“Fair enough.” A quick twist of his hand, and her arm was pinned behind her, between her body and the hard plane of his. “Then we’ll do this the undiplomatic way. I think you secretly like that better, anyway. You seem to jump at any excuse for violence.”
She jerked against him. He laughed, dark and humorless. “Tell you what, little queen. I say my piece, and then you’re welcome to hit me. As hard as you want. Anywhere you want.” There was an edge to his voice, something she couldn’t quite identify. Rueful and angry, a low burn of ferocity like a banked fire. “Do we have a deal?”
It wasn’t like she had many other options. “Fine,” Neve said. “Talk.”
He relaxed behind her, slightly, though his hold on her arm remained unyielding. He wore silver rings on almost all of his fingers, and they bit into her skin, spots of deeper cold in a cold world. “You’re in the Shadowlands.”
“I gathered,” she replied, trying to let fierceness carve out any fear in her tone.
“Smart woman.” He adjusted his hold, silver chilling the fragile length of her forearm. “You’re in the Shadowlands,” he continued, “because I need your help.”
“What if I don’t want to help you? Why would I ever want to help you?”
“Because you don’t really have a choice.” He turned her around to face him then, apparently satisfied that she wouldn’t take a swing until he gave her the word.
Solmir was handsome, a fact she hated twofold—hated that it was true and hated that she noticed. Long, straight hair spilled over his shoulders, almost to his elbows. She didn’t know its color, since the monotone of the Shadowlands washed it out, but it looked a middling gray, like it’d be somewhere between gold and brown in a place with color. Dark brows slashed like dagger strikes on a high forehead; his nose was straight and prominent over a thin mouth with a wicked curve. Considerably tall, so that when he peered down at her, he looked almost like a bird of prey eyeing something caught in a trap.
And his eyes. They were blue. Blue in all this gray and black and white.
“I’m not going to attempt to justify myself to you.” But the look in those blue eyes said he might want to. “I will simply tell you, with complete honesty, that everything I did on the surface was for a purpose.”
“And that purpose was?”
A bladed smile without any warmth bent his mouth. “To kill the Kings.”
Neve was very good at keeping her emotions off her face and out of her limbs, playacting impassivity, so she stood statue-still as confusion and the stomach swoop of blasphemy churned in her mind, attempting to take this piece and fit it somewhere that made sense.
“You,” she said finally, “are going to have to explain more than that.”
“Come on, Neverah.” He shook his head, all that hair swinging to brush her chest. “You didn’t think they were something good, did you? I know you didn’t. I saw how you never wanted to touch that branch shard. All of this was for your sister, never because of some misguided piety.”
“Do not talk about my sister.”
Queenly, an order, and his eyes briefly widened. “Understood, Your Majesty.”
Inexplicably, the title brought heat to her face. Neve wrenched her arm from his hold, though she didn’t try to hit him. Yet. “So you want to kill the Kings. Is that why you tried to bring them through?”
Solmir nodded, a solemnity that sat strangely against the mocking way he’d spoken to her.
A terrible, twisted grove, blood on white branches, darkness dripping. Her memories of what happened before she woke here were scattered, hard to gather, hard to meld into a whole picture. But she knew, deep in her bones where cold magic twined, that before she’d been pulled into the Shadowlands, Kiri and Solmir and the other priestesses had been making a doorway between the worlds. Using her to make a doorway. Anchoring her to the inverse of the forest that anchored Red, making them dark mirrors of each other.
Red. Shadows damn her, she couldn’t think about Red right now.
Neve swallowed, banishing the itch of grief that hung in the back of her throat. “You’re just going to try to kill the Kings here instead, then?”
“I’d love to. But I can’t.” That cold smile again, all angles. “Nothing can truly die in the Shadowlands, I’m afraid.”
The fact itself might’ve been comforting were it not for the way he delivered it. As both a challenge and the winning card in a hand, eyes glittering and mouth a harsh line.
But Neve didn’t have much of a chance to ponder it.
The inverted trees whipped from side to side, the spindly roots stretching into the cold sky and waving like skeletal fingers. A sound like tearing metal echoed through the gray, and with a crash, the long-bodied monster shot out from the forest, toothed mouth gnashing at the air and coming straight toward them.
“Dammit,” Solmir muttered, and thrust Neve aside.
She stumbled over dry ground and tangling branches, landing on her knees and away from the careening teeth. She still wore a white nightgown, flimsy against the cold and the press of rough bark. Had she known she’d be journeying to the underworld, she would’ve chosen her attire with more care.
The ridiculous thought, something that belonged to her life as a First Daughter rather than a queen and a heretic, was enough to loose a horrible, barking laugh.
Before her, Solmir stood in the path of that huge mouth, his own teeth bared in the rictus of a smile. He’d been wearing a coat before, dark and almost military-like, but now he’d thrown it to the side, pushed up the sleeves of the thin white shirt beneath. Black lines ran down his arms, like ink cascading from his heart instead of blood. Darkness pooled in his hands, blackening his fingers, his wrists. A thin line of ice shone across his knuckles.
The gnashing mouth of the wormlike monster was so close Neve could feel its breath.
Then Solmir opened his outstretched fists.
The darkness in his hands shot into the air, growing jagged and thorny, like he’d woven a net of brambles in his bloodstream and now cast it out. It fell on the monster, cutting into its gore-caked flesh, contracting around its body, and making it bellow.
But still the thing kept coming.
Fear was an unnatural emotion to see on Solmir; the angles of his face couldn’t carry it well. His blue eyes widened, and his cruel mouth opened, but he allowed himself only a heartbeat of shock before he thrust his hands out again, trying to call up more shadows. The ink that crawled slowly down his skin wasn’t quite as dark as before, more gray than black.
Magic, growing thin, running out. Neve still wasn’t exactly sure of its mechanics, the cold thing that her blood on a sentinel shard had called into her bones—only that it was tied to this place, the inverse of Red’s green and growing power. But she knew it still lived in her, chilled and thorned, made even more potent by the doorway they’d tried to open, the way they’d anchored her to that awful grove.