” The eyes of the puppet were blank, but they still managed to look almost sly. “And you’d be surprised how easy worship is to get back, under the right circumstances.”

Neve looked away from the puppet’s empty corpse-eyes, turning her attention instead to her surroundings. The table was in part of the cavern she hadn’t seen before, a small alcove carved by years of saltwater currents, set up on a rocky platform. Gaps in the stone above their heads shone with watery light, the ocean suspended like a glass ceiling.

“To answer your question,” the Leviathan said, as if annoyed that Neve’s focus had wandered, “I didn’t take you from your prison to impart any particular wisdom upon you, though if you have questions—good ones, clear ones—I might be moved to answer.” It folded its hands on the table, almost demure. “No, Neverah, Shadow Queen, I took you from your prison to satisfy my own curiosity. To take the measure of your soul and see what I thought of it.”

The answer took her aback, enough so that she couldn’t hide it with an icy, poised exterior. Neve blinked, then trapped her questions behind her teeth. The Leviathan clearly wanted her to ask, simply so it could have the pleasure of saying no, and it was a game she had no intention of playing.

The massive shape of the true god in the back of the cavern shifted, a gray haze of huge eyes and the suggestion of a shining fin. The puppet it controlled stood, began a stuttering pacing back and forth across from her.

“When you arrived here,” it said, all business, “you had the ability to pull magic directly from the Shadowlands. Correct?”

“So you get to ask questions, but I don’t?”

“I’m still waiting for you to come up with a good one,” the corpse answered. “And I’ll take that as a yes. Did it hurt?”

Neve pressed her lips closed. Sat still, fighting the urge to cross her arms like a petulant child.

The god, apparently, had little patience for her anyway.

“How much pain were you in, Neverah?” It came out like a roar through all those teeth, and the Leviathan’s skeletal hands slammed onto the table before her.

Neve jerked backward, hand raising—she didn’t realize she’d grabbed the god-bone from her pocket until she saw it gleaming white in her fist.

The Leviathan looked at the bone. Smiled. “Good,” it said softly. “You might need it.”

Before she could process that, the Leviathan picked up its strange line of questioning again. “The pain, dear, tell me how bad it was.”

“Bad.” Neve didn’t answer beyond that. She lowered her hand, nonsensically hiding the bone in the hem of Solmir’s coat, even though the god had already seen it.

The Leviathan nodded, thoughtful. “And now?” The corpse didn’t have eyebrows, but the seaweed-articulated muscles in its rubbery face still seemed to make one raise. “Now that Solmir has made you the vessel for the magic? Is there pain?”

“No.” Her fingers flexed, cold seeping through her bloodstream.

“I see.” The Leviathan’s hands clasped behind its back as it continued to pace back and forth. “I can’t read the future,” it said finally, still not looking at her. “Not like the Oracle, or the Weaver’s lover. But I can feel the currents of it, the ebb and flow.” Its head tipped back, looking at the black, glassy expanse of the ocean suspended over their heads. “It will be you.”

“What will be me?” That question she couldn’t swallow, and the Leviathan grinned to hear it, clearly pleased it had finally drawn one out of her.

“The vessel,” it said simply.

Talking in circles, giving answers that either cleared up nothing at all or told her things she already knew. Gods were a pain in the ass.

“So the things the Kings promised me in exchange for capturing you are, essentially, voided.” The Leviathan shook its head, sounding as irritated as Neve felt. “Not that I expected much else, to be quite honest. One should always be on their guard when bargaining with once-enemies.”

Something clicked in her mind, made her carefully curated stoicism fall away. “If the Kings sent you,” she murmured, “that means they were never coming.”

The Leviathan nodded, like a teacher encouraging a slow student. “They were strong enough to resist the pull of the Heart Tree. Not for long. But they didn’t need long.”

“They knew, then.” A rasping whisper, fear making her throat rough. “They knew what we planned. So why didn’t they try to stop us?”

