The floor—ceiling—was flat here, the doors to branching corridors far above them. Wooden beams crossed the space, low enough to almost brush the top of Neve’s head, the rectangles of cracked stained glass windows between them. Up ahead, though, the flat expanse ended, a steep drop indicating what would be a higher ceiling if the structure were right side up.
“Staircase is over there.” Solmir gestured to the drop. “We’ll have to climb up it.”
“Or down it, as it were.”
He didn’t acknowledge her. “The Tree is in the hall on the first floor—or what would’ve been the first floor, were this damn thing facing the right way. The one with the dais.”
Neve nodded, swallowing. She knew the one. The hall where Red had been blessed as a sacrifice to the Wolf. The hall where Isla had chosen Tealia as the High Priestess’s successor and thus sealed her fate.
She slanted a glance at Solmir, unsure whether she was looking for guilt or simple recognition. His face was blank.
They reached the drop—Neve anticipated another climb, but the ceiling was sloped gently enough that they could walk, albeit very carefully. Solmir went first, gracefully, but Neve slipped halfway down. She cursed, scrabbled for a handhold, got fingernails full of splinters instead—
Then Solmir’s arms, wrapping around her waist. Solmir’s middle absorbing the impact of her fall with a grunt. Her knees bracketed his hips, her hands splayed across his chest, palms on skin bared by his half-open shirt.
And they stared at each other, her confused, him with the stoic face of a man marching to a noose.
“Are you going to take it?” he asked.
Her brows knit. “Take what?”
“The power,” he sneered. “The magic. You could, you know. Right now. You could take all of it.”
The furrow in her brow went deeper. “But it would make me—”
“Monstrous?” he scoffed. “You want to be afraid of that, Neverah, but we both know you aren’t.”
Truth, and it made her scramble from him, put her feet on solid ground, and close her hands to fists so she didn’t feel him beneath them. “What are you trying to do?”
“Give you all your options.” His eyes glinted in the dark as he stood, raised his arms to either side, a stance that encouraged a fight. “You have to take in the power of a god to get through to the Tree anyway. And if you decide to take it all—the Serpent’s power, the Oracle’s, all the damn lesser beasts we’ve killed along the way—I won’t stop you. I’ll let you become the monster you were always meant to be.”
Cruelty came as a surprise now. She’d stopped expecting it from him. And maybe that was the reason he offered it; as if he realized they’d grown past animosity, and it scared him. So he threw it out like a wild punch, not caring whether it hit, only that he’d tried.
It made her want to answer in kind, to strike with sharp words of her own. But Neve was still a queen, and her voice came even, her chin tilted upward, regal in his coat and her torn nightgown. “As I’ve said before,” she stated coolly, “one of us is more prone to monstrousness.”
His teeth shone, not a smile, though the fierce expression was tempered by a regretful glint in his eyes. “Are you so sure about that?”
Neve’s teeth set hard against each other, fingers flexing into fists and back out again. All the warm thoughts she’d had of him—in the marshes, on the Bone Ship, on the beach where she’d watched him wash his hair and let her cheeks heat for it—felt like indictments now. This man played her like a harp string, over and over, and she kept looking for goodness in those discordant notes. Kept looking for something worth thinking of fondly.
Strange and humbling, what loneliness could do.
She strode past him, close enough for her shoulder to brush his arm. “You were right,” she said. “It appears having a soul does little to make one good. Maybe they’re mostly just nuisances, after all.”
He didn’t respond. But she saw a wince pull at his mouth as his arms dropped back to his sides, no longer inviting a brawl.
So preoccupied was she with the fallen King, she hadn’t taken a moment to marvel at what lay before her until she moved beyond him. A familiar foyer, one she’d walked through countless times in that other life, the one where she was merely a sister and a daughter and a future queen. But inverted, like everything else was here.
The marble floor she knew so well hung far, far above, so distant she couldn’t quite make out the individual pieces of interlocking stone. The huge spiral staircase started right at the level of her eyes, spinning upward at an angle that made her stomach hook.
And there, at the top—the bottom—a shimmer of darkness, like shadow had solidified into a wall.
“Is that where we’ll need the magic?” she asked quietly.
“Yes.” Neutral-voiced, like their argument of a moment before was forgotten. Solmir stepped up beside her, scrutinizing the staircase. “The first time I came, I climbed that. It was less than pleasant.”
“I haven’t expected any part of this to be pleasant,” Neve muttered.
“I think I can spare enough to make it somewhat less unpleasant.” Solmir raised his hands, shooting her a barbed grin. “All that murder put to work.”
Thorns sprouted from his fingers and grew slowly up the staircase, winding around the railings. A lattice, easier to climb than the inverted stairs would be. Solmir stood straight and unyielding as the magic spiraled out of him, but she was close enough to see the sheen of sweat on his brow, the thud of his shadow-chased pulse as ice crystallized on his palms.
“That’s enough,” she said quietly.
But he shook his head. His fingers twitched, and the points of the thorns blunted—not entirely gone, but filed down enough so they wouldn’t slice.
Solmir wrenched his hands down, grimacing. “That’s all I can spare.” He didn’t look at her as he grasped one of the brambles and pulled himself up. “I would advise you not to look down.”
Neve followed his advice, her heart migrating to somewhere in the vicinity of her tongue as she pulled herself up the thorns. Even blunted, they were still an uncomfortable thing to navigate around, and her skirt kept getting tangled. Finally, with a curse, Neve leaned her weight into the thorns and used her hands to tug her skirt up and tie it in a knot, leaving her legs mostly free.
She glanced up at Solmir just in time to see his head whip forward, away from her.
One handhold, one heave at a time. Her eyes wanted to track downward, to see just how high she’d climbed, but Neve wouldn’t let them, peering resolutely forward, watching the floor draw nearer rather than the crossbeamed ceiling recede farther away. It was incredible, really, the fears you could master when you had no choice.
Neve could feel it as they drew closer to the wall of shadow. A hum in her bones, a subtle rattle in her teeth. It felt like one of the quakes but tuned to a minor key, less jarring but just as unsettling. She firmed her jaw against it and heaved herself up again.