Besides, the slow click of chiton, the twitching of what she’d thought were stones set into the sides of the cliff, was somewhat more distracting.
The last of the magic drained into Solmir as the cliff side—not stone, but a massive wing—fluttered, sending a gust of foul-smelling breeze to stir Neve’s hair. Her hand fell to Solmir’s shoulder, squeezed.
She echoed his demand from earlier. “You might want to move.”
A rush of wind, the smell of it enough to make her gag, and the children of the Roach launched themselves from the cliff face next to the cave.
The rat-thing had, strangely, been easier for Neve’s mind to deal with. Fused together, too many legs and eyes and mouths, clearly a monster. But the children of the Roach looked, simply, like giant roaches, and something about that was far more terrifying.
“That’s enough to turn your stomach,” Solmir said, still in that too-deep, too-rough voice. Neve didn’t realize that she’d cowered on the ground and he’d stood until he braced his legs on either side of her body, hands lifted in the air. This close, she could feel the tremor in him, the vibration of something bearing so much weight it was near to collapse.
Neve didn’t watch, but she felt the impact in the atmosphere as Solmir’s thorns shackled the children of the Roach, a sick, low thrumming as their wings beat against the brambles. No thuds of massive bodies hitting the ground—they dissolved in midair, broken down to nothing but shadow.
Through it, Solmir’s breath came harsh, and she felt the legs pressed against her side tremble, harder and harder, so close to buckling.
When she reached out and closed her hand around his ankle—not to take magic, just to offer a reassurance, an anchoring—it felt like practicality. She still needed him, after all.
But the jolt that went through him, the look in his eyes when she raised her head, felt more like shock.
The last of the Roach’s children winnowed away into nothing in the air above them with a chittering screech that made her skin crawl. Then, finally, silence.
And she still had her hand around Solmir’s ankle.
Neve stood, flexing her fingers out and in as she awkwardly scrambled from beneath him. A slight rumble shuddered through the ground. The Shadowlands, slowly breaking apart, counting the time they had left.
He offered her his hand, wordlessly, veins still tracked in darkness and mud still clinging to his palm. She took it, let him pull her up. They stood there a moment, breathing hard, eyes locked.
She was the first to turn away, to look out from the cliff and over all that black water. The air wasn’t foul, not like it had been in the cave or when the Roach’s children flew overhead, but neither did it smell like salt. It was just empty. Nothingness. “I assume this is the Endless Sea?”
“You assume correctly.” Solmir propped a boot on a rock, vainly attempting to brush dried mud from his legs. “The Kingdom of the Leviathan.”
Neve glanced down at her mud-soaked nightgown, her dirt-streaked arms. “Would the Leviathan mind if I used its kingdom to wash off some of this mud before we go to the Heart Tree?”
“Probably,” Solmir said. He grasped the edge of his thorn-torn shirt and tugged it over his head, grimacing. “But the Leviathan is a selfish old bastard, so bathe away.”
Chapter Twenty
Neve
They climbed down the outcroppings of stone lining the cliffs to the short strip of beach, rocky sand that bit into the soles of Neve’s feet once she’d worked them free of her caked-up boots. She picked her way gingerly to the tide line, though there was no tide here to speak of. No waves, either—the Endless Sea was glass-like beneath the gray sky, flat and rippleless as a pool of spilled ink.
She glanced at Solmir lingering behind her. Shirtless and mud-caked and still, somehow, able to look arrogantly regal, his posture perfect and his chin held imperiously. The impression she’d had before, of him being built like a knife, was only intensified by the lack of a shirt—broad shoulders tapered to slim hips, all of it pale and muscled without being bulky.
Her cheeks flushed; Neve turned back to the strange ocean. “I can touch it, right? It won’t make me go mad or start sprouting thorns?”
“You looked good with thorns, as I recall.”
The flush in her cheeks flared hotter.
“But no, touching the water won’t cause any undue effects.” She heard him approaching, crunching over the rocky sand. When he reached her side, he dipped a hand into the water and rubbed it over his face, attempting to scrub mud out of his short beard. “You’ll remain un-monstrous.”
“Maybe I should be monstrous,” she muttered, the words coming out before she could reel them back in. She still felt raw inside from where the Oracle had cut through to her soul, unraveled all her truths; they lived closer to the surface now and were harder to deny. Vulnerability, here in a place where she couldn’t afford to be vulnerable.
With a person she couldn’t afford to be vulnerable with.
A pause. Solmir turned to her, dark brows drawn together. His irises were still blue, she noticed, but there was a thin ring of black around their edges, and the veins at his throat seemed darker than before. “What do you mean?”
She shrugged, stepping out into the shallows. The water was strangely warm, closing over her feet, her ankles, dragging at her torn nightgown’s hem. “After everything I’ve done,” she said, speaking to her wavering reflection instead of him, “it should mark me somehow, shouldn’t it? Everything you did marked you.”
She could’ve said it like it was a barb, one of the sharp jabs they’d grown used to throwing at each other. But it didn’t come out that way. It was just a truth, offered with no judgment.
He rubbed at the scars on his forehead, sighed. When he spoke, he didn’t look at her, staring with narrowed eyes out at the empty horizon. “I know you’re not going to believe me—you didn’t before—and I know me saying it doesn’t mean much, anyway. But you are good, Neve.”
Her eyes pressed closed. He was wrong. Both in the statement and in his assumption that it wouldn’t mean anything coming from him.
“Everything you did was because you loved your sister.” His voice was prayer-low. “You love without restraint, without settling. And that’s a good thing. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.”
It faded into the air, floated across the water. It hummed between her ears.
You are good.
The air hung close and expectant, chill against her skin. She could feel his eyes on her like a touch, and she turned to meet his gaze.
Solmir’s arms were crossed across his bare chest, his jaw rigid beneath his beard. An expression as hard and unforgiving as any she’d seen on him before, but something in his eyes had changed—softer, less guarded. “You are far better than me,” he murmured. “I know that isn’t a revelation. But it’s why I need you for this. Why it has to be you.”