Trying, and apparently not getting very far. “Are you finding the right tunnel or calling a wayward dog?”
“Your Majesty, I beseech you for the gift of your silence.”
She shifted back and forth, looking warily around the circular space while Solmir tried to figure out which tunnel to take. Her vision was somewhat hazier down here. Shadows curled around the stone walls, thick and dark and ominous, and she fought the urge to slink closer to Solmir again, just for the solid reassurance of not being alone.
For all her mocking, she understood the principle of what he was doing. Power attracted power, he’d said, and he was full to the brim. So was the Serpent. If he listened to the magic within him, all that power he held so she wouldn’t have to, it should pull him toward the dying Old One.
Hopefully, before the dying Old One was pulled to the Five Kings, stuck in their Sanctum.
The Seamstress had told them that the Serpent was holding on, purposefully trying to avoid being absorbed by the Kings, increasing their magic with its own. But there was no way to know if it had been successful. No way to know until they went down one of these tunnels and found either a god or more empty darkness.
Both options made her wrap her arms tighter around herself, cocooning in Solmir’s coat.
After what felt like an hour, Solmir’s hands dropped. He turned to her, and Neve had been wrong—it wasn’t surprise or even fear that looked most alien on his sharp-boned face. It was defeat.
“I don’t know,” he said, like it was as much a shock to him as it was to her.
For a moment, Neve stood in confused silence. Then she advanced a step, hands curling tight against her arms. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“Exactly what it sounds like.” Solmir reached up, nervously rubbed at the puckered scars on his forehead. His pointer finger turned the ring on his thumb round and round. “The magic isn’t telling me where to go. The power should call me, but it’s… it’s just not. Or, rather, it’s trying to, but…” He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s like the Serpent doesn’t want me to find it.”
She was right next to him now, glaring up as if she could use her eyes as daggers. “You mean you took us all the way down here, and you don’t know—”
His palm over her mouth muffled the rest of her poison, and Neve had her hand half raised to try to twist from his grip before she saw why.
The shadows at the edges of the room were closer. Thicker, almost opaque. A small circle of unshadowed stone surrounded Neve and Solmir, but other than that, the whole room was covered in viscous darkness.
And emanating from it—a low, gibbering sound.
Shadow-creatures. Unfettered magic, like what had burst from the broken ground, like what had seeped out of the lesser beast as her thorns made it unravel. But there was something different about these. They were still, uniform, as if they were being controlled.
As if they’d already attached to something bigger, their magic directed by something stronger than they were.
Solmir turned slowly, dropping his hand from her mouth when it became clear she’d stay quiet. But his other hand found her wrist, squeezed so hard it hurt.
“Magic from the Serpent?” Her lips barely moved with the question, like sound would shatter the shadow-creatures’ stasis. Even as she asked, though, she knew the answer was no. If the Serpent was dying, it wouldn’t have the strength to hold all this raw power at attention.
“No.” Barely sound, more a breath into her ear.
“Then can you take it?”
Slowly, Solmir shook his head. “It’s already claimed.”
Cold shot from Neve’s sternum, down through her middle. A numbing kind of fear.
The wall of darkness stood, impenetrable, pressed close. Then, in the darkness, a glint of white.
Teeth.
Teeth in the shadows, sharp and elongated, a hundred maws filled with fangs. At first, they just hung there, but then they all dropped open and spoke.
“The prodigal.”
A voice from everywhere and nowhere, layered and discordant. It took everything in Neve not to clap her hands over her ears. She tightened her grip on the god-bone in her other hand, wondering if it would work against something incorporeal.
All the teeth clicked together, a tandem fanged smile, before speaking in sync again. “Solmir, boy, we’ve been waiting for you. Welcome home.”
“Calryes,” Solmir breathed. Fear gleamed in his blue eyes, in his blanched face, and a terrified former god was the most terrifying thing Neve had ever seen.
But he recovered. Schooled his expression to cold, to haughtiness and impassivity. Almost casually, he turned, his death grip on her wrist his only tell.
Solmir shot a bladed grin into the shadows. “Hello, Father.”
Chapter Eleven
Neve
A pause. Then a laugh, even louder and more horrible than the speaking of the hundreds of mouths had been, echoing and distorting in the dark.
Terror and incredulity warred in Neve’s mind, her fingers tightening around the god-bone until her knuckles felt like they might crack. Calryes? Father? The legends said nothing of this, nothing of Solmir being one of the other Kings’ sons, and though she couldn’t quite make sense of why the revelation felt so world-bending, it was enough to make her stomach knot.
If Valchior was the leader of the Five Kings, then Calryes was his right hand.
Which meant they were in deep shit.
“Son.” Calryes still spoke from hundreds of fanged shadow-mouths, but there was a denser space of darkness right in front of Solmir that appeared to be shifting, twisting into something new. “You’ve returned with a companion, I see. How interesting.”
Solmir moved incrementally forward, placing himself between the swiftly coalescing shadows and Neve. Not protective, necessarily, more like he wanted to hide her from view, keep the King, swiftly coming into shape, from seeing the whole of her.
In every other circumstance, Neve refused to cower. But now, behind Solmir, she let her head bow forward, let herself hide behind him. Some deep instinct told her this was not the time for queenly arrogance.
The darkness before Solmir slowly solidified. The essence of shadow remained, even as the darkness became a thin figure wearing a spiked crown. It shifted too much to settle on any one shape, was only the suggestion of a person.
The Kings couldn’t leave the Sanctum, the Seamstress had said—they were trapped there, anchored down by all the magic they’d pulled in, becoming part of the Shadowlands. But they could send projections of themselves. This wasn’t Calryes, it was merely a simulacrum.
That should have been more reassuring than it was.
“The little queen from the surface,” the King continued, shadows seeping around his edges like mist on a moor. He didn’t call her Shadow Queen, not like the Seamstress had, and for some reason that made relief run a cool finger down her spine. “And whatever for, Solmir?”
“Got lonely,” Solmir said.