“Not if she’d just run.” Neve shook her head, a shiver working over her at the contrast of this familiar argument happening in such a wholly unfamiliar place. “If Red had listened to me and not gone to the Wolf, none of this would’ve happened.”
“You know that isn’t true. You made the choices that led you here, Neverah. They’re yours as much as they are hers. You could’ve run from it, but the two of you are for the Wolf and for the throne, and such things have a way of finding you even if you hide.”
Her choices. Letting Kiri convince her there was a way to save Red from a fate she’d greeted with open arms. Bleeding on the sentinel shards to grow their inverted grove. Pulling in all that shadowed magic as she lay there in a glass coffin.
All these things she’d done for a measure of control, and it all led to the same place. To her choosing to go, the same as Red had, both of them trying to save the other.
It kept coming back to two women and the woods.
Solmir stared down at her, somehow still imperious even when collared with her thorns. His eyes were a sky-colored glitter in a place with no real sky, his too-long hair brushing the puckered scars in his forehead. “Are you going to release me, Your Majesty?”
“Can’t you release yourself?” If it came out mocking, so be it. Kings and shadows knew he’d mocked her enough today.
He shifted, the first real sign of discomfort he’d shown without attempting to hide it. “Not until I absorb a few more shadow-creatures,” he answered. “Our magic supply is running low, since we’re unable to pull from the Shadowlands themselves without rather dire consequences. Pain and unraveling for you, the further rending of an already tattered soul for me.” He tapped a finger against a thorn. “This was shamefully wasteful.”
She scowled, fought the urge to clasp his arm and pull out more of their limited supply of magic just so she could curve one of those thorns into his mouth. Instead, Neve stood pin-straight and queenly and let her hand fall away, releasing her hold on the magic in the same instinctual way she’d unspooled it from him in the first place—the moon releasing a comet from its orbit.
Slowly, the thorns around Solmir’s neck withered, retracted into themselves. They curled into plumes of gray smoke before dissipating into the air. It reminded her of when they killed the worm-monster from before, but these shadows didn’t make any noise. She’d drained the magic out, stripped it of use.
Solmir stood close until the last of it was gone, close enough for her to feel the skate of his breath across her cheek.
Then he turned sharply on his heel, striding forward again. “Come on. My friend is waiting.”
“You still haven’t told me who your friend is.”
“I don’t know what her name was, before. But here, she’s called the Seamstress.” A glance over his shoulder. “I think you’ll like her.”
The forest grew denser before it thinned, inverted trunks growing close as threads on a loom, waiting for a weaver. The branches on the ground dipped and wove around each other, hard to navigate. In some places, they stacked almost like a madcap staircase, canting up and then down, and she’d nearly tripped into Solmir’s back more than once. He tensed every time she came close, like he expected her to grab his arm and siphon magic out of him again. Neve tried not to relish that too much.
Both of them kept one eye to the reaches of the forest as they moved, wary of noise. The memory of that toothy wormlike thing was still extremely fresh in Neve’s mind, and she had no desire to come upon something similar. Or something worse.
But the inverted forest was silent. It seemed like they were the only two sentient things for miles.
Another rumble, reverberating through the ground. They paused, braced atop latticed branches until it passed. An uneasy, wordless look passed between them. It was close to companionable, and they both seemed to notice that at the same time—Neve scowled, and Solmir’s lip lifted, and they turned away from each other and back toward the path without another glance.
Slowly, the inverted forest tapered away, the upside-down trees growing farther apart. They came to a clearing, open enough so that Neve could see what passed for a sky, see the cloud-like smudges of faraway roots in the gray horizon. The branches on the ground thinned, snaking over the dry dirt like roots might, weaving together and lying flat.
In the center of the clearing sat a cottage. It looked so normal that Neve had to stare at it a moment, to see if her mind was somehow playing tricks. A perfectly ordinary cottage, log-built, with a plume of smoke twisting from the chimney into the gray sky. There was even a damn goat in the yard.
Her brow furrowed as she stepped forward, passing Solmir, drawn by the sight of something nearly normal. “The Seamstress seems to have made a cozy home for herself, all things considered.”
What was meant to be a throwaway comment seemed to strike Solmir more heavily than she meant. He nodded, lips contemplatively twisted. “She did, before.”
In the yard, the goat turned to look at her. Only then did Neve notice it had three eyes. It bleated, and the sound was like a crying child.
Neve’s heart jumped into her throat; she started backward, nearly colliding with Solmir, then reversed direction, her nightgown knotting around her legs.
Solmir looked at the goat, shrugged. “Another lesser beast. A rather useless one.”
“Useless, maybe, but damn unsettling.” Her heartbeat slowed; Neve straightened. “Five Kings.”
“It’s extremely disconcerting that you use that as a curse,” Solmir muttered.
But Neve wasn’t paying attention. Her eyes had gone to the cottage, to the slow creep of the opening door.
Pushed by something that was decidedly not a human hand.
Chapter Five
Neve
Instinct told her to back away, to run into the inverted trees they’d left behind. Instead, Neve planted her feet, pulled the edges of Solmir’s coat around herself as if it could be armor.
Solmir looked at her with one knife-slash brow arched. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Who says I’m afraid?”
“Every single thing about you right now says you’re afraid.”
She didn’t like that, didn’t like the idea that he could read her easily. “Concerned and afraid are not the same thing.”
“Whatever you need to tell yourself, Neverah.”
The door continued to press implacably forward, pushed by something that looked almost like… like spider legs. Three of them at least, moving in tandem like a hand might. Spiky dark fur studded the legs’ lengths, and though the gloom inside the cottage hid whatever torso they attached to, the legs alone looked nearly as long as Neve was tall.
“What is that?” Neve did her best to keep her voice even, though it was a challenge. She hated spiders. Always had. Of course there’d be a giant spider here.
“She,” Solmir said, with emphasis on the pronoun, “is the Seamstress. And you have nothing to fear from her. She only eats insects.”