“Is that why you took all my magic? To prove your noble intentions?”
He half turned, the gleam of his blue eyes bright as flame-hearts in all this gray. The corner of his mouth twisted up, not in a smile. “I’d never claim that my intentions were noble, Neverah. I know what I am.”
Her lips pressed into a tight line.
“I took it because the magic here rots your soul, turns you into a monster.” He started forward again, climbing with agile grace over the thatched branches hilling the unnatural forest floor. One of them sliced up from the ground; he stood on it, looked down at her. “I don’t expect a thank you, don’t worry.”
Neve glared up at him. “At least you know better than that.”
Another bend of that cruel mouth into a not-smile. Solmir inclined his head, almost courtly, then hopped down and continued weaving through the inverted trees. He didn’t offer Neve a hand to help her over the branch; she nearly stumbled, stubbing her bare toe against pale bark.
“If you want my soul to stay free of rot,” she said, glowering at his back and trying to ignore the pain in her foot, “what about yours? Assuming you have one.”
“Oh, I do.” He sounded almost angry about it. “Withered and sorry thing though it is. But I managed to disentangle it from magic some time ago.” His voice slanted low. “It was quite a feat, if you want to know the truth. The magic here likes to seep into every available place, take you over. Much like the magic in the Wilderwood, I’m told. But if I’m careful, I can keep the two from melding together.”
“Do you want a medal?”
Blue eyes flickered her way. “A moment of silence will suffice.”
And because her mind was already awash with things she couldn’t quite wrap meaning around, Neve gave it to him.
She craned her neck as they walked, peering at the snatches of sky she could see between the thready roots of the inverted trees. Something that looked almost like stratified clouds marked the gray, but when she squinted at them, she saw that they were just more roots, high enough to be obscured in shifting mist.
“I don’t deserve your trust. I know that much.” Solmir resolutely faced forward, his tone and his stance casual in a way that seemed almost forced, like he’d been thinking the words over long before they escaped his mouth. “But, unfortunately, you’re going to have to give it to me.”
“I did trust you.” It came out almost wounded, and Neve hated that, but she couldn’t swallow the jagged sound out of her voice. “It put me here.”
His hand tightened on the strap of the bag over his shoulder.
Neve’s eyes narrowed at his back, something thorny and poisonous rising in her chest, despite the fact that all her power was housed in him now. “Maybe it’s unfair to claim I trusted you, since you were pretending to be someone else all along. You’ve lied to me since the beginning, Solmir. How can you ask me for trust?”
Solmir turned. He closed the distance between them, nimble as a dancer, striding over the irregular, branch-covered ground to loom over her, hands clasped behind his back like a general addressing a wayward soldier.
“And you swallowed the lies without question, didn’t you?” His gaze pinned her in place, spots of cold as chilling as his rings on her skin had been. “Even when the deepest part of you knew there was something happening. Even when you knew I wasn’t Arick.”
“I didn’t know that.” But that falling feeling in her stomach said she did, she did, she did.
“Don’t insult your own intelligence. You didn’t know the whole of it, maybe, you didn’t know exactly what had happened, but you suspected. You knew he’d changed, that he was being influenced by more than Kiri. And you said nothing.” He paused. “Not even when you knew they killed your mother.”
Another quake saved her from trying to defend herself, trying to pretend what he said was a lie. It shook through the ground beneath them, enough to knock her off-balance, to send her stumbling against Solmir’s chest. His hands came up to steady her, his palm against the sliver of her wrist his coat sleeve left bare.
Neve didn’t take a moment to think. She turned her hand and closed her fingers around his.
He realized what she was doing. She felt him jerk against her, try to pull away, but she pulled first, tugged at him like a planet to its moon.
And that dark, thorned power he housed spilled into her waiting veins.
It stung, ripping at her insides, carving familiar wounds. Her palm eclipsed, then her fingers, veins going inky and running up her shoulder, toward her heart, then down her other side to mark the hand that didn’t hold his.
Solmir wrenched himself away, but she was faster still. Neve opened a frost-laced hand between them like she was offering him something, and her offering was a bramble, flecked with dagger-long thorns, wrapping around his neck, a collar he couldn’t pull out of.
But Solmir didn’t look afraid, not in the slightest. Instead, he looked almost pleased. “Oh, yes,” he murmured. “It looks like this is going to work out just fine.”
“You told me you had nothing to do with my mother’s death.” Neve’s voice was so calm. That was a difference between her and Red, one of many—Red wore her emotions where everyone could see, making no attempt to hide them. Neve was skilled in burying them deep, far down and distant, something to be dealt with later if they were dealt with at all.
“I didn’t.” Solmir’s voice was just as calm, despite the shadow-made thorns digging into his neck. “The killings were all Kiri. But that was the moment you knew. The moment you were sure that whatever was happening was bigger than what you’d planned for. And you did nothing to stop it.”
“Neither did you.” Neve’s fingers twitched; the thorns around Solmir’s throat tightened, enough that she saw the flicker of a grimace at his mouth. “You said you tried to do this in a way that didn’t hurt me, but when you saw that it did, you did nothing.”
“Did you want me to?” His face was all harsh angles. “You never asked me to stop any of it.”
Her lips lifted back from her teeth. “I can’t be your conscience.”
A spark in his eye, a snarl to match hers. “And I can’t be your spine.”
They stood there, locked together by magic, a Queen and a King and the darkness of an underworld.
“It was always going to come to this.” Solmir shifted, his collar of thorns digging into his skin. One pushed in at his throat, enough to pucker, not quite enough to pierce. “It was always going to come down to you to stop them, to annihilate them so that they can’t make a world in their image. It was always going to be you and Redarys.”