The quake came out of nowhere. A pitch, a slide, a rumbling in the floor that sent them careening against each other and then to the ground. Instinctively, Raffe braced himself over Kayu, expecting falling rock and ruin.
But the rocks never came, as if the earthquake was centralized—focused on the pieces of sentinel trees. Around them, the stone walls groaned, but only the branch shards bent and twisted, like someone awakening from a long sleep. Shivers of color trembled over the white wood, gold and black, a dance of light and darkness that lasted only a blink.
Panicked, Raffe checked his palms, then grabbed Kayu’s and checked them, too. No blood, no tiny cuts that might’ve accidentally awakened the shards. This was different, something new—
As soon as it began, it stopped. No more groaning, and the floor was once again level, unmoving. They crouched on the ground, both tense and ready for another round, but the Shrine was still and silent.
A heartbeat. The very ends of the branches twitched, once, like dying hands. Then, with a crack, they all changed their shape.
Keys. They all looked like keys.
A blink, and they were just branches again, so quickly Raffe wondered if he’d imagined it. But next to him, Kayu’s eyes were wide, her mouth agape—she’d seen it, too.
“What in all the shadows was that?” she whispered.
“I don’t know.” Raffe sighed, shook his head. In for a sip, in for a pint. “But I know who will.”
Chapter Ten
Neve
After two days of walking—she assumed, at least, since they’d stopped to sleep twice, taking turns watching the unchanging horizon while the other dozed fitfully far enough away for the comfort of the other—the landscape up ahead finally changed. Neve was embarrassed by the way her heart leapt to see something other than flat, cracked ground.
It looked like a mountain range, cragged and rough, a darker shade of charcoal against the ash-colored glow of the sky. The range stretched from side to side, like the curve of a bowl’s edge, and seemed to grow larger as they walked closer, the only marker of time or distance she’d noticed since they left the inverted forest.
Solmir stayed a few yards ahead of her, but she didn’t have to raise her voice to be heard. The silence of a dead world made sure her words carried. “How big are the Shadowlands?”
“Big enough,” he answered, without turning around.
“And was it always like… this? Even before it started breaking apart?” The ground had stayed steady since the huge quake that shook magic from the depths of the earth, but Neve still stepped cautiously, prepared for the world to lurch at any moment.
“It’s never been exactly vibrant,” Solmir said drily, “but when the Old Ones first came here, with all their lesser-beast children, it wasn’t quite so dead.” His hand cut backward in the direction they’d come, then forward, toward the mountain range. “The whole of the Shadowlands is hemmed in by forest—the borders of the Wilderwood, though the exact measurements of the edges obviously don’t match up—but the Old Ones shaped it as they wished. They each made their own territories here. The Serpent underground, the Weaver in the forests, the Dragon out past the Endless Sea, where the Leviathan lives. They fought against each other, took territories over, lost others. Treated it mostly like they treated the surface, just without humans getting in the way.” He shrugged, dropped his hand. “It’s never been pleasant. But it’s been more than this.”
She couldn’t decide if the world he described sounded better or worse than the one they walked, but something else he’d said stuck out to her even more than the slapdash geography lesson. “The lesser beasts are the Old Ones’ children?”
“That’s as easy a way to put it as any.” Solmir shrugged, making his hair ripple behind him. He still wore it down, though it had to get in the way. “The lesser beasts are weaker copies of the Old Ones they come from. The Old Ones are their only parent.” He turned then, giving her an arch look and a wicked turn of his mouth. “Even the Old Ones that took lovers didn’t manage to procreate with them.”
Neve grimaced.
The only lesser beast they’d encountered so far was the three-eyed goat and that worm-thing with all the teeth. But Neve thought, unsettlingly, that what she’d been thinking of as worm could just as easily be serpent. “How long until we get there?”
“Patience, Your Majesty.”
Neve could very patiently tear him limb from limb, but she fell silent, following him across the cracked not-desert.
Then, a rumble.
Solmir stopped and barely had time to cast out a hand in her direction before the pitching earth sent them careening into each other. The runnels in the dirt widened, spider-webbed. The quake wasn’t as dire as the one before—no clouds of rogue magic bloomed from the chasms opening like hungry maws—but it still rattled Neve’s teeth in her skull.
On the horizon before them, one of those mountainous smudges began to sink. A cloud of dust bloomed into the gray sky, the sound of its collapse made soft by distance.
The quake was over nearly as soon as it began, leaving her and Solmir canted together on the ground, pressing into each other for balance. The world shuddered once more and then was still.
He pushed up first, steadying before she did. Solmir stretched out a courtly hand.
Neve eyed it warily before lightly placing her fingers in his palm, nails clicking against all his silver rings. Solmir pulled her up, hand dropping as soon as she was safely upright. “Last time I helped you up, you siphoned off a sizable amount of magic.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Neve muttered.
He cracked a sharp smile, then started out across the seemingly endless desert again. “We need to make haste.”
She chewed her lip as she followed, a nervous tic she and Red shared. But where Red would pull her bottom lip between her teeth, almost flirtatious if you didn’t know it was a mark of anxiety, Neve tended to gnaw hers bloody.
They walked on. Before long—minutes, hours, Neve didn’t try to keep it straight anymore—something rose up in front of them, a small interruption against the endless horizon. A hill, maybe, but irregularly shaped, with strange humps and curves she couldn’t quite make out.
It didn’t seem like an entrance to a kingdom or a territory or anything else. Neve assumed they would pass it, a strange aberration in a stranger land, but Solmir curved his path toward the hill.
She frowned. “Is that where we’re going, then?”
Solmir flipped his hand at the oddly shaped hill, the lazy imitation of a welcoming flourish. “Behold, the entrance to the Kingdom of the Serpent.”
Neve’s head canted to the side, trying to make this square with the image of the entrance she’d had in her head—something ornate, Temple-like, to mark the kingdom of a god. “Are all the territory entrances so… ordinary?”
“Depends on your definition.” Solmir shaded his eyes from the pale glow of the sky to look toward the mountain range, then pointed with his chin. “That’s the Oracle’s domain, where we’re going next. Does it seem ordinary to you?”
“Yes,” she bit out, irritated. “They’re just mountains.”