“Because they didn’t want to. They wanted you to reach the Tree. And they counted on you to come back out. You’ve never been someone to leave a job half done.”

Clammy sweat chilled her back. Neve knotted her hands in her nightgown’s skirt, the bulky silver of Solmir’s ring slipping on her thumb.

“They counted on you,” the Leviathan repeated, “but that will backfire on them, I think. You took to shadow like a fish to water, pardon the saying. But I don’t think you’ll drown, Neverah Valedren.”

It would’ve been comforting, were it not for the nearly sorrowful tone.

Suddenly, the cavern lurched, so violently that Neve nearly tumbled from her seat. The dishes holding the false feast shook, the glasses falling to the floor. They rolled across the ground, wine turning back to murky seawater.

Neve braced her hands on the table until the shuddering subsided. When it did, she shot an alarmed look at the Leviathan. “Another quake?”

“Would that it were so simple.” The god righted its chair, jerky movements directed through the seaweed ropes leading back to the Leviathan’s true shape. It sat down, then held out a hand across the table, palm up. “That wasn’t a quake. That was a spasm.”

Behind it, in the dim, the massive form of the Leviathan churned, gray fin and black eye.

“I’m dying,” the Leviathan said simply. “We’re being pulled to the Sanctum, all of us, by the magic of my death throes.”

Matter-of-fact, precise. Neve’s whole body felt numb. She thought of what Solmir had told her in the coral prison, how the Leviathan dying would destabilize the Shadowlands entirely, speed up its dissolving. Drastically shorten the time left on their ticking clock.

And she still didn’t know what Solmir planned to do, how he planned to destroy the Kings now that he wasn’t giving Neve over to them as a vessel.

Heedless of the maelstrom of panicked thought swirling in her head, the Leviathan reached across the table and took Neve’s hand, the one still clutching the god-bone. “So here’s what I need to happen: Kill me, Neverah. Absorb my power before the Kings can.”

“Why?” It slipped from icy lips.

The look the god gave her was almost pitying. “Because your soul can take it.”

Another lurch reverberated through the ground, shaking water from the stalactites pointing wickedly toward the floor, rattling the table and all the illusions of plenty piled on it. Neve grabbed the table’s edge to stay steady, looking toward the coral prison that still held Solmir—a crack appeared at the very top, the same place the Leviathan’s tentacle had snaked in to bring her out, spreading slowly down the side.

The Leviathan stayed still, her hand still cradled in its palm, the god-bone still snug in her grip. It stared at her with those dead eyes, and behind it, the true shape of the god shuddered, flashes of massive gray bulk showing through the haze.

“We’ll be there soon, Neverah.” Even and calm, not at all like something dying. “You chose your path when you chose not to follow your sister. When you chose instead to pull the Heart Tree into you, make it something you could carry.”

The key woven into her hair was cold against the back of her neck. From the corner of her eye, Neve could see a strange, dark glow, like the shine of a star dipped in ink.

“Your way is set.” Skeletal fingers squeezed around hers. “Now all that is left is to follow it.”

The crack in Solmir’s prison widened with a groan. A bloodied, silver-ringed hand thrust out, clawed at the rock. “Neverah!”

“He believes in you,” the god murmured. Another crash, shaking the cavern. The death rattles of something divine, bringing it slowly to destruction, the gravity of rotten magic pulling them all toward doom. “And, for what it’s worth, so do I.”

The ocean held in stasis above their heads was changing. Neve couldn’t look at it directly—something about it was blurred, like two thin pictures laid over each other so that the lines tangled. It was the dark sea, but it was also the inside of some huge cavern, almost pyramid-shaped, the hollow body of a mountain. Bones lined the walls, huge ones, twisted ones.

“Time grows short, Shadow Queen.” The Leviathan still sounded calm, but the bite of its fingers into her skin tightened. “Either take my power, or they will.”

