“You can try to earn it back.” The dark made it impossible to see anything, but she turned her head in his direction anyway. “It won’t be easy.”
A nod, felt rather than seen. “It shouldn’t be.”
They sat in silence, other than the rasp of their breathing. The heat of their bodies ovened the small space, turning dampness to thick humidity. Neve slipped her hand into the coat’s pocket, closed it around the bone and the key. The bone she stuck in her boot. The key she weighed in her hand for a moment before reaching up and threading the open end through the fine hairs at the nape of her neck, further knotting her tangles to hold it in place.
Then she pulled off Solmir’s coat. Set it next to her. The lack of a barrier between them pressed their shoulders together, skin on skin. The magic curled in her center spiraled lazily, a billow of smoke from a snuffed candle. But there was no pull from him, no tug like he was trying to take it back. He’d given her the power and intended to let her keep it.
That was a comfort, at least.
“Did they ever come?” she asked quietly. “The Kings?”
“No.” Solmir shifted, his salt water–coarsened hair brushing her arm. “Maybe they were on their way. I don’t know how all that works, the way power pulls.”
“Or they figured us out. Knew they couldn’t outsmart us.”
Solmir snorted. “That might be giving ourselves too much credit. Maybe there’s a reason they didn’t come, resisting on purpose.”
“What kind of reason?”
“I have no idea, Neverah.” He sounded weary. She felt the brush of his hair as he tilted his head back against the coral.
But she wasn’t one to wallow. Neve had never let seemingly impossible circumstances leave her languishing before, and she wouldn’t start here. “You said giving the Kings a vessel was the easiest way to kill them. But is there another?”
A pause. “Yes,” Solmir said finally.
She waited for him to elaborate. He didn’t. His shoulder was tense against hers, rigid as stone.
Neve gave one nod, decisive, even though he couldn’t see it. “We’ll do that, then.”
Some of the rigidity bled from his muscles, relaxing against her by a fraction. The close quarters made touching inevitable, and both of them accepted it. There was reassurance in the solid shape of another person, giving form to the dark.
Her thumbnail worked nervously against the thin fabric of her nightgown. “I saw Red, while I was in the Tree.”
“You did?”
“She was there somehow. Called when I went into the Tree, I guess. She said something about a key…” Neve reached up, touched the one she’d secured in her hair. “The Heart Tree gave me one, too.”
“It gave you a key?” Solmir sounded puzzled. “I’m not sure what that means, to be honest.”
“That makes two of us.” Neve shrugged. “It was in my hand when I came out.”
“When you chose to come out,” he murmured.
That question again, hanging above her head like an ax set to fall. The key the Tree had given her shifted against her neck as Neve adjusted her seat on the hard, shell-pocked ground, its cold a welcome counterpoint to the heat inside their coral cell. She said nothing. If he wanted an answer, he had to ask the question, with words instead of tone and waiting.
“Why did you do that?” There was incredulity in his voice, but also something like awe. “You could’ve gone home, Neve. Why didn’t you?”
And she still didn’t know, not really, not in a way that lent itself to easy words. All she had was that feeling, that indelible sense that something here still needed to be done. That were she to go home now, there would be consequences. Maybe not for her, maybe not ones she would see. But someone would. Mistakes demanded payment, and they’d come due eventually.
“Because until the Kings are gone, I’m not done,” she said finally. “We’re not done.”
That collective pronoun made him sit up straight next to her. She felt the stir of air as he nodded, then another as he moved again, his arm rasping against hers. “Neve, I’m—Fuck, that hurts.”
She fumbled in the dark until her hand found his arm, traveled down to his fingers. Her palm slicked with his blood when it met the mess he’d made of his fist. Solmir cursed again, jerking away from her. “Shadows damn me, woman, what part of fuck, that hurts made you think grabbing it is a good idea?”
“Stop whining,” Neve muttered. Gently, she felt along Solmir’s fingers. One of them bent at a sickening angle. “You broke a finger when you punched the wall.”
“The wall deserved it.”
“It needs to be set, if you don’t want it to heal crooked.”
“I feel like a crooked finger is the least of my—Shadows damn me to the deepest pits of the earth and leave me there!”
Neve let go of his finger, the bones now set straight. He couldn’t see her self-satisfied smirk, but she gave him one anyway. “That will swell.”
“Oh, will it?” he muttered mockingly. But she felt him bend his fingers against her knee, testing them. “I suppose I should take that ring off, then.”
“Probably.”
He lifted his hand from her knee. A moment later, his fingers found hers, placed something in her palm.
A cold circle of silver.
“Keep it for me,” Solmir said.
Neve weighed it in her fist. Then she slipped it over her thumb.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Red
Are you going to eat?”
Eammon’s voice was quiet in the dim of the cabin. Red saw his shadow against the wall, the edges diffuse from the sunlight up on the deck.
“You know, that wasn’t really a question.” The edge of the bunk sank down as he settled his weight on it. “You’re going to eat, it’s just a question of how pleasant the experience will be for everyone involved.”
She snorted weakly. Flipped over so she could curl around his knee instead of her pillow. “In that case, the answer is yes. I’d rather eat jerky of my own accord than have you nearly drown me in broth again.”
“Good girl,” Eammon rumbled.
Red forced herself to sit up, wincing against the pain in her head, and accepted the napkin-wrapped dinner and cup of lukewarm ale Eammon handed her.
It was the first time she’d managed to eat since the night before last, since the key in her pocket pulled her into a strange dream-space—the Heart Tree—and revealed her sister, only to take her away. The key was still under her pillow. She’d considered breaking it, more than once, in a fit of rage that it’d brought her so close only to fail. But she couldn’t do it.
Her sister, wreathed in thorns, black-eyed and black-veined, changed by the Shadowlands in ways that echoed Red’s changes from the Wilderwood. Wasn’t that what the voice meant, when the mirror in the tower broke? That they had to mirror each other, match each other? But they’d done it, and here they still were, stuck in opposite worlds.
Red chewed methodically, took a swallow of ale to wash it down. She tasted none of it. “I don’t understand.”
“I know.” A constant refrain, what they’d repeated to each other over and over again since Eammon found Red collapsed on the deck. “But we still have the key. Maybe Kiri can tell us how to make it bring you to Neve again.”