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.
Two corridors branched out from the sides of the staircase, one to the left and one to the right. The shadowy barrier only blocked the right—the way to the hall with the Tree. The thorns made a precarious bridge across the empty space between the landing and the beginning of the ceiling. Solmir stood just inside the curved lip that marked the start of the hallway, arms crossed.
“Don’t look down,” he repeated quietly.
Movements small and fear-precisioned, Neve slipped over the thorns toward the solid ground. She couldn’t help seeing what lay below as she worked her way across, and it made every nerve in the back of her neck tighten.
The brambles covering the stairs behind her slowly dissolved, fading into gray and silent smoke that drifted through the inverted castle like a ghost. The roof yawned below, what looked like miles of empty air, and her breath came shallow in her throat, a strangled gasp she couldn’t hold back.
She felt his hands on her arms, guiding her from the thorns and down to the solid stone slope of the hall’s ceiling. “Breathe, Neve. You’re fine.”
Solmir sat her down by the wall, and Neve pulled up her knees, pressed her forehead against them. She tugged in deep breath after deep breath until her heart no longer felt as if it were trying to break free of her ribs.
He crouched before her, face unreadable, hands with all their silver rings hanging between his knees. “Can you go on?”
One more deep breath, scented with pine and snow. She nodded.
He nodded back. Then he stood and turned to face the churning wall of shadow blocking them from the Heart Tree.
When Neve and Red were ten, a huge storm had rolled in from the Florish coast. Such things were fairly common in the summer months there, but this was the first and last time she could remember one coming close enough to see from Valleyda. They’d stood on the roof, necks craned upward, watching a mass of black cloud spread slowly over the sky, spangled with lightning. It’d raised the hair on her arms, made the very air feel charged.
That’s what this looked like. What it felt like. A storm of shadow, though not shot through with any light. Only churning darkness, covering the corridor, making it impossible to pass.
Neve stood, tried to step closer. But her bones buzzed against it, as if she and the shadow were the same polarity, repelling each other. “So what do we do?”
“I give you the power of one of the gods. I keep the other.” Solmir’s mouth was a grim line. “And then it will let us through.”
She thought of how they passed power, through a kiss, through a touch. She knew instinctively which it would have to be. Time was short, and the magic they exchanged was strong.
Solmir turned to her, jaw a pained ridge beneath his short beard, blue eyes alight. His shoulders tensed, making the sharp line of his collarbone stand out under moon-pale skin, casting a smoky shadow she could trace to his heart.