“I didn’t keep it.” Neve flexed her fingers, surreptitiously checking for thorns.
But you could have. You just chose not to. So much of this will come down to choice, in the end. A rueful laugh echoed through the mist, from everywhere and nowhere. A lesson learned isn’t easily discarded.
Neve frowned. “So that’s why the mirror is gone? Because I took the Serpent’s power?”
You don’t need a compass when you are yourself a map.
Her frown deepened. Neve continued forward into the fog, though no matter how far she walked, the tower of tree roots behind her never seemed to get farther away. “And in your metaphor here, the mirror is the compass.”
Well done.
“And I’m the map.”
Not you alone.
Neve’s feet stuttered. She paused a moment before picking up her ambling again. “Me and Red, then,” she said quietly.
A first and a second and a third to take what is left. Something melancholy in the voice’s tone now, like the mention of Red weighed as heavy on it as on Neve. But you and Redarys only, for the Tree to open. Prophecies can come piecemeal.
The cold knot in Neve’s middle felt suddenly heavy, like she carried lead behind her ribs. That place where she pushed everything, guilt and shame and every other emotion she didn’t feel like dealing with, the convenient cage where she held all her true feelings about everything that had happened since she and Red turned twenty. Her hand pressed against her stomach as if she somehow had to keep it from escaping, from ripping her open in its desperation to be known.
Such things can’t be pushed away forever. Mournful, tired. All truths must face the light, in order to have the power to get to the Tree. To get the key.
“But we know where the Tree is,” Neve said. Then, almost begrudgingly, “Or Solmir does, at least.”
The location is not everything. You need the power of two gods, one for each of you. And then, when you find the Tree, you must make your choice. To become what the stars have promised, or to leave the burden to those who come after.
Neve shook her head. “What do you mean? Make what kind of choice?” But even as the words left her mouth, they grew thin, faded, the tree roots and the mist blanking out.
“Neverah?”
Vision gray, swimming up out of her head, out of sleep. Neve sat up, wincing—sleeping on the hard-packed desert dust wasn’t doing her bones any favors. “What?”
Solmir sat a few feet away, back against a rock, legs stretched out in front of him as he whittled that piece of wood again. “You made a noise.”
She rubbed at the back of her neck, tried to run her fingers through her tangled hair. “Did you sleep?” she asked, because she didn’t want to ask what kind of noise she’d made, and she didn’t want to think about him paying close enough attention to be concerned at whatever kind of noise it was. Didn’t want to think about how she’d done the same, in those scant moments they stole for sleep, watching his face twist and his brows furrow when she should’ve been watching the empty landscape.
There was no night here. The not-sky was the same dim gray, no change in the monotonous horizon. But still, when Neve could barely keep her eyes open and grew unsteady on her feet, Solmir had insisted they stop at an outcropping of stones—real stone this time, not soldered-together bone. Neve had been asleep nearly as soon as she stopped walking, the fatigue of carrying a god’s power and then releasing it so draining that such vulnerability didn’t seem something to worry over. She knew Solmir would watch her back.
At some point, against all her better judgment, she’d started to trust him.
Valchior’s words, whispered in the dark. He’ll burn you in the end.
Not if I burn him first, Neve thought, a rebuttal to a memory. But it sounded hollow, even inside her own head.
Solmir’s sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, revealing muscled forearms as he carved. The rips in his sleeves gaped around the band of the tattoo circling his bicep.
“What’s that on your arm?” Neve drew her knees in toward her chest. She might be awake, but she wasn’t ready to start walking again just yet. And she was curious.
“Clan tattoo,” he said, clipped. “Old Alperan custom. They needled it into me when I became king.” He gestured to his arm with the knife, pointing at each band in turn. “Thick one is for the people. The one with all the lines is for the king before me—some uncle, I suppose, I didn’t really know the man before Elkyrathi assassins gutted him. And the thin one is for me. The least important part of the whole equation.”
He went back to his whittling. Neve bit her lip.
Here was another spit of common ground between them, unwelcome and unable to be ignored. The mantle of rulership, how it gave you power while stripping you of personhood. Especially when it wasn’t really something you wanted.
Neve had been raised knowing she would someday be Queen. The fact hadn’t held any sort of emotional weight; it was just what would happen, her inevitable trajectory. And once she did become Queen, she didn’t view the position as anything more than the means to an end. The circumstance of Red’s birth had condemned her to be sacrificed to the woods, and Neve resolved to use the circumstance of her own to save her. Queendom was something that had happened to her, not something she’d sought out.
Solmir was the only person to talk to here, but he was also one of the few people who would understand that.
She tucked her chin against her knees. “When my mother betrothed me to Arick, she didn’t even tell me before the announcement.”
The soft snick of Solmir’s knife against the wood stopped. “That’s less than ideal.”
“Quite.” Neve snorted. “It was… embarrassing, to be honest. He was so clearly in love with Red.”
“Hmm.” The sound of knife against wood grain picked back up, but slowly. Giving her space to talk about the man he’d inadvertently murdered.
But Neve didn’t think about that. Not right now. “I think that’s when I realized how little it mattered,” she said quietly. “The title, the power… you’re just somewhere for it to rest. The wheel of the kingdom keeps turning, whether you sit on the throne or someone else does.”
Solmir set down his knife and the piece of wood, looking out over the gray horizon. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “you would’ve been an excellent queen, in other circumstances.”
“I doubt it, to be honest. Though it probably would’ve been easier without you taking the form of my betrothed and twisting my desire to save my sister to your own ends.” It could’ve come out poisonous. Instead, Neve just sounded tired. Anger was a hard thing to sustain, even righteous as it was.
“Can’t argue there.” Solmir rubbed at his scars again.