They didn’t make a show of leaving. Solmir hurried across the beach, parallel to the cliffs and the edge of the sea, and Neve followed.
“How long will it take to get there?”
“Not long.” He looked over his shoulder toward the flat black water, mouth pressed thin and a calculating look in his eye. “Not if we take the ship.”
“The ship?”
But Solmir was already striding toward the shoreline, determination in his gait. “It takes magic to call,” he said, almost to himself. “But there should be enough.”
She remembered what they’d been told by the Seamstress, about needing the power of two gods to get to the Heart Tree. Solmir had used quite a bit of magic to kill the children of the Rat and the Roach, but he’d taken some in, too. And he still held all the power of the Serpent, of the Oracle.
Solmir waded purposefully into the shallows, bending to place his fingertips gently to the water’s surface. Closed eyes, furrowed brow, then darkness seeped down his veins, spreading from chest to elbow to wrist before finally flowing outward, ribboning into the water like blood from a wound.
The shadows were a deeper black than the sea; Neve could see them race from Solmir’s hand out toward the horizon.
“Will that let the Leviathan know we’re here?” she asked quietly. Telling the most powerful Old One left that they were near its kingdom didn’t seem like the best idea.
“The Leviathan might be powerful, but it’s not all-powerful.” Solmir straightened, taking his hands from the water. “It keeps to the deep, and the Bone Ship always makes itself from things on the surface.”
“Makes itself?”
He gestured to the sea.
Something pale raced across the water toward the horizon line. Many somethings—ripples wavered from multiple directions as shapes Neve couldn’t identify skimmed over the surface of the sea, called from far-away shorelines to the center of the black ocean. In the distance, the shapes came together, cobbling themselves into something large and gleaming.
Something like a ship.
It crept toward them, slow and stately across the water. The closer it got, the easier it was to make out.
A ship, yes. But a ship made entirely out of bones. Smaller and more delicate than the massive things that formed the mountain range where the Oracle had made its home, fused together in graceful shapes to make something at once beautiful and macabre. The only thing not made entirely of bone were the sails—those appeared to be pieces of huge, scaled hide, still glistening with water, as if the skin had been in the shallows on some farther shore.
The ship glided toward them on an unfelt wind, finally washing up on the rocky sand and coming to a stop. With a creak, a makeshift gangplank lowered to the ground, made of interlocking pieces of vertebrae.
Solmir stepped up onto the gangplank, shoulders set like a soldier marching into a doomed battle. “You coming, Your Majesty?”
Of all the strange things she’d done since waking up in the Shadowlands, sailing on a ship made of bones might have been the strangest.
Solmir had directed the ship to where they wanted to go—some complicated ritual involving pricking his finger and writing a series of symbols on the deck in blood—and now all they had to do was wait. Wait for the ship to bring them to the inverted castle that held the Heart Tree. Wait and see if the power they’d stolen from murdered gods would be enough to get them inside.
Wait and see if her and Red’s love was matched enough to open a door between worlds.
It was oddly peaceful, sailing over the black ocean, the slight creak of bones beneath her boots and the groan of the scaled hide that made the sails the only sound. Solmir had gone to the prow as soon as he finished telling the ship where to go and loomed there still, elbows resting on a rail made from delicately fused ulnae and radii. He hadn’t spoken since.
Neve sighed, leaning far enough over the side of the ship to watch her reflection in the black water. Maybe telling him about Valchior had been a mistake. Maybe trusting him—more than she absolutely had to—had been a mistake.
One more in her long line of them.
It’d be over soon. That’s what she kept telling herself, watching her dark reflection slide by in an alien sea. When they reached the Heart Tree, when she opened it and its power pulled the Kings from their Sanctum, tugged them into the true world where Solmir could kill them, then it would be over. Then she’d return to her life and start making amends for all the things she’d done, the people she’d hurt. She’d never have to see the terrifying man at the prow again, never have to endure his mocking sense of humor, never have to see him rub at the scars on his forehead or twist his lips in amusement.
The thought didn’t comfort her. She pushed it away before she had to look at it too closely.
On they sailed. The ship stayed parallel to the shoreline on one side and the horizon on the other, following the trajectory they would’ve taken had they not been detoured by the fallen bone, the children of the Rat and the Roach. Hours slipped by that way, or at least what Neve assumed were hours. It should concern her, probably, how used she was getting to the way time seemed to shrink and expand here, where there was no night or day to count it by.
“You should sleep again.”
Solmir, at her elbow. She’d been so lost in her own thoughts that she hadn’t heard him approach. He adopted the same stance next to her as he had at the prow, forearms resting on the railing, peering out over the water.
She glanced at him, just once, before returning her attention to her slow-drifting reflection. “Not tired.”
“Opening the Heart Tree will take a lot out of you. You should try, at least.”
“Fine.” She wasn’t in the mood to argue. Wasn’t in the mood to do much of anything, really. The silence of the sea and the gentle creak of the ship had lulled her into a kind of stasis, calmed the low-level panic that had chewed at the bottom of her stomach ever since she entered the Shadowlands. Neve turned and slid down the wall, sitting with her chin tipped back. From this angle, she couldn’t see Solmir’s face—just the curve of his shoulder, the dip of his arm, the trailing length of his tied-back hair.
After a stretch of silence, she asked, “What’s going to happen when we get there?”
A sigh, lifting his shoulders, then lowering them. “The Heart Tree is inside the inverted castle,” he replied. “When I went there the first time, it took an immense amount of magic just to open the door and get inside.”
The power of two gods, the Seamstress had said. Two gods for the two of them. But back then, when Solmir first went to the Heart Tree—first tried to open it with Gaya, unmatched in love—he’d been a god himself. She pressed her lips together.
“So we use the magic we’ve stored away to open that door,” he said, “and then we approach the Tree.” He angled his head so he could look down at her, one split second before his eyes went to the horizon again. “After that, it’s up to you.”
“You have no pointers for me?”