The moment passed; he turned back to his boots. “You fooled everyone else well enough, if it’s any consolation.” He snorted. “Except Kiri, maybe.”
It was the opposite of consolation, but Neve didn’t tell him that. Didn’t tell him that the two villains in her story being able to read her better than anyone else was a fact that clawed her gut and hollowed her chest.
“I didn’t fool Raffe,” she said quietly. Almost a weapon. Proof that someone else looked at her and saw truth.
Mostly.
The name made Solmir’s mouth twist as he leaned his head back against the wall. “Raffe would believe whatever you told him.” He snorted. “That’s what true love does, isn’t it? I wouldn’t know.”
Her hands closed to fists in the too-long sleeves of his coat. True love. Right.
She shook her head, banishing thoughts of Raffe and whatever lay between them and all the invariable ways she’d broken it. With a sigh, she settled on the rug, then lay back, head cradled on threadbare fabric and broken feathers.
“Comfortable?” Solmir asked.
“Better than a glass coffin.”
Silence. She heard Solmir shift against the wall. “I would say I was sorry about that,” he said, voice nearly as sharp as hers had been, “but it was to keep you safe, actually. I understand that you have a hard time believing I’m concerned with your safety, but it’s true.” Another pause, longer, heavier in the cold air. “I need you, Neverah. Unfortunately for us both.”
“It wasn’t worth it,” Neve said, curling up on her side. She pillowed her head on her arms, the fabric of his coat scratchy against her cheek, smelling of pine and snow.
“What wasn’t?”
“Keeping me safe,” she replied.
Fog. Not just around her—it felt like the fog was in her, like she’d dissipated and become nothing but smoke herself. It was peaceful, almost.
Dreaming. She must be dreaming.
Neve wasn’t one to dream deeply or often, wasn’t one for ascribing some sort of richer meaning to whatever her brain spilled out in sleep. But something felt… different here. Heavy. Aware.
She couldn’t feel the floor, but she knew she was lying on it; couldn’t feel the weave of the coat pressed against her face, but knew it was there. The pinions of old feathers poked through her nightgown, and she felt them as if they were pressing through thick fabric instead, present but distant.
And she felt magic.
Not much, nothing like what she’d carried before Solmir took it with that bruising, terrible kiss, or even the cold slither that had been a constant on the surface, when she was stealing it daily with blood on a sentinel. But there was a breath of it deep within her, the prick of thorns in her very center, like something had been permanently altered in ways kisses couldn’t fix.
Her soul, maybe.
Slowly, the fog around her dispersed. As it did, the feeling of being incorporeal faded, Neve’s consciousness weighting back down into her limbs.
The shifting fog revealed a massive tree.
But only part of one, the lower half. A tower of roots, twisting in on each other, tall as three of her. If she craned her neck, she could almost see where the trunk began in the fog, what seemed like miles above her head. Looking down, she saw she stood on roots, too. The tree was the only solid thing she could see, the rest of the world made only of mist.
The roots were white, like the branches in the Shrine, like the trees in the inverted forest. Dark veins ran through them, streaks of shadow that were still somehow luminescent. But far above, where the roots ended and the trunk began, were faint glimmers of gold.
Neverah Valedren.
A voice, reverberating all around her, coming from every direction and none at all. The diffuse sound made it difficult to pick out characteristics, but it came across as vaguely masculine, confident. Half familiar.
She took a step forward, toward the root tower. The tree itself grew no closer, but every step seemed to ground her more in her body. Her nightgown was gone, and Solmir’s coat and the Seamstress’s boots, leaving her in nothing but a gauzy white covering that reminded her uncomfortably of a shroud.
Following some deep dream instinct, Neve began to climb up the roots toward the trunk.
Something glimmered in all that white wood. As she drew closer, she saw it was a mirror, one framed in golden gilt that looked vaguely shabby against the luminous glow of the tree bark. Rusty stains marred the frame, the color almost unbearably lurid, and blond hairs had been woven through the whorls like rays from a faded sun.
But the mirror wasn’t nearly as unsettling as the reflection it held.
Neve’s veins were black under white skin, every one of them, tracing her entire frame in a lacing of darkness. Tiny spikes grew down from her wrist, largest near her hand, tapering into smaller points as they grew nearer her elbow. More thorns stood out from her knuckles, a gauntlet. And her eyes were wholly, completely black.
Just like Solmir’s had been when he took in all that magic from the Seamstress, the lesser beasts they’d killed. Except hers didn’t have the slightest touch of color that signified the presence of a soul.
This must be the monstrousness he was saving her from.
Gently, Neve lifted one thorn-laced hand and touched the mirror’s silvery surface, her skin gray against the red and gold.
Something shifted in the glass. A momentary distortion of her reflection, her gauntness filled out and given color. Dark-gold hair, fierce brown eyes, a face with fuller lips and plumper cheeks than her own.
Red.
There and then gone, and Neve all but clawed at the mirror, her spiked hands arching on the glass as if she could smash it. “Red! Can you hear me? Come back!”
But her reflection was merely her own again, and even that was momentary. The mirror stopped picking up her image and instead showed only a thick tangle of tree roots touched with darkness.
Neve slapped her hand against the glass. “Red!”
Nothing.
She slid to her knees, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes, mindless of her bracelets of thorns.
You almost have it.
That voice again, the one that had said her name, full and soft and somehow familiar, like a memory from childhood she couldn’t quite hold together. Sorrow welled in it, one deep enough to make answering pain echo in her chest. She took her hands from her eyes—no blood, as if her thorns were incapable of harming their wielder—and peered into the fog. “What?”
You aren’t ready to be the mirror yet. Not until you find the Tree, find the key.
Neve shook her head. Nonsense words in a nonsense place, but the voice had mentioned the Tree, and that made her think this was something she should pay attention to. “Who are you? An Old One? One of their adherents?”
A pause. Behind the mirror, in the gaps between the tree roots, Neve almost saw a figure. It was gone too quickly to make out anything distinct.
I don’t know what I am. Not really. Faint, with a note of longing. But I don’t think I ever did.