If the worst had happened, Neve would’ve never, ever forgiven him. He would’ve never forgiven himself. Though Kiri would’ve held the knife, the fault would lay on Raffe, and even though it hadn’t happened, he could still feel what it would’ve been like if it had—a possibility that lay right beside him, barely a breath away, so close he could feel its phantom echoes.
And still, he’d spoken up for Kayu at the tavern.
He couldn’t square it with himself, couldn’t make the ends match up. So he didn’t try. He rested his head against the wall, and he thought of nothing.
“Raffe?”
Shit.
Kayu had taken off her cloak but was still dressed in clothes similar to the ones she’d worn on their first voyage—loose pants, loose shirt, hair tied back in a colorful scarf. For a brief moment, he wondered what she looked like in Order white, then thrust the thought violently away.
Her lips were chapped. Shadows still purpled the skin beneath her eyes. She shifted back and forth from foot to foot, like she was torn between staying and running.
“I know sorry is a weak thing to say,” she murmured finally, looking down at where she worked the hem of her shirt nervously between her thumbnails. “And I know telling you I had no choice is cowardly, even though it’s true. Or felt true.” She shrugged. “You always have a choice, I guess. But when it’s death for you or death for someone you don’t know, it seems so simple.”
“When did it stop seeming simple?” His voice was hoarse.
She gave a weak snort. “Pretty much as soon as I arrived in Valleyda. Seeing you… how much you cared for Neve, how much you wanted her back… that made me care for her, in a way. Anyone you cared about that deeply must be someone good.”
Raffe thought of bloody branches and shadowed veins and dead queens. He didn’t respond. But he did scoot over a little, an invitation.
Kayu took it, sitting next to him. “And then I actually met Red, and I started to care about her, too,” she said, not breaking the rhythm of her explanation. A sigh slumped her shoulders. “I never had any intention of letting her be killed, not after we went to the Edge and saw those carvings, not after I got a chance to know her and Eammon. But I didn’t know how to stop the things already set in motion. That’s all I did the entire time we were sailing here, the entire time in the Rylt—tried to find a way to get all of us out of there alive.”
Six passengers, she’d told Neils when they chartered the galley. She’d intended for all of them to leave, even if she didn’t know how.
“In the end, it wasn’t anything graceful or smart.” Kayu made a rueful noise, knuckling her hair out of her eyes. “It was just desperation and using what I had. And I was almost too late.” A slight shudder rippled through her. “I keep playing it over and over in my mind, what might’ve happened if I had been too late, or if Eammon hadn’t showed up to finish the job when I couldn’t.”
“We don’t have to think about it.” A lifeline for the both of them, something to pull them out of those echoes of things that hadn’t happened but had been so damn close. “You weren’t too late, and neither was Eammon, so we don’t have to think about it.”
Kayu took a deep breath, nodded. For a moment, they sat in silence, both trying very hard to follow that advice.
“I want you to know,” Kayu murmured, “that from here on out, I’m on your side. Unequivocally. I don’t deserve your trust, and I get that, but just… just know that whatever we need to do to get Neve back, to make sure the Kings end once and for all, I’m in.”
“I believe you.” And he did, even if it made him a fool twice over. “The others might be harder to convince.”
“That’s fair.”
Raffe shifted against the wall. The movement brought their shoulders together. It made him think of other things coming together, but he didn’t edge away. “It’d be easier if we knew what we needed to do.”
“It seems like we can’t do much but get back to the Wilderwood and wait.” Kayu’s eyes flashed in the gloom. “Which I don’t think anyone is taking well.”
“Sitting tight and waiting for the monster prison to rupture isn’t my idea of a good time,” Raffe muttered.
Suddenly, the boat rocked to one side, then the other, fast enough to make them crash together in a tangle of limbs and knocked skulls. Raffe heard Red yelp, Eammon’s garbled shout. From above, a clatter of something falling over, more surprised yelling.
Raffe was first up the ladder, Eammon not far behind, though there was a hint of seasick glassiness in his eyes. Neils was whooping with rough laughter, pulling at a rope to adjust a sail. Fife and Lyra stood near the railing, both soaked in seawater and wearing similar expressions of alarm.
“Rogue wave!” Neils waved his hand at the sea like it was a horse that had jumped a steep hurdle. “Like there was an earthquake under the surface or somethin’! I’ve never seen ’em come like that!” Another whoop rang out rough over the water. “Kings’ kneecaps, the look on your faces! I don’t think we’ll be runnin’ into another one, not to worry, lads.”
Lots of worry, lads, Raffe thought wryly.
It seemed like the wait for the monster prison to rupture was growing shorter by the minute.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Neve
Neve kept her eyes closed as the Kings laughed. She kept them closed, and thought of her sister, thought of home, thought of Raffe and of Solmir. All the small things that she could draw around her like armor.
She felt the displacement of air as Valchior reached for her, the groan of rock on rock as he bent closer. His finger touched her forehead, collapsing the true world into an illusion of bone and whole flesh once again. “You still want to see your traitor?” Merry as a joke. It must be one, to him.
Neve nodded, chin held high, as queenly as she could be.
Valchior smiled, the skin of his jaw flickering out of existence, revealing skeletal teeth. “Come on, then.”
The projection of the King turned toward the coiled bones that made the Sanctum’s wall, headed for a gap in the dead Dragon’s tail. He ducked through it, slipping easily into the ivory lattice. With a bladed swallow, Neve followed.
She’d thought the walls were made only of the Dragon’s skeleton, but it seemed that assumption was incorrect. If the center of the Old One’s coiled tail made the Sanctum, the rest of its jagged bones and those of other beasts formed the corridors, madcap halls and rooms built of tilted-together ribs, the broken plates of massive skulls. There was no pattern to it that Neve could discern, but Valchior moved confidently, the illusion of the man he’d been, stepping over broken bones like they were cobblestones.
They lived in a palace made of the things they’d killed.
The King looked back over his shoulder, the space around his eye becoming desiccated skin and empty orbital socket. A sly smile bent his mouth.