Chapter Thirty-Eight
Neve
For a moment, stillness.
Solmir stood behind her, his hands still curled as if he wanted to touch her but couldn’t make himself move. Around them, the stone effigies of the Kings, the churn of their thoughts nearly palpable in the air though their forms were frozen.
“This isn’t how it was to go.” Byriand, his voice aged and shaking. “This wasn’t—”
Shadow, hissing, seeping from the hole in Valchior’s shroud. His power, his soul, pulled out by the piece of bloody god-bone wedged in his empty eye socket.
Neve’s bone.
Valchior’s stone hand lifted, almost disbelieving. Neve’s blood dripped from the razor-sharp spike of his crown.
Then the huge rock-hewn hand shot toward her, the storm-squeal of shifting shale like a collapsing mountain.
Neve read the movements, knew what was coming. She’d believed herself a god and that made it true, and the power in her center thrilled to it, darkness flashing along her veins, making her thorns grow longer, sharper. She felt like a veil had been lifted, her new divinity polishing everything to the bright shine of perfect clarity.
Moving quicker than she ever had before, she reached up, tugged her severed finger from Valchior’s face. It was slippery with blood, but she kept her hold. “Solmir!”
She didn’t look behind her to see if he caught the grisly weapon she threw him. Didn’t make eye contact to make sure he knew what he had to do. She trusted him.
He might even deserve it now.
The heel of Valchior’s hand collided with her forehead, so forcefully that it might’ve knocked her out if she wasn’t a newly forged god. Still, it hurt, and she had to fight to keep her balance as the touch of the King wrenched her out of reality and into illusion.
Half an illusion, anyway. Valchior was caught somewhere between the man he’d been and the monster he’d become as his soul poured out of his eye. The half of his face she’d stabbed was immense, monstrous, bone and stone and tattered veil, the proportions dissonant and unable to fit together. The other half of him was the man he’d been, the same physicality as he’d shown her before, but somehow twisted. Fury gnarled his hands into knotted fists and his mouth into an inhuman snarl.
The backs of his knuckles cracked over Neve’s cheekbone. It abraded her skin, rock instead of flesh despite the flickering illusion. She stumbled backward, trailing blood from her four-fingered hand.
“Bitch.” It roared from the monstrous side of his mouth, hissed from the other, full lips and cracked teeth in a harmony of rage. “I was trying to help you, Neverah.”
“You don’t have to pretend anymore.” Even in the depths of this illusion, she could hear shouts and rumbles, the clatter of bone and stone. The hoarse sound of Solmir’s scream.
The illusion stuttered, showing her the Sanctum for half a heartbeat. She saw Solmir, scored with cuts and bruises, her severed finger clutched in his hand. Behind him, two shattered stone monoliths, the remnants of spiked crowns. Jittering shadow coursed up and down his veins, growing his nails into claws and his teeth into fangs. Blue flickered in and out in his eyes, at war with deep, void-like black.
He’d known what to do—used her bone to stab the Kings, to release their souls so he could pull them into his own. The others weren’t as strong as Valchior, weren’t putting up as much of a fight. They’d slipped right into Solmir like a second skin, making his body react the same way it had to the magic, but magnified. Sharp and cruel and hurting.
The illusion fell back into place as Valchior backhanded her again, and though it was weaker this time, it was still enough to almost send her to her knees.
“I’m not pretending,” Valchior sneered, his tongue visible in his skeletal jaw as it curled behind his teeth. He loomed over her, monster and man. “I was trying to give you a way to keep him, Neve. You’ve never been good at keeping the people you care about, but I didn’t expect you to cling so doggedly to a path that would kill them all.”
Her heart was a ragged, too-quick thud in her chest, a speeding counterpoint to the steady beat of the key tangled in her hair. “It’s just him,” she said, because the whole thought was too heavy to speak. It’s just Solmir who would die. He was the only person she cared about that she’d have to sacrifice, and for good this time, with no hope of bloody branches and altered religion to try to bring him back.
The afterimage of Valchior’s shroud strobed in and out over his face. In his illusion, she couldn’t see the black smoke of his soul pouring into the air, but she could see how it slowly ate away at the human guise he presented, leaving less flesh and more rock.
“What do you think will happen when Solmir takes us all in, Neve? You aren’t stupid.”
A blink, the illusion flickering again. Solmir, on hands and knees now before the empty throne that had once been his, veins running black, fingers elongated, too many joints and too-sharp ends. Fangs protruded from his gasping mouth. The blue in his eyes was only a ghost, a breath of fragile color.
“Come on then, boy.” Calryes, the last King, creaking as he leaned over to put his massive spike-crowned head next to his son’s. “Be useful for once.”
Valchior, again, standing before her, Solmir and Calryes gone. “He can’t hold us,” he said. “Not without losing himself entirely. And if you think your sister and her Wolf or you will be enough to stop his power—our power—you’re wrong. We will take hold of the world again. We will bend it into what we want. And we will wipe everyone who stands in the way off the face of our earth.”
The word was another crack of his hand against her face. Her new god-bones creaked but didn’t break—still, Neve gasped, pain making her vision feather.
“If it was you,” Valchior murmured, “we’d have time to make the world into what we wanted. Gently, easily, in a way that everyone would accept, because they don’t want to look up from their tiny little lives to see how things warp.” His head tilted, a razor smile traveling from the side of his face that was man to the side that was monster. “It would have been far more elegant. But destruction, devastation—that works, too.”
The feeling of stone wrenching away from her, the god’s heavy hand finally falling from her brow and taking the half-made illusion with it. Neve collapsed onto the floor, curling in on herself as Valchior’s statue fell from its throne.
Not broken, not yet. The seep of smoke from his eye socket was still slow. Like he was waiting for something.
A rumble shook the ground, enough to rattle her teeth. Bone dust clouded the air, tiny slivers of ivory shaking free of the walls to glitter on the ground. High above, the skull of the Dragon quaked, the massive jawbone near to coming loose.
The stump where her smallest finger had been still pumped sluggish blood, inky in the colorless light. It should make her weak, make her lightheaded, but all Neve felt was a faint pulse of pain. She was a god now, and gods didn’t die of blood loss.
They only died when their souls were consumed, snuffed out.
“Afraid?” Calryes’s laugh groaned like a tectonic shift, a sound that made her head ache. “Are you really going to falter right here at the end, Solmir? Leave a job undone, just because you’re scared of holding my soul?” It was impossible to see his face, but Neve could tell he sneered. “Shall I tell you all the ways I loathe you instead of letting them seep into your every thought? Once I’m in your head, those will be the only thoughts you have. How much we hate you. How disappointing you are to me, to your mother, to Gaya, to your little Shadow Queen—”
With a snarl, Solmir launched up from the ground, Neve’s severed finger held in his hand, her blood gloving him to the elbow. He slammed the bone into Calryes’s stone-veiled thigh.
The statue didn’t move as black smoke began to pour from the improbable wound, the King’s soul let free. But his laughter echoed around the room, mad and jagged.
The smoke of his soul rushed for Solmir, flowing into his mouth, his eyes, his nostrils. His roar was pained; he dropped to his knees as shadow pulsed into him, his veins blinking dark, the blue of his eyes dimming. His lips stretched around overlong teeth, thorns cutting longer through his skin, the places where they bloomed weeping charcoal-colored blood.
The last of Calryes’s soul rushed out of the rock, and the statue burst apart like it’d been hit with some invisible hammer, spraying stone and dust. The ground shook, a nearly continuous quake now, rattling the skull far above them and the bones that made the walls. Solmir made a choking noise, like the souls of the Kings were something stuck in his throat.
“Neve.” Her name was hoarse, and he said it as if it was something he had to work to remember. “Neve, I can’t—”
His head wrenched to the side, an unnatural movement that might’ve snapped his neck were he only human. His eyes opened, fully black now, face warped in an expression that could’ve been anguish or terrible glee. “Stupid boy.” The voice wasn’t his. Too high, almost shaking. Byriand. “He thought so highly of his soul, thought it was something he could hold apart, but it is a wretched, shriveled thing—”
Solmir grunted, turned his head again with clear effort. His hands curled on the stone, the claws his nails had become screeching over the rock. When he looked up, a sheen of blue ringed his pupils again. “They’re so loud.” His voice now, those arrogant, clipped tones blunted in a haze of fear. “Neve, they’re so loud, they’re all I can hear, I can’t think.”
She rushed to him, hands on his shoulders, on his sharp-planed faced. The magic within her coiled and writhed, blinking shadow in her own veins. Before, when she’d touched Solmir, the power had reached for him, too, something easy to pass back and forth. But now it shied away from her hands, like it could hide in her, like it wouldn’t let itself be given away again.
Because now she was a god, and only death would relinquish her power.
“They want…” His eyes flickered, black then blue. “They want awful things, a world burning, and they’re so damn loud.”
“Don’t listen.” She tasted salt; her cheeks were wet. “Solmir, don’t listen, you are good, you can—”
A wrench of his neck, and he was black-eyed again. With a cruel grin, he pushed forward into Neve’s hands, knocking her off-balance so she sprawled on her back. He crouched over her, caging her face between his clawed hands, his fanged mouth close enough to kiss.
“Is he good?” Calryes’s booming voice, so loud and so close that she flinched. “Or is that just what you tell yourself so you don’t feel like a whore for falling into his bed?”
She slapped him with her bleeding hand on instinct, half because of the words, half because hearing Calryes come out of Solmir’s mouth was anathema. Her hand hit one of his razor teeth, opening a shallow cut to bleed anew, and he grinned. This close, she could see those puckered scars on his forehead. Something metallic glinted in them. His painful, razored crown, growing back.
His eyes changed, went faintly blue. He looked down at her with dawning horror, mouth working, no sound. “Neve,” he said finally, scrambling backward, cutting himself on his own claws. “Neve…”
“You see now?”
Valchior. The statue of the King still lay on its side, still unbroken, still with his soul drifting from the wound in his eye, a delicate tendril of smoke that paused and collected in the air instead of rushing straight for Solmir like the others. His voice was weak, but there was a note of triumph in it.
Dread curled cold in Neve’s stomach. The key tangled in her hair sped slightly in its pulse, as if in concert with her own racing heart. “He can take it.” A lie, one proven by the monstrous thing Solmir was becoming before her eyes, but she said it anyway, like she could make it true.
“He’s fading,” Valchior continued, soft and pleased and ignoring her entirely. “That scrap of a soul he’s so proud of can’t stand up to all of ours. The weight is too much for him to carry. It wasn’t so long ago he was as straightforward a villain as you think we are.”
“Not so long at all,” Solmir agreed. And there was blue in his eyes, but it was so faint, and she couldn’t tell if his fanged grin was delighted or sorrowing or somehow both. She couldn’t tell if the voice was his or one of the Kings he caged.
“He will lay waste.” Fainter now, more of Valchior’s soul twisting from his stone body to coalesce in the air, like a storm in waiting. “You think your Wolves can stop him? You think you can? He—we—will be the most terrible thing the world has ever seen. We will make all the gods you’ve killed seem like pets.”
“No.” Solmir shook his head, eyes closed tight, trying to drown out the voices in his head. He pressed his hands to his temples, his claws raking bleeding runnels into his face. “No no no, I won’t, please stop—”
“He’s fading,” Valchior whispered. “All he needs is one more push.”
And the word was a rush, the storm of the last King’s soul overwhelming Solmir in a torrent of shadow. The statue flew apart. Black smoke flowed into nostril and eye and open mouth, a scream tearing from Solmir’s throat as Valchior poured into him.
The Sanctum shook. More bones tore free of the walls and clattered to the floor. Neve stood open-mouthed, filled with godhood and useless power that could do nothing for him, staring at Solmir’s twitching and broken form on the floor.
But when he stood, it was worse.
He was too tall. There were too many joints in his legs. The claws at the ends of his fingers were needle-pointed; so were his teeth. His hair hung loose around a face made even sharper, the planes carved to knifelike precision.
There was no blue left in his eyes.
“Pretty little Neverah Valedren.” It was all their voices now, a chorus of Kings issuing from one mouth. “Who’s never been enough to save someone she loves.”
Then Solmir—what had been Solmir—lunged.
Neve knew with some deep instinct that he was going for her key. His claws swept for her hair; she feinted to the side and turned to run, stumbling on broken rock and bone. He laughed, five voices knit into a single terrible cacophony as one of those unnaturally jointed legs reached out, hooked her ankle. Neve crashed to the floor, biting her lip bloody as her chin hit the stone, the breath knocked from her lungs.
Then he was on her, crouched over her back, balanced on claws that stood like prison bars on either side of her head. She tried to flip over, throw thorns around his neck like she’d done so long ago, but the power wouldn’t solidify; he batted tendrils of her meager attempt away.
“Neverah, Neverah,” the voices whispered. “Now to decide if we want to keep you alive, or—”
Something shifted. She couldn’t see his face, but she felt it in the atmosphere, an intangible struggle so intense it imprinted on the air.
“Neve, you have to kill me.” Solmir’s voice, ragged and hoarse against her ear. “You have to open the door and kill me right now.”
Her eyes pressed closed. She reached for the back of her neck.
And the skull of the Dragon finally broke loose.
It fell toward them, so much larger than she’d thought, and Neve wondered what would happen to her if she was crushed by a skull in the Shadowlands where she couldn’t truly die. Solmir rolled them away, his eyes still blue, his claws wrapped around her in an embrace that brought blood.
The skull landed hard enough to cave in part of the stone floor. In the places where it broke, nothing but seething dark, swirling and shimmering like the inverse of a star.
Next to the hole it made, Neve and Solmir, positions switched. She straddled his hips in a parody of how they’d been in the prison made of ribs. He looked up at her as the last bit of blue died in his eyes.
“You will lose everything,” Solmir snarled in the voices of the Kings.
And hadn’t she already? She couldn’t return to her life on the surface. She’d already proven herself a vicious queen; didn’t Valleyda deserve more than someone who would twist the political power granted them by nothing but their birth to her own ends? Red was safe with her Wolf, but untouchable, unknowable. And Raffe…
She’d already let Raffe go.
So what was left for her? Nothing but this. Making sure the Kings died and stayed dead. Making sure those who’d been wounded by the life she’d led had a place to heal.
She’d been willing to doom the world for her sister. Was this so different?
“Not if I give it up first,” Neve murmured.
And she leaned down and kissed him.
His fangs stung her lips. His clawed hands came up to her waist, and she couldn’t tell whether it was to throw her off or bring her closer, but she kissed him through it, a real kiss, one that held everything Solmir didn’t let her say and everything she didn’t know how to, one that held everything they’d never have time to figure out.
She felt them flow into her. The Kings’ souls felt like rancid oil poured down her throat, a sickness she could feel herself catching. Slithering voices laughing in her head, foreign things shackling around her heart.
It hurt. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Still, she pressed her mouth to Solmir’s until she felt all that darkness, every scrap of monstrous soul that didn’t belong to him empty out and enter her instead.
Then the only soul Solmir had was his own. Small and withered, maybe, but dearly fought for. Not enough to hold up against the evil of the Five Kings, not yet. But someday it would be.
It was the last coherent thought Neve had.
Ringing and shouting and laughing, a clanging storm of terrible sound that she couldn’t escape inside her skull. Neve screamed and clamped her thorn-wreathed hands over her ears, barely conscious of Solmir scrambling out from beneath her, Solmir’s hands on her shoulders.
“Neve!” He screamed it in her face, trying to be heard over the awful din of the Kings in her head and the falling Sanctum, the world collapsing around them. “Neve, you can’t do this, you have to give them back—”
“No!” It came from her and it came from all the souls trapped inside her, five different refusals that made him stumble backward.
Neve pressed her eyes shut. She couldn’t hear herself speak, only knew the words came from her mouth because she could feel it move. “It has to be me. If they have you, they’ll take the world. I can hold them.”
Can you? Valchior’s smooth voice asked in her head. It felt like a worm making its way along the inside of her skull, a sliding invasion she couldn’t grab hold of. Or will you be just as terrible as he would be, only craftier about it?
There was a satisfaction to the words, something pleased. She tried not to listen, but it was impossible to drown out her own thoughts. Neve reached up and yanked the pulsing key out of her hair with clawed hands. Strands tangled around the thorns growing from her wrists and spangled out from the key like rays of a black sun.
The tendrils of shadow in the white bark had grown; they covered almost the whole of the key now, and they glowed, a strange not-light that hurt to look at. Solmir tried to grab it from her, but she held up a hand and thorns wrapped around him, held him back.
Walking was difficult with all the Kings in her head, like their souls threw her off-balance. But Neve did it anyway, following instinct and the pull of the key to the hole in the floor the Dragon’s falling skull had made, the seething dark it uncovered.
You think your sister will be able to kill you?
Valchior. It made her stop, her steps stuttering on the shaking ground.
You tried to save her, she tried to save you. He sounded so pleased, so content. It made the tiny parts of her mind that were still her own recoil, dread a freezing stone in the pit of her stomach. It doesn’t matter how terrible you are. Matched love, Neverah. All she wants is you alive.
The Kings clamored in her skull, so much horror packed into her frame, all the magic of the Shadowlands. The tendrils of it that curled up from the breaking floor flowed into her without her trying, her gravity enough to bring it in. A woman made a monster, made a home for shadows.
But she had a job to do. She’d chosen to stay here so it wouldn’t be left undone. This was her atonement, and she had to see it through.
Neve took the cold key in her hand, its pulse now rabbit-rhythm, a match for her own. She dropped it into the hole in the floor, into all that hissing dark that made the firmament of the Shadowlands.
And as the Heart Tree began to grow—the doorway she and Red had compressed into keys by the force of their matched love, by their willingness to do whatever it took to save the other—she heard Valchior laughing and laughing and laughing.
You’ve played your part to the letter, Shadow Queen.
Roots boiled up from the place where she’d dropped the key, a white trunk stretching toward the broken-bone ceiling of the Sanctum. An opening in the gray-fogged sky, a gash of color as a doorway opened.
Neve grabbed Solmir’s hand, dragging him behind her. If he protested, tried to jerk away, she couldn’t tell.
She stepped toward the Tree, trying to ignore the voice, trying to hold on to herself amid all this writhing shadow. The trunk opened, the dark inside filled with a wheel and a glimmer that looked like stars, like a place between worlds, a corridor to walk from one to the other.
As she stepped in, Valchior whispered, singing it along her bones:
I told you we welcomed it.