She shrugged, looked away. “I meant what I said, about you being achingly noble. Nobility gets people eaten alive, especially people in foreign kingdoms with missing queens. I truly want to help you, Raffe.” The rueful flicker of a smile. “This isn’t the kind of thing you can do on your own.”
His mouth desperately wanted to gape again. He clenched his jaw to keep it from happening.
Kayu patted his chest where he’d slid Kiri’s letter between linen shirt and doublet. “Think about it.” She glided away toward the door and slipped out. It closed quietly behind her.
Raffe stared at it for a moment, rubbing a hand nervously over his close-shorn hair. “Five shadow-damned Kings on five shitting horses.”
Chapter Four
Neve
The tower was beautiful. Brutal, and unnerving, but beautiful. Neve could admit that much.
Four open windows stood at compass points in the walls, their sills carved with sinuous lines reminiscent of shadows, twisting and curling over the wood. A nearly bare shelf was pushed against one wall, housing a collection of cracked ceramic pots. Next to it, a fireplace glowed with still-lit embers that hadn’t been teased into a full blaze. It was strange, to see fire devoid of color. The flames were nearly indistinguishable from the smoke.
Other than the shelf, the only furnishings in the room were a table, a chair, a cot pushed against the far wall.
And her coffin.
Neve froze at the top of the stairs, widened eyes fixed on the place where she’d awakened. The lid to the coffin, glass smoked with tendrils of darkness, was still half off the plinth where she’d pushed it.
Hello, Neve. You’re awake.
That was the first thing she’d heard here, and there’d been a moment—a scant one—when it’d been a comfort. Hearing the voice of another person in this alien landscape, knowing she wasn’t alone.
It wasn’t a comfort anymore.
Solmir went to the shelf, picking up one of the ceramic pots and scowling down into its contents. “Not much,” he muttered to himself, “but it will have to do.” A canvas bag hung on one of the shelf’s posts; he slung it over one shoulder and shoved a handful of whatever was in the pot into the bag. “Something convenient about this place,” he said as he worked. “You don’t need to eat here. One of the benefits of not being, in the most technical sense, alive. You don’t necessarily need to sleep, either, but I still do.” His chin jerked to the cot against the wall. “Old habit, I guess. Not like there’s much else to do.”
But Neve wasn’t listening. She was still transfixed by the coffin.
He noticed. Blue eyes tracked from where she stood to where she looked, and the slash of his mouth bent. “How much do you remember?”
“Enough.” It was scraped-sounding. “I remember the grove. The sentinels. The…” Her hand raised; she flexed her fingers, now pale gray, remembering when they were shot through with shadow.
She didn’t finish, but Solmir nodded. Something flickered in his gaze, hard and bright. “And you remember choosing this?”
A challenge, almost, like he expected her to deny it. But Neve shrugged. “Yes,” she murmured. “I remember that, too.”
Her eyes opening to smoke-fogged glass, a familiar face on the other side. Red. Tearful and tattered, dusted with dirt. Red slamming her fists against the glass, screaming for her. A small part of Neve had been meanly satisfied to see that, to see Red trying to get to her as desperately as Neve had been trying all those months. Back when it felt simple.
She remembered looking down at herself. The pulsing, external veins, pumping darkness, connecting her to the inverted grove of sentinel trees. Making her a doorway to the underworld.
There’d been another face on the other side of that glass, too. Raffe. Even now, it felt like a spear through her middle. Raffe yelling for her, Raffe trying to save her. Always trying to save her, even after she’d made her choice back in Valleyda, plunging headlong into the darkness of the Shrine and her blood on branches.
In search of her sister, yes. But in search of other things, too.
And when faced with another choice, there in the grove, she’d pulled all that shadow inside.
Neve lifted her hands again, finally tearing her eyes away from the coffin to look down at her palms instead. Still unblemished by dark veins, but if she tried to call up magic, like she had outside—
“It won’t work.”
Solmir had moved nearly silently; he stood directly in front of her, face unreadable. “You don’t have the magic anymore.”
Her eyes narrowed. “If you think you can control me by making me think I’m powerless, you’ll have to try a different angle. I haven’t been powerless a day in my life, and I won’t start now.”
His brow arched, a cruel smile curving his mouth. “I would never presume to call you powerless, Neverah.”
And that shouldn’t have felt like a victory, but it did.
“However,” Solmir continued, “using that power is going to take a bit more planning on your part from now on. Because it lives in me.”
Her hands still hovered in the air between them, open-palmed, like she was waiting for him to give her something. “What are you talking about?”
“You don’t remember that kiss?” His eyes glittered. “I’m wounded.”
That kiss, a kiss that wasn’t for heat or romance, but something cutting and calculated, a well-timed move in an intricate battle. The rush she’d felt, like something drained out of her.
Solmir tapped the center of her palm with a pale, elegant finger. “Pulling power from the Shadowlands itself is a dangerous game. It changes you, tangles up in you, anchors you here. Better to pull it from a different vessel. Something that can take in power and give it to you when you need it.”
“You.” Her teeth clenched on the word. “You’re the vessel.”
A muscle feathered in his jaw, but Solmir’s slash of a smile didn’t waver. “Precisely.”
Her hands closed. “So I have to kiss you anytime I want to use my magic?”
She didn’t have to tell him how much she hated that; her tone, frost and fury at once, did it for her. She’d just as soon kiss whatever that toothy thing was outside.
“It’s not your magic, Neverah. It doesn’t belong to anyone or anything but itself.” Solmir turned back to the shelf and shoved a few more handfuls of whatever was in the ceramic pot into his bag. “And it doesn’t have to be a kiss, though that is the most efficient method of transfer, for reasons I cannot possibly fathom but assume have to do with the melodramatic nature of the Wilderwood and the Shadowlands and their making. Just a skin-to-skin touch will do.”
That was better, but not by much.
One last handful from the pot, then Solmir slung the bag over his shoulder. “I’ve done you a tremendous favor, really. Believe me, you don’t want to let the Shadowlands alter you any more than they have to.”
“So you’re going to let it alter you instead?”
“I know what I’m doing,” he replied, which wasn’t really an answer at all. “Why, are you worried about me?”