Neve glared at the back of his head.
“Here’s hoping it works out better for you this time.” The words were sly. The shadows around Calryes’s vague shape shifted and coiled, vipers in a pit. “At least she came all the way through without dying. That’s an improvement.”
Solmir’s hand clenched into a fist by his side, so tight it nearly trembled.
Behind him, Neve ran through quick calculations in her head, plans she knit together and then discarded. Calryes had known they were going to the Serpent’s cairn, so it stood to reason he knew why: to harvest the dying god’s power, take it before the Kings could. Was he here to try to take it himself?
No—no, that didn’t make sense. If the Kings were trying to pull dying gods to the Sanctum, where they were physically trapped, that must mean they couldn’t absorb magic unless they were truly present. Which meant he wasn’t here to try to take the Serpent’s power—he was here to try to keep Neve and Solmir from taking it.
And even though he couldn’t physically touch them, the realization made her nerves spike.
Well, then. He’d just have to be distracted.
Neve stepped forward, striding around Solmir like he was furniture. He stood still and stupefied, the presence of the King—his father—stealing all his movement, replacing it with dread.
“You know why I’m here,” Neve told the dark.
Silence. Then another roar of laughter, discordant and quick, from all those toothed mouths. “Do I?” A shimmer ran through Calryes’s vaporous figure, the spiked crown that was the most solid part of him tipping back. “I can think of many reasons, little queen. None of them are kind.”
“Neither am I.”
“No,” Calryes said contemplatively. “No, I don’t think you are.”
Thin tendrils of darkness curled around Neve’s arms, almost like they were looking for something. A gasp caught in her teeth, but she didn’t move, kept up her icy poise even though every part of her wanted to cringe away.
But the sight of the shadows on Neve ripped Solmir from his fearful stillness. He grabbed her wrist, tried to haul her back. She didn’t let him, instead whipping her head to the side, eyes fierce and fixed on his.
She mouthed one word: Go.
He dropped his hand, but didn’t follow her order, staring at her as if he were seeing her for the first time.
The shadows curling around her arms slithered away, like night insects chased off by light. “Hmm.” Calryes’s shape was too amorphous to reveal true movement, but Neve had the impression of him tapping thoughtfully on his chin. “No magic. At least, none that can really be used. But you’ve had it before, and recently. The scars are fresh.”
Then the shadows shot toward Solmir.
If their twining around Neve was slow and sinuous, they went for Solmir with vicious intent, a striking attack rather than curious exploration. Darkness twisted around his throat, shackled his arms. Tendrils dove into his mouth, his nostrils, his eyes, delving deep and searching.
He screamed, raw and hoarse, worse than the scream he’d let out in the field when the world was shaking apart, when all its rogue magic rushed to him like rain to dry ground. The sound reverberated through the cavern, and it finally shattered Neve’s queenly poise.
Part of her wanted to run for the surface. Part of her wanted to tear the shadows from Solmir and drag him with her. But she couldn’t make herself do either, so she just slapped her hands over her ears, trying to drown out that terrible screaming.
“So he’s become the vessel,” Calryes mused casually, his son’s pain having no effect on him at all. “Holding all that magic for you. It must seem noble, but don’t let it fool you, little queen. Souls and magic are hard to hold all at once. Saving you from one just means he wants you for the other.” A low chuckle. “Always trying to outrun fate.”
Ropes made of darkness hauled Solmir from the ground, pulling him, writhing, into the air. He’d stopped screaming, finally, but his throat and eyes and nose were still full of those delving tendrils, and the tendons stood out in his neck, the veins stood out in his eyes. He looked at her, trying to communicate something, words in his gaze that he couldn’t say with his mouth. The same order she’d tried to give him.
Go.
And as if that wordless order made it happen, something within Neve was calling.
A pull, a tug. Like a hook had been lodged in her sternum and reeled forward, gentle but demanding. She lurched a step before she had the thought to, then obeyed the instinct, breaking into a desperate run down the tunnel in front of them.
She expected Calryes to send shadows after her, try to trip her up, keep her captive. But the laugh that echoed in the cavern behind her was worse than any torment from the darkness would’ve been.
“Run fast, little queen!” Calyres called.
And Neve did.
All the tenuous vision she’d had before was gone now, siphoned away by the endless black of the underground. Still, Neve could mostly make out her surroundings, sparse as they were. Curved stone walls and a curved stone floor, sloping only ever downward. She passed a few more lesser-beast corpses, more mottled, tubelike bodies ending in teeth. One had died turned toward the tunnel instead of the wall, its mouth hanging open before her. Neve shuddered even as she ran on, careful to give it a wide berth.
She stopped running, eventually, the rasp of her breath the only sound. A few gasps, and then she made herself hold it, listening to see if she could hear anything, either from ahead of her or behind.
Nothing. She thought of Solmir, tortured by shadows—by his father—and squeezed her eyes shut. She’d left him there.
It was strange, to feel guilt for something done to Solmir. He was a King, a murderer who’d manipulated her with Arick’s stolen face, and he undoubtedly deserved every awful thing that fell upon him.
But still, the guilt snaked around Neve’s gut, knotting and uncomfortable.
She hefted the god-bone in her hand, holding it like a sword. Solmir would be fine. He’d gotten through worse than this.
And she had a god to stab.
Pulling in a deep, aching breath, Neve started running again.
The tug in her veins grew stronger the farther she went, drawing her downward, steady and inexorable. Neve had never liked caves—being underground made her feel jumpy and on edge; human beings were meant for sun and surface—but the beat of her pulse and the pull in her bones didn’t give her time to consider her surroundings.
Not that she had time for fear, anyway. Neve was practiced at doing what she had to do, even when it scared her, even when it hurt.