Become more monstrous, or the Kings would.

Your soul can take it.

A repetition in her mind, the Leviathan speaking without sound for the first time. Its voice in her thoughts was as vast as its body, something that made her head ache to try to contain.

There was something bolstering about having a god believe in you.

Neve closed her fingers around the bone. She lifted her hand from the Leviathan’s. The corpse-puppet sat back, waiting. Even the churn of the dying true god at the back of the cavern grew still, that one massive black eye fixed on her.

“How?” she murmured.

“A blade across the throat will suffice.” The puppet’s smile widened. “We are tied together by more than seaweed.”

So Neve lunged across the table and swiped the sharp end of the god-bone across the Leviathan’s neck.

Stillness. It was a profound thing, after spending so long with that ever-present rumble beneath her feet, the slight vibration of a breaking world.

Slowly, the corpse-puppet’s head lolled back, the bloodless gash across its dead neck widening, widening as the weight of its head pulled at the wound, ripping the rubbered flesh. Behind it, the vast shape of the true Leviathan shuddered, that massive eye still fixed on her, lidless and staring.

The weight of the head tore through spongy skin and desiccated sinew, snapped brittle ossified bone. It fell to the ground.

And the cavern shook like the world was ending.

Power was a black rush, wilder than she’d ever seen it before. It rushed from the back of the cavern, where the true Leviathan rattled in death throes, ropes of shadow flowing straight toward Neve like she was the ocean to its river.

She raised her hands.

It slammed into her with the force of a hurricane, the Leviathan’s power tangling in her fingers and slicing into her skin as if it were no barrier at all. It was cold, a chill deeper than she’d thought possible, ice poured over her head in a wave that just kept coming, a vein of darkness running congruent to her every limb, her every thought. Her mouth wrenched out a scream, but she couldn’t hear it above the rush of magic, the power of the strongest Old One making a home in her instead.

When the last of the magic finally drained into her, Neve collapsed. She barked her knees against the shell-pocked floor, her hands sliced on coral shards. Above her, in that window made by a hole in the cavern ceiling, the sea and the wall of pyramid-stacked bones flipped back and forth, sometimes one and sometimes the other. The very stone of the cavern seemed to thin, growing nearly transparent, as the Kings pulled them to the Sanctum, power drawing power.

She curled up on the floor, flooded with dark divinity, and tried to remember how to breathe.

“Neve!”

Solmir, freed with a final shattering—the coral prison sundered in half, and he burst through, hands bloody messes and a snarl on his face, eyes gleaming impossibly blue. Stalactites shook free of the ceiling as he ran across the breaking floor toward her, gaze tracking from the headless puppet to the rapid interplay of rock and bone as the cavern faded away.

A jagged spear of rock broke away from the ceiling right above Neve. She heard the groan but couldn’t make herself move—her limbs felt so heavy, so full of magic and darkness and cold.

Something landed on her first, softer than the stone, though not by much. Solmir stretched over her, wrapped his arms around her middle, and rolled, taking both of them out of the way of the falling stalactite seconds before it hit the ground where Neve had been. They landed with him atop her, hands on her shoulders, shock and fear and awe in his eyes.

“What did you do, Neve?” He asked it quietly. And the look on his face said he already knew the answer.

All her attention remained on him, on the blue of his eyes and the dagger-sharpness of his cheekbones, the line of puckered scars along his forehead. He was her still point as the world changed around them, rock fading away until it was gone, the sea merely a memory.

Power drew power, and they’d been pulled to the most powerful thing left in this dissolving underworld.

“You know what she did, boy.”

It wasn’t the voice she recognized, wasn’t exactly the one she’d heard in the cairn with the Serpent. Deeper, more graveled, as if it came out of the earth instead of a throat. But the cadence was the same, the royal arrogance, the too-friendly tone.

Valchior laughed, low and rolling. “She did exactly what we thought she would.”