“You know what they say about assuming.”
“Manners, manners.” The Leviathan’s tone was distracted, its shark-black eyes fixed on Neve rather than Solmir. With a subtle twitch of his shoulder, Solmir put himself between the two of them, chin tipped up, wet hair dripping down his back.
The Leviathan smiled, showing razