A moment of quiet, the calm before a thundercrack. Then a low laugh, coming from everywhere at once.
“Well, Valchior, you did your best.” Calryes’s voice was somehow mocking, even layered in rock. “But it seems we’ll be stuck with a second-rate vessel after all. You always were a disappointment, son. Running for centuries, only to end up right back where you started. You tried so hard not to be a villain, and look at you now.”
“He’s better than you,” Neve snarled. “Better than you could ever hope to be.”
“I suppose we’ll see, won’t we?” Calryes was incapable of expression, and the shroud draped over him hid where his face should be. But it sounded to Neve like he grinned.
A frisson of disquiet curled in her middle, a splinter of doubt.
The King in front of them shifted with the squeal of rubbing rock. Valchior leaned down, the spikes of his awful crown glinting. Solmir stepped between them, like he could block the King, but Neve laid a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“Wait,” she murmured. The magic in her center swirled and writhed.
He didn’t want to. She could see it in the thin line of his mouth, the terrified glitter of his blue eyes. But when Neve stepped around him, toward that waiting stone finger, Solmir didn’t stop her.
The stone finger touched her forehead, alchemized to flesh. She opened her eyes, and she and Valchior stood alone in the Sanctum, an illusion of privacy.
The King didn’t take his hand from her once the illusion was complete. Instead, he slid it from her brow to her cheek, cupping her face, a worried light in his eyes.
“I will speak plainly,” he said. “You are making a mistake, Neverah.”
Her brows knit. The uneasy curl in her stomach coiled all the way up her spine.
“You want to think there is good in him,” Valchior murmured. “I don’t fault you for it—we want to think the best of those we care for. Even when there is no proof of it.”
“There’s proof.” Her mouth barely moved, a whisper in this vast cavern made from a corpse. “He’s willing to sacrifice himself to end you. To keep you from coming back ever again.”
“Are you sure?” He raised a brow. “Are you sure he would let himself be killed, in the end? I think it more likely he would do whatever he could to live. Especially with all that new power. Power you are throwing away.”
Her mouth opened to say of course she was sure. But that sinking hook of doubt in her stomach, that needling unease.
Valchior continued, sensing the bruise and pressing it hard. “We are a heavy burden, Neverah. Our darkness is so much to carry, and it weighs on a soul. Changes it. Even one that starts out pure and unblemished, and you and I both know his isn’t.”
“No one’s is.” But it didn’t sound like the strong rebuttal she wanted it to be. It sounded like an excuse.
“True.” The King inclined his head with an amused smile. “But some are in better shape than others, and one can’t deny that yours is better off than his. It is far more dangerous for him to be our vessel than you. It’s what you were made for. To be the dark to your sister’s light.”
Neve didn’t realize she was crying until salt touched her lips, tears sliding soundlessly from her eyes. She wanted to wipe them away, but Valchior did before she could, thumbing gently at her cheek.
“That’s not fair.” She didn’t know she’d spoken it aloud until she saw Valchior nod, and she pressed her eyes closed. “It’s not fair.”
“It’s not,” he agreed. “But we all have to pay for our mistakes, Neve. You pulled in the darkness in the shadow grove. You started all of this by not being willing to let Red go.”
The linchpin, the axis. She and Red, over and over again. She’d conspired with Kiri, let Arick be the collateral, she’d changed everything with no thought for the consequences. To save Red, yes, but also for herself. To feel like she had some modicum of control in a life that allowed her so little of it, some ability to change what was wrong.
“But you can atone.” Valchior lifted her chin with his thumb. “Think of all you can do, with our power inside you. All you can accomplish, with our magic turned to your use.”
She took a shaky breath. Thought of wrongs to be righted. Thought of control.
“I knew you were what we’d been waiting for,” Valchior said quietly. “When I first caught a glimpse of you, a feel of you through the grove you made. This is what you were meant to be.”
“I can’t.” She turned her chin away from his touch. “Whoever goes through as the vessel will be—”
“The Wolves won’t kill you.” There was something scraping in his tone, something edging up toward irritation. “Redarys won’t let Eammon do it, and even if it were only Eammon, he wouldn’t kill his wife’s twin. He would step aside.”
Even if it were only Eammon, he said, like it was a possibility Valchior had thought about. Panic spiked in her stomach. “Red—”
“Is perfectly fine.” The soothing note was back in his voice, face once again handsome and introspective, a mask made to be trusted. “Can’t you feel your key?”
Her key. The one hidden in the tangles of her hair. It pulsed gently against the nape of her neck, cold and comforting. Almost like a heartbeat.
Red’s heartbeat. Reassurance her sister was alive.
“They don’t even have to know,” Valchior said, smoothing her hair back from her face. “You can hide us, Neve. Tucked inside your soul, feeding you power like you’ve never known. Magic that will make what you bled for look like party tricks. You take in our souls, you ascend. You live your life and leave a rich legacy. Famines alleviated, seas calmed, sicknesses healed. You’ll be a god in your own right. They’ll worship you.”
“And when I die?”
The King smiled, something glittering in his eyes. “Who says you have to?”
That was what made her decide, what snapped her out of her wavering and her confusion, the muddled feelings of pride and guilt. That split-second smile, that malevolent glimmer.
“No,” Neve said.
His expression warped. Gone were the gentle hands and soft words; he gripped her shoulders and tugged her forward with fingers that were all bone and sinew and the clinging meat of muscle, the flesh rotted away. His face went concave on one side, cheekbone arcing the wrong direction, desiccation along his lips and decay between his teeth.
“You have no choice,” he hissed, carrion breath enough to make her gag. Valchior wasted no magic on making himself handsome and whole, not anymore; he used only enough to stay in a nearly human shape, the better to batter her with. “We cannot be killed by discarded god-bones, Neverah, you can’t wrench a femur off the wall and stab us with it. If we are going to relinquish our souls, we do it on our own terms. You cannot force us.”