Neve crossed her arms, still uncomfortably aware that she was wearing his coat. It smelled like pine, like cold and snow. “More worried that you’re going to start growing fangs.”
“Not yet.” He turned, disappearing into the dark of the stairs and leaving her no choice but to follow. “The marks the Shadowlands have left on me are harder to spot, I’m afraid.”
If she trained her mind only to pay attention to the tree trunks, it was easy to pretend that this was a normal walk through a normal wood. Not that she’d spent much time in forests of any kind—not with the specter of the Wilderwood looming so large over her whole life—but it kept her thoughts mostly quiet, calmed the lurking panic just beneath her sternum.
Up ahead, Solmir made no efforts to keep to a pace she could match. Her bare feet scrambled over packed dust and slicing branches and the skeletons of dead plants, just keeping the whip of his long hair in view. Solmir moved like a soldier, controlled and steady, walking tall despite the uneven ground. Whatever he’d packed into the bag over his shoulder crunched unpleasantly with his movement.
She should probably keep him within arm’s reach. Just in case she needed to use magic.
Damn you, she thought at his back. Kings and shadows damn you to the deepest belly of the earth.
An ironic epithet. There was really no further damnation she could wish on Solmir than he’d already found himself.
Neve looked down at her hands, pale and cold and empty. Experimentally, she bent her fingers. The barest hint of a sting in her veins, but no darkness in her wrists, no frost on her palms. It was obscene, that the magic’s absence would make her feel bereft.
She’d told Solmir she wasn’t powerless, that she’d never been. That was true—she was a First Daughter, a Queen. And Valleyda, for all its innumerable faults, at least recognized that more than only those who were assigned men at birth and aligned themselves with the distinction deserved to chart their own course. Even now, with the magic she couldn’t stop thinking of as hers housed in a man she hated, she wasn’t powerless.
But having power wasn’t quite the same as being in control of it, and that was what she wanted.
It could be for the best, as much as the thought galled her. What Solmir had told her made sense, about the magic of the Shadowlands and the Wilderwood changing you.
After all, it’d changed Red.
The thought was an ache in her chest, like her heart had grown too heavy for her ribs to hold in place. Red, crouched on the root-riddled floor of the Shrine, feral, more wild than woman. Green veins and green around her eyes, the promise of more change to come. They’d mired themselves in opposite sides of a magic forest, in trees and in shadows.
Red entangled with a monster, and Neve with a fallen god.
Her eyes narrowed on Solmir up ahead. She’d followed him on instinct, sticking close to the devil she knew in the presence of so many here she didn’t, but the feeling in her chest was nothing like safety. “Where are we going?”
“To see a friend.” Solmir didn’t turn around. His lick of long hair was a smoke-colored beacon in the solid black of the trees.
“A friend.” She tried to keep the fear from her voice, hoped that the edge sneaking in could be mistaken for contempt. “A monster, or something worse? Or maybe all your talk of killing the Kings was a lie, and you’re taking me right to them.”
“If you believe one thing I tell you,” Solmir said, still not turning, “make it this: The Kings and I are not on the same side. Get that through your head, Your Majesty.”
“Stop calling me that.” She wanted it to be in the tone of an order, but it never quite hefted the weight. “Stop calling me that if you’re going to say it like it’s a joke.”
“You’re a queen, Neverah.” The sound of her name was harsh in his throat as he finally turned to face her, stopping in the middle of the path. He’d hardly ever called her Neve, even when he wore Arick’s face. “You have a crown and a throne, and call me old-fashioned, but that requires some deference on my part.”
Something knotted in her stomach. “You’re a king.”
The line of his mouth flattened. “I was.”
Neve wasn’t sure how to respond to that.
Solmir shifted back, away from her. His arms hung stiff by his sides, his face implacable. A standoff, two rulers unwilling to give quarter.
He broke first. Solmir reached up, rubbed at the scar on his temple, then turned around and started forward, once again nearly nonchalant. “I realize this is a lot to take in,” he said conversationally. “But all I have ever been trying to do—yes, even on the surface, pretending to be poor, hapless Arick—has been about killing the Kings. Neutralizing their threat before they regain power the likes of which your world is not equipped to face. Could never be equipped to face.” He glanced back at her, quickly, like he was checking for her reaction and was irritated with himself for doing so. “All of it—Kiri and Arick, the grove—it was all a means to an end. The moment the others came through, I was going to destroy them.”
Another shudder rippled over the ground, not as strong as the one they’d felt at the tower, but close. Neve put a hand on one of the inverted trunks next to her, locked her knees against the pitch. Solmir didn’t balance himself on anything, but she could tell that every muscle in his body tightened, see it in the way his shirt stretched across his shoulders and his thighs strained against the nondescript fabric of the dark pants he wore.
Damn him for being handsome. Life would be so much simpler if all monsters looked the part.
He recovered first, once the ground stopped writhing. The line of his mouth actually looked worried now, instead of just mocking. “It’s getting worse,” he muttered, nearly to himself. “Must be only three left.”
Neve straightened on shaky legs. “It seems like the Shadowlands might end themselves if we just wait long enough.”
She’d been only half serious, but the look Solmir leveled at her was grave. “Even if the Shadowlands collapse with the Kings in it, they won’t be ended. Not really.” He turned on his heel, striding away over the branches cutting through the dusty ground. “It takes more than that to vanquish a god.”
They walked in silence. Neve shivered against the cold, tugging Solmir’s coat around herself before she thought through exactly what she was doing. Part of her wanted to cringe away, but a bigger part of her was just cold.
After a moment, Solmir sighed, as if her silence were something that weighed on him. “I did try to do this the easiest way possible,” he said. “Before your sister and her Wolf got in the way.”
If he kept bringing up Red, she was going to tear him limb from limb and relish the fact that he couldn’t really die here. “I don’t believe that you’ve ever done something for the benefit of someone else in your life.”
“First time for everything,” he replied.