“Red?”
Eammon had rolled on his side, bracing one hand on the other side of her head and caging her in his arms, worry in his eyes. “You cried out.”
She reached up and smoothed the line between his brows. “Sorry,” she said. “Strange dream.”
He frowned. “Again?”
Red nodded, pushing to sit up, hair mussed from sleep and sex. “It felt different this time.” She searched for her hastily discarded tunic, stricken with the sudden need to find the thing she’d pulled from the earth. “Does the term Heart Tree mean anything to you?”
Eammon’s frown deepened. “Not off the top of my head, no.”
Her tunic was a few yards away—damn, he really threw the thing—tangled in a bush’s low brambles. Red didn’t bother disentangling it before reaching into the pocket, pulling out the mystery object that had been left in her hand when she almost became a sentinel. She knocked it against her knee to clear the dirt.
A key. Made of white wood and threaded with veins of gold, but unmistakably a key. And when she closed her hand tight around it, she felt the faint rhythm of a heartbeat, as if the key were a living thing, or at least connected to one.
She turned back to a still-confused Eammon, holding it aloft. “Whatever it is,” she said, “it apparently has a lock.”
Chapter Eight
Neve
Because Neve’s most well-honed talent was torturing herself, she thought of Raffe as they walked.
The ever-present cold of the Shadowlands made his warmth easy to call to mind. Warm brown eyes, warm smile, warm mouth on hers for the one kiss they’d shared, there in her room with her mother dead and her hands iced from magic and Red still gone.
He’d kissed her like he wanted to pull her back from a cliff’s edge.
But there’d been more to it than that, hadn’t there? More than just wanting to save her and defaulting to what he thought might work?
Neve’s lips pressed together, trying to remember, to replay that kiss in her mind. At the time, she hadn’t thought of much beyond the feel of him, the purely physical rush of having something you thought was unattainable, even if only for a moment. That was the crux of what had always lived between them, potent and heady: the knowledge that it could never happen. But then it did, and what even was it?
A rescuing. Raffe throwing her a lifeline, something to cling to, as what she kept grabbing for slipped out of her hands.
It made her frown, to think of it in such stark terms. To try to recall emotion, when desperation was the only one she could name.
Long before she and Raffe had started orbiting each other like stars that might collide, he’d been her friend. And in the end, that’s what she’d felt in that kiss, as heat-filled and thorough as it was. The desperation of a friend, faced with the possibility of losing someone to a darkness they didn’t understand.
There is nothing you could do to make me stop loving you.
That was the way he told her he loved her. A confession, maybe, but not a surprise—of course they loved each other, that was never in question. But the specifications of it, the parameters and ways the corners fit… that was more complicated.
She hadn’t said it back. She’d thought of that more than once since it happened. She hadn’t said it back, and should she feel bad for that? It wouldn’t have been a lie, but it would’ve been a truth without context, and was that worse than no response at all?
Neve wondered what he was doing. She wondered what they’d say to each other, if she saw him again. She wondered what she wanted him to say.
Thinking of Raffe made her think of Arick, and thinking of Arick made her think of Solmir—Solmir-as-Arick, wearing her betrothed’s face, bending them all to his plans like they were nothing but tools.
She glowered at him, moving straight-backed and precise through the trees. All the weakness that absorbing magic had wrought in him was gone now, dark power packed down. A vessel, that’s what he’d called himself. It tugged at her mind, that word, like it should hold more weight, like it was a piece of something larger. But Neve couldn’t remember what.
“Watch your head.”
His voice came quiet, startling her from her thoughts. Ahead of her, Solmir had turned to face her, gesturing up at the lowest branches—roots—on the upside-down trees.
Webbing. It was strung fine as silk, nearly invisible, but still thick, clouding the air. Neve grimaced. “I hate spiders,” she muttered, low enough to be speaking to herself.
“Me too,” Solmir said, turning back around and ducking to avoid the webs.
Her mouth twisted. Other than a shared goal of sending her back to her own world—and, hopefully, killing the other Kings—common ground with Solmir was not something she wanted to find.
The strange moments of tenderness he’d shown back when she thought he was Arick still haunted her. The way he’d moved, careful and caring at once. She wasn’t sure how much of it had been his trying to make a convincing mask of Arick, to fill in the blanks of his being her betrothed. But not all of it felt like a mask.
Now that he was here, in his own body, that carefulness around her had stayed. Not as obvious, but there in glimmers, both in the way he treated her and the way he moved through this world. Giving her his coat. Humming a lullaby.
She couldn’t quite categorize him, and Neve hated things she couldn’t quantify. She’d always had a quick mind, able to decipher people within moments, know what they wanted and how she could use it. But Solmir eluded her, and that made her uneasy.
He needed her. And, for now, she needed him—she couldn’t navigate the Old Ones’ underworld on her own. Right now, Solmir was a necessary evil.
But if there ever came a moment when he wasn’t… well. Then other choices might be made.
The trees thinned, eventually, revealing an open vista of gray. It might’ve been a field once—in some places, the dried husks of dead grasses still clung to the earth, stubbornly rooted into the cracked ground. Now it was nothing but a flat expanse, stretching ever forward, vast and featureless but for the figure of Solmir walking up ahead.
The rumbling started slow, crawling through the ground, making her borrowed boots shake. She looked up, found Solmir staring at her, blue eyes wide.
“Get on your knees,” he said, and though the words were something she certainly would’ve given him an earful for in any other circumstance, Neve obeyed.
Just in time.
The ground shuddered like it was trying to break apart, raising a roar into the still air, making her teeth clatter together. Then it did break apart—fractures split the dry, dusty ground, shuddering open, yawning chasms of deep darkness.
A hairline crack appeared next to Neve’s hand, widening rapidly into a fissure. She tried to scramble away, but the shuddering earth made directing movement nearly impossible, and more cracks ruptured around her, making an island of rapidly deteriorating safety where she crouched.