“Vessels,” Valchior breathed. “You know a bit about them. When things changed at the Heart Tree—when Solmir gave you the magic—we felt it happen. We sent the Leviathan to collect you.” The stone effigy wasn’t capable of facial expression, but Neve sensed something like exasperation. “That didn’t exactly work out how we planned, of course.”
The Leviathan had decided to believe in her, instead of in the Kings. Neve’s hands curled, darkness staining her palms.
“So now you are faced with another choice, Neverah.” Valchior’s inhuman voice was calibrated for comfort, but it still rang cold. “Give up what the Leviathan gave you and join with us instead. Become the vessel you were meant to be, and finally find some of that control you so desperately want.”
The vessel she was meant to be. What Solmir had planned for her, before… before he decided he couldn’t kill her, for whatever reason. Reasons she couldn’t think of right now, didn’t have the time to look at, because that would require her to look at her own.
Valchior was asking her to become a vessel for the Kings’ souls. To be the vehicle that brought them to the surface.
To be part of the reign of terror they planned.
The key the Heart Tree had given her burned cold on the back of her neck. “And if I don’t?”
“If you don’t,” Calryes said, his voice sharper and less warm than Valchior’s, “Solmir will take your place. And we all know how poorly he copes with his own soul—I can’t imagine he’ll do well with four more.”
More rumbles of awful laughter, the deep sounds of cliffs collapsing and continents splitting.
It took her a moment to put it all together, how this was an answer to two questions. What would happen if she refused to be the vessel, and what Solmir had meant in the coral prison when he said there was another way.
Here was why he’d tried so hard to make a different plan work. Why he’d come to the surface, tethered to Arick, why he’d led them to make the shadow grove. A desperate attempt to hang on to himself, to write a different destiny where he could be saved.
If Neve wasn’t the vessel for the Kings’ souls, Solmir would be.
And then what would he become?
She didn’t realize she’d let go of the god-bone until she heard it clatter to the floor.
Another sound of groaning stone, a King leaning forward. “Perhaps this would be easier,” Valchior muttered in a voice of gravel and shale, “if we were face-to-face.”
He reached out, as slow-moving as the shift of a mountain. She could’ve run, but where would she go?
The giant stone hand touched Neve’s brow. She clenched her jaw against expectant pain, but there was none. A moment of rough-hewn fingers, then the hand on her forehead felt only like flesh, an illusion spun straight into her mind.
Neve opened her eyes to the man she’d seen in the cairn, bright-eyed and handsome. The image of him was stronger this time, less wavering, and the vision he crafted covered everything she could see. Instead of billowing shadows, there was only the Sanctum, empty of everyone except the two of them.
Valchior gave her a small, sad smile, bittersweetness shaped by perfect teeth. “Oh, Neverah,” he murmured. “What has our wayward brother done to you?”
She wished she had an answer. She wished she knew what exactly had woven itself between her and Solmir, a complicated kind of caring that wasn’t quite friendship and wasn’t quite something more, but lived somewhere outside both, heated and strange and volatile.
Her lips stayed shut. Valchior didn’t deserve that explanation.
The King watched her through warm eyes, waiting. When it was clear she wouldn’t talk, he clasped his hands behind his back, began a slow meander around the falsely empty room. Circling her like a predator, though he spoke like protection. “Solmir has always been more in touch with his humanity than the rest of us, I’ll admit. Even before that whole debacle with my daughter, he didn’t sink into this as readily as we did.”
That whole debacle with his daughter. Valchior spoke of Gaya’s death so flippantly.
“So when we felt the Shadowlands begin to dissolve—long before Gaya’s whelp become the Wolf, long before he found your sister—we knew we would need a vessel, if we were to reenter our own world. If we were to escape the destruction of the prison we created.” He flashed a smile, crooked and endearing. “That’s why Solmir was so desperate for the Heart Tree to work with him and Gaya, why he tried to bring us through with the shadow grove when that failed. We would’ve been happy for either to work, but of course, they didn’t. He’s always been looking for an out, Neve.”
Her shortened name was a murmur as he reached toward her, his fingers—solid, and though she knew that was illusion, too, she still shuddered—slipping into her hair. They brushed her temple, the back of her neck, came to rest against the cold shape of the key she’d hidden there, still faintly beating with a pulse that wasn’t hers.
Neve’s spine locked. She didn’t breathe.
But the King didn’t yank the key out of her tangles. Instead, his grin widened as he withdrew his hand. “Between you and me,” he said, resuming his slow circling, “I don’t think it’s the loss of self that he’s most afraid of. I think he’s more afraid of becoming more like himself, with all of our souls subsumed into his. Solmir is not so far removed from monstrous godhood, and he knows it.”
He’d told her she was good, once. Standing by black water and washing themselves free of mud and blood. You are good, he’d said. That’s why it has to be you.
Because he was afraid of what would happen if it was him. He’d clawed his way free of the dark once and didn’t know if he could do it again.
“And yet, he was willing to face that fear for you.” Valchior chuckled. “Malchrosite said Solmir was always able to turn heads easily, but it means his head is also easily turned. He would make himself a monster for you, Neverah, but do you want that?”
She thought of him wreathed in dark and thorns, stalking toward her on that cracked desert plain. Fear had sparked in her, yes, but also recognition. The thorns in her seeing the thorns in him and knowing they were the same.
He’d made his decision at the Heart Tree, when he kissed her and passed power to her. Decided to become something terrible if it meant saving her life. But Neve had never been good at letting others’ decisions stand if she thought they were the wrong ones.
Almost unconsciously, Neve looked down at her hands, the black veins, the studding thorns. She kept forgetting they were there, forgetting how the magic Solmir gave her and the power she took from the Leviathan had wrought her into something dark and inhuman, brutal and beautiful.
Valchior gingerly picked up her hand. “It wouldn’t look much different than this,” he mused. “You wouldn’t become something terrible if you contained us, not like he would. You could use that power for good. Keep everyone you love safe.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Even him.”