Her arms crossed, tugging his coat tight around her. “I fell off a horse as a child. A tall horse.”
“Yes, I’m sure it was very traumatic.” He waved a dismissive hand. “But you don’t really have an option here. We need the power of two gods to get to the Heart Tree. And the Oracle will be easier to kill than the Leviathan.”
She knew she didn’t have options, knew that she had no choice other than to climb up this massive pile of bones and kill the god at the top. Neve flexed her fingers back and forth, like the mountain was something she could fight.
Solmir watched her, hands hooked on his hips, face unreadable. “I won’t let you fall, Neve.”
Reassurance still sounded so odd, coming from him. She turned away from the mountain, looked at Solmir instead.
A moment, then he shrugged. “I need you.”
Simple truth, uncolored by emotion. She nodded, one jerk of her head.
“This section is secure.” Solmir kicked at the tibia he’d been using as a foothold. “The Oracle lives on top of it and can’t leave. The mountain won’t fall as long as the god is there.” He inclined his head toward the bones, stepping aside. “You go first. I’ll tell you where to put your hands and your feet.”
Her insides were simultaneously tense and shivery. Neve mimicked what she’d seen him do—one foot on the tibia, then gripping the skull. Her hand trembled, slightly, but Solmir made no mention of it.
“Pull yourself up,” he said, low and even. “Then, you see that piece of rib sticking out above your right hand? Grab that next…”
And so, directed by the former King at her back, Neve climbed the bone-mountain.
When they reached the top, her limbs felt like limp strings. Neve managed to walk over to a chunk of unidentifiable bone and sit down, breath coming heavy, all the fear she hadn’t let herself feel as she climbed pouring into her nervous system at once. She buried her head in her hands and shuddered.
It was ridiculous, her consuming fear of heights. The fall from the horse started it, and it had only been nurtured the older she got—such a pedestrian fear, just like Solmir said. But being the First Daughter and then the Queen didn’t give one much time to climb walls, so the fear remained, swelling and unconquered.
And it was refreshing, almost, to fear something so simple. Heights instead of forests, climbing instead of loss.
After a moment, she felt Solmir come sit beside her. She steeled her shoulders, waiting for him to make some cutting remark, but none came.
“Would you look at that,” he said, stretching out his legs and propping his arms up behind him. “You did it.”
“I did,” she replied.
He sighed. “And now for the hard part.”
“Could we take a minute first? Going right from mountain-climbing to god-killing might be a bit overwhelming.”
Solmir snorted, reaching down to pull out his carving and small dagger from his boot. “Take five, even. The end of the world can spare that much.”
Neve closed her eyes, took a few deep breaths. When she felt a bit steadier, she glanced at him from the corner of her eye. His knife dug at the wood in his hand, though the curve of his palm still kept her from seeing what exactly he was carving.
“What is that?”
A flinch; he hadn’t seen her looking. Solmir’s hand closed around the wood, as if he’d hide it from view, but then he opened his fingers on a sigh. “It’s not finished,” he hedged. “And it’s not very good.”
“Horseshit. Let me see.”
“Such a mouth for a queen,” he muttered, dropping the wood into her palm. Neve turned it over.
A night sky. He’d carved a night sky, a moon and scattered stars.
He shrugged again, looking out over the gray horizon instead of at her. “I didn’t realize how much I missed the sky until I saw it again.”
She rubbed her thumb over the whorls of stars, along the dip of the crescent moon. “I miss it, too,” she murmured.
“Keep it.”
“No.” She turned to him, holding out the carving. “You said it wasn’t finished.” A smirk picked up her mouth. “An unfinished carving is hardly a gift fit for a queen. Give it to me when it’s done.”
“Assuming I have time to finish it before the Shadowlands collapse.”
“You will.” She said it like a command.
They looked at each other, half anxious and half confused and wholly trying to hide both feelings. Then Neve turned back to the horizon to see where all her climbing had taken her.
They sat on a shelf of bone, the vertebrae of some impossibly large thing, pockmarked and shining white in the gray-scale dimness. Behind them, a gigantic skull, the eye sockets big enough to drive a carriage through. It took her a moment to comprehend its shape, blown into such epic proportions, but there was the long snout, ending right before the vertebrae on which she stood, and the remnants of fang-like teeth below it.
A wolf. A giant wolf.
“Another dead Old One?” She sounded so polite, though her eyes felt as if they were going to fall out of her head.
“The Wolf.” Solmir stood up, went to kick the toe of his boot against one of the oversize teeth. “The real one. Ciaran killed one of its whelps. That’s how he got his evocative nickname.”
Ciaran. The first Wolf of the Wilderwood. Even knowing that the monster of legend was technically her sister’s father-in-law, hearing him spoken of like a peer still made her thoughts stutter.
Solmir looked at the wolf skull with only vague interest, but there was something in his eyes that said his mind was turned toward the same story hers was.
“You’re the villain in that one, you know.” She said it lightly. “The tale of Ciaran and Gaya.”
Another kick against a giant tooth. “Every story needs one.”
“Having become a villain myself, I assume there’s more to that particular story.”
One knife-slash brow raised as Solmir turned to face her. “Do you consider yourself a villain?”
It’d been a jibe, not an invitation for scrutiny. Neve shifted uncomfortably, tugged at the loose thread on the hem of her tattered sleeve. “I’m sure Red does.”
“I think Redarys’s feelings about you are a bit more complicated than that.” His finger twisted at the silver ring on his thumb. “You were trying to save her, after all.”
“When she didn’t need to be saved,” Neve murmured. “When she told me to let her go. If I’d just listened…”
She trailed off, not needing to finish the thought. If she’d just listened, she wouldn’t be here. If she’d just listened, the cosmic question of the Kings and their souls and the Shadowlands and the Wilderwood could’ve been left for someone else to deal with.
“It takes more than not listening to make a villain,” Solmir said. “With the caveat that I’m not an expert on the subject, having left most of my humanity behind long ago, that sounds mostly like human nature. We’re rather predisposed to think we’re always in the right.”
Neve made a rueful sound. “What about you, then? Were you actually the villain?”