She can go, the voice finally answered. If it is her choice. Finding a key and becoming the mirror are pieces of a larger story, but they are not required for Neverah’s return. Only for the Shadow Queen’s.
The title reverberated in Neve’s bones, made all the magic wrapped up in her sing. Shadow Queen. What she’d been called since she entered the Shadowlands, words that were both terror and touchstone. She hadn’t thought that it was something that could be separated from her, but the voice’s phrasing made it clear: the Shadow Queen was Neve, but Neve wasn’t just the Shadow Queen. That mantle was one she’d have to choose.
And if she did, it meant this wasn’t over. Neve had made mistakes—they all had—and sooner or later, someone would have to pay for them.
She could go home now, pass the torch. Or she could become what she was meant to be. Whatever that was. Whatever that entailed.
Slowly, Neve turned, facing her sister. The person she loved most, the person she’d tear worlds down for without a second thought. She reached up, cupped her cheek in a thorny hand. “I love you, Red.”
The realization was a slow bloom in her twin’s eyes, widening, tearing up. “Neve, you can’t.”
“I have to.”
“But what does it mean? What do you have to do?”
“I’m not sure yet.” Already the fog was thickening, covering the Tree, clouding the space around them so all Neve could see was her sister. “But this has to end. Solmir thought he could do it without me, but that isn’t true—he needs me still, for more than just opening the Heart Tree.”
“Neve, you can come home.” Red put her hand over Neve’s on her face, pressed in as if she could hold it there.
Her sister didn’t care about her thorns, her sharpness, and something about that made Neve want to start crying all over again.
“Forget Solmir,” Red said. “Forget the damn Kings. Just come home.”
Neve shook her head. “I choose to see it through,” she murmured. “I choose to be the Shadow Queen.”
And with those words, the fog closed over Red’s face, silencing her panicked shout. Neve’s eyes closed, peaceful with her decision.
But her eyes opened on anything but peace.
The room was half flooded. Black, briny seawater covered Neve’s ankles, steadily rising, as if the whole inverted castle were slowly falling into the ocean. The structure shook.
Solmir stood in front of the Heart Tree, arms stretched to either side and legs braced, like he was waiting for an onslaught. He saw Neve, looked away, did a double take. “Neverah, what are you doing here?”
“What I’m supposed to.” Something was in her hand, rough edges cutting into her palm. Neve looked down—a key, white wood threaded with black veins.
He snarled in response, moved toward her as if he’d throw her back into the Heart Tree himself. But another shake tossed him off-balance, sent him splashing into the rising seawater. “Something’s coming,” he said through gritted teeth. “But I don’t think it’s the Kings.”
“It’s not.”
The voice was everywhere and nowhere at once, almost more like two voices that had been sloppily soldered together. The room darkened.
At one of the upside-down windows, a massive eye pressed up against the cracked glass.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Neve
The eye looked at her.
Neve had never felt so small. Not in the presence of the Serpent, its huge bulk unknown but felt in the dark, and not before the Oracle, an inhuman thing in a humanoid shape. Not even next to the Heart Tree, the nexus between this world and the real one.
That huge, dark eye seemed to see all the way through her, and though Neve had spent quite a lot of time in the company of gods in the past weeks she’d been in the Shadowlands, this was the first time she felt like it.
The paralysis that held her didn’t extend to Solmir. He cursed and splashed through the rising water to her side, grabbing her still-thorny arm and spinning her to face him, his other hand cupping the back of her head to press her face against his chest. “Don’t look, Neve.”
A laugh echoed through the shaking castle, worse even than the words had been. Neve clapped her hands to her ears, mindless of their thorns, and made a low, pained sound.
“Apologies,” the Leviathan said. “I thought she could take my true form. You can, after all, and you’re no god anymore.”
“I’m not enjoying it,” Solmir growled.
Another laugh, this one sounding truly amused. “You always were the rudest of them, Solmir.”
The water was at their waists, too dark to see through and ice-cold. Neve pushed herself as close to Solmir as she could, teeth beginning to chatter. He touched her carelessly now, with none of the distance he’d shown as they made their way to the Heart Tree. He’d given her all the magic and apparently didn’t want any of it back.
What had changed?
No time to puzzle over it now, not while they were stared down by the most powerful Old One left, not while her mind felt as if it were starting to winnow away at the edges as she was scrutinized by something so massive, so unknowable.
Solmir’s arms tightened around her. “Whatever you’re planning to do,” he snarled at the god, “do it.”
“As you wish,” the Leviathan said.
In an instant, the water rose, closing over their heads, drowning them in black and cold. The current rushed around them, trying to pull them away from each other; she clawed into Solmir’s back, held on to his hair. His arms felt stone-hard from the strain of his muscles.
Neve held her breath until it felt like her lungs would burst. They couldn’t die here, not ensouled as they were, but it still felt like death when her mouth inevitably opened, finally took in a drowning throatful of the dark, endless sea.
She choked on it, and knew nothing.
Neve came to with her head propped against Solmir’s bare shoulder. His skin was wet, made sticky with drying salt, enough to make it hurt when Neve peeled herself off him. Though he’d lost his shirt in the maelstrom, she’d kept her nightgown, kept the dark coat. Her hand delved deep into the pocket, heart in her throat. It only migrated back down to her chest when her fingers closed around the god-bone and the branch-shard key. Neve let out a thankful breath, tipping back her head to see where they were.
A cavern. Huge and salt-pale, ridged with coral on the floor and the wavy lines of erosion on the walls, but mostly dry, and full of breathable air.
But whatever relief she might’ve felt was eclipsed by the sight of the Leviathan at the front of the cavern.