A god’s magic, made her own.
There were substances some courtiers indulged in, bought on dimly lit street corners at strange hours of night. Things with odd names and odder looks, powders to place under the tongue or liquids to be carefully plied with a needle into a vein. Neve had never tried any of them, not having them offered and not caring enough to seek them out—wine did well enough for forgetting. But Arick had tried once, and had told her that it felt like flying, like some huge hand had plucked you up and flung you into the places between stars, and all you felt was the rush with no fear of the fall.
This was better.
Forget being flung; Neve was the place between stars, a cosmos held beneath her skin, a galaxy in human shape. She’d held up her hands after killing the Serpent, and it didn’t matter that she hadn’t done this before, that she didn’t know how to absorb power from another creature—it came to her anyway, slid beneath her skin like a dagger into a sheath. There was a bite of pain at first, but nothing like what she’d felt when she first woke up, when she pulled magic from the Shadowlands itself. It really was different, taking power as death freed it from an Old One or a lesser beast.
And though her veins blackened as if her blood had run to ink and thorns pressed through her wrists like brutal jewelry, Neve felt safe. She felt infinite.
When the initial rush of all that absorbed magic began to wear off, making her aware of her body as flesh and blood instead of a conduit of shadows, Neve could’ve cried at the loss. Darkness was so much easier than the intricacies of humanity.
She paused right at the cairn’s entrance, the band of shadow where the lip of it blocked the thin gray light. Her palm pressed against her chest; she gasped, as if she’d forgotten to breathe up until this moment.
“Are you hurt?”
Solmir, worry hardening the edges of his voice, making the question a demand. He’d released her hand at some point, a fact she didn’t realize until she saw him reaching back toward her, skin striped by light and dark as he stood on the outside of the cairn. His beard hadn’t grown in the days they’d been traveling, she noticed. Still cut short, framing a strong chin. One more reminder that time didn’t run as it should here. That life and its markers held little weight.
“I’m fine,” Neve replied, and her voice sounded distant, airy. “More than fine.”
His hand still stretched toward her, a slight tremor in his fingers. “It doesn’t… it doesn’t hurt?”
“Hurt is temporary.”
A frown wrinkled his brow, twisted that blade-shaped mouth to the side. He grabbed her hand, a darting motion like a killing strike, and Neve knew he wanted her to let the magic go, to let it flow into him rather than live in her. But it wasn’t something he could make her do. He’d kissed her to take it once, the first time—but she’d been confused and afraid then, scattered. And that was just power from the Shadowlands, not a god.
Now Neve was focused. Controlled. He wouldn’t have this magic until she decided to give it to him.
His brows drew down farther, but Solmir didn’t say anything. After a moment, he dropped her hand.
“It feels so different,” she murmured. Neve looked down at her wrists, twisted them gently back and forth to admire her thorns. There was a delicate beauty to them, for all their sharpness.
“It is different.” An emotion she couldn’t name wavered beneath the surface of his voice. “The Serpent let you kill it, but you still did the deed yourself. Power you gain through your own actions sits differently than power that’s given.”
Didn’t she know it. How power conferred by nothing but name or title was never truly yours alone, always tugged at and picked apart by those who bestowed it. How power could be nothing but the strings that held you up; maybe it hiked you higher than others, but you were still a puppet.
All Solmir’s vitriol against the other Kings made sense, given that framework. Especially now that she knew Calyres was his father, that he’d had less of a choice here than she’d always thought.
Odd, how much more she seemed to understand him with all this shadowed god-magic coursing through her.
Neve cocked her head. She felt loose and strung thin, the weave of her made threadbare by the magic she carried. “You didn’t tell me Calryes is your father.”
His expression shuttered, all that worry choking itself out, becoming hard angles and arrogance. “I wasn’t under the impression you were interested in my family history.”
“I am if your family history is going to interfere with me getting home.”
“I’ve wanted to kill the Kings for longer than you’ve been alive, Neverah. The fact that one happens to be my father is inconsequential.” Solmir crossed his arms over his chest. “We have no warm feelings toward each other. As I’m sure was made clear earlier.”
Earlier, when he’d been shackled by shadows, tortured by them. Kept busy.
She hadn’t thought of Valchior as the Serpent’s power settled into her veins, but now her conversation with the King’s projection came to the forefront of her mind. He’d called her Shadow Queen. Said the Kings knew why she was here. Said they welcomed it.
None of it made sense to her. If the Kings knew she was here as part of Solmir’s plan to bring them into the true world, where they could be killed, why would they welcome that?
The Kings were playing a different game than Solmir was. Same pieces, disparate moves. And Neve was caught in the middle.
It made her decision easy: She’d keep what Valchior said to herself.
“It was made perfectly clear that you and your father are estranged.” She crossed her arms, too, mirroring Solmir’s closed-off stance, still inside the lip of the cairn. “But you should’ve told me. If we’re supposed to be working together, you should tell me everything.”
Different games, different pieces, different rules. Just because she’d decided to keep secrets didn’t mean she wouldn’t try to tear Solmir’s out.
Still, Neve had no expectations of sudden honesty. So when the former King slid his blue eyes away from hers, softened his crossed arms, and sighed, it was as much a surprise to her as it seemed to be to him. “I’m a bastard. Calryes slept with my mother when he visited the walled city that became Alpera. Didn’t know I was a result until later.”
So he was from Alpera. It made sense—he looked like ice and snow, smelled like pines.
“My mother was the third-born daughter of the king. But once Calryes found out he’d sired a son—one who could use magic—he had everyone in the way of me becoming the heir killed.”
“Including your mother?”
His voice became slightly quieter. Still clipped, but roughened. “Including my mother. And my two half brothers.”