Her brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
He swallowed. Then he shook his head, turning back toward the horizon. “Nothing new,” he said, and his voice was different, back to his normal just-shy-of-arrogant tone. “You know. Prophecies, First and Second Daughters, doorways. All that shit.”
“Ah, yes. Perfectly normal shit.” The air felt diffuse again, the charge of the atmosphere settled. Neve was left somewhere between disappointed and relieved.
If Solmir felt the same way, he didn’t show it. He dipped his hand into the water again, ostensibly to wipe at his face, but he splashed some purposefully her way as he turned back toward the beach. “Wash up. I won’t look.”
Her cheeks burned anyway as she tugged off his coat, pulled her nightgown over her head. She grabbed a handful of sand and used it to scrub her clothing, one piece after the other, doing her best to loosen the packed mud ground into the weave. When the gown and coat were as clean as they were going to get, she ducked her head under, floating for a moment in the completely still waters as if she were suspended in a womb.
Scrubbed hair, scrubbed face, and she emerged mostly free of dirt, wringing out and shaking off before she pulled on her nightgown and Solmir’s coat again. “Your turn.”
Contrary to his nature, Solmir had been a perfect gentleman, facing the cliffs until he heard her call. He glanced over his shoulder, still caked in mud. “Are you implying that you want to watch me bathe?”
“Are you attempting to make me use that bone on you?”
He took the aforementioned god-bone from his boot and lightly tapped her on the forehead with it as he passed on the way to the water. “If you were going to stab me, Neverah, you would’ve already.”
Flippant, but something about it tugged at her chest anyway as she took the bone from him and tucked it into her pocket. He was right. The god-bone was their only weapon, and he’d trusted her to carry it. And she’d trusted him to hold all the magic they harvested from dead lesser beasts, dead gods. It was the most she could ever recall trusting another person, and it was him.
Neve pressed her lips together.
Solmir pulled off his boots when he reached the shallows, waded in to his waist before following suit with the tight pants he wore, scrubbing at them and then tossing them back toward the beach with his shirt. The curve of the tattoo on his bicep caught the light as he stretched, then ducked under the water. A moment later, he resurfaced, hair streaming, and he combed it back with rough fingers.
Neve hurriedly turned around to face the cliff.
“Decent,” he called moments later. She turned just in time to see him tug his shirt over his head, then gather his hair into his fist, wringing it out onto the rocky sand. “I should just cut it off,” he muttered, grimacing.
“Don’t.”
His brow raised.
“Just tie it back,” Neve said, with a quick shrug that she hoped looked nonchalant. “It’d look nice.”
A pause, Solmir’s expression unchanging. But he ripped a tiny piece of fabric from the hem of his shirt and reached up, doing as she said.
She thought again of the bone in her pocket, a tool for killing gods. She thought of secrets and whispers in the dark and of trust, the thing he’d tried to gain from her through slow seduction on the surface, what he insisted he wasn’t worthy of here.
It was true. But she found herself trusting him anyway. And whether it was desperation or stupidity or simple loneliness, she wanted it to be in full. No more half measures.
Which meant it was time to stop keeping secrets.
“I saw Valchior in the Serpent’s cairn,” she murmured.
Silence. Then, emotionless: “Did you?”
“He said that… that the Kings knew why I was here.” She swallowed, eyes on the black sea instead of him. “That they welcomed it. What in all the shadows does that mean, Solmir?”
He stayed quiet, long enough that she finally turned to face him again, if only to try to force an answer. Solmir’s arms were tightly crossed, his head bowed over them, the hair he’d tied back hanging loosely over one shoulder. Finally, he looked up. “It means things are going according to plan.”
Neve gaped at him.
“Think about it, Neverah. Our goal is to bring the Kings through the Heart Tree so they can be killed in the true world, where their souls will be destroyed as well as their bodies. Correct?”
He waited; Neve jerked a nod when it became clear he expected an answer.
“If they’ve somehow figured out our plan, they probably think they can outsmart us,” Solmir continued. “Use the open door to escape and overpower us on the other side.”
Her still-damp nightgown was cold; Neve mirrored his stance, arms crossed to hide a shiver. “Can they?”
Solmir was quiet for a moment, the long strands of his hair stirring against his shoulder. “I won’t let them,” he said finally. “Leave the killing to me, Neverah. You just concentrate on getting through the door.”
Clipped, snapped out like an order. She narrowed her eyes. “I’m just as capable of killing as you are.”
Something flashed across his gaze, too quick to puzzle out. Pain, almost. Regret. “But you don’t have to be.”
She had nothing to say to that.
Solmir looked at the open stretch of beach, the cliffs above. “This is probably the safest place we’re going to find for a while,” he said. “If you want to rest, we should do it here.”
Her limbs suddenly felt heavy, as if his mention of rest made her body crave it. Neve nodded. “I suppose that’s a good idea. Before we go to the Heart Tree.”
“Yes.” That same shade of pain and regret lurked in his tone; he wasn’t quite able to mask it. “You’ll need your strength.”
Neve shrugged out of his coat, bunched it up into a makeshift pillow. “Don’t let me sleep too long. And wake me up if there are more monsters.”
“On my word, the only monster here you’ll need to worry about is me.”
She scoffed, turning her head back and forth to find a comfortable angle.
“What part of that strikes you as funny? That I’m a monster?” It wasn’t joking, not really. There was a chord to his voice that begged earnestness.
“Not that part,” Neve said, already half-asleep. “The part about me needing to worry about you.”
He didn’t respond. But his jaw tensed, and his arms tightened over his chest as he stared out over the dark water, a monster watching for other monsters.
Chapter Twenty-One
Neve
She woke to Solmir’s hand on her shoulder, though he took it away as soon as he saw the slits of her open eyes. “We need to move.”
Neve sat up, rubbing sleep from her face; immediately, she sensed the cause of his urgency. The ground was rumbling, bits of rock shaking loose of the cliffs to clatter onto the beach below. Ripples spread across the black water from the shoreline. Not a full quake, not yet, but enough of a reason to get going, and a reminder that their time was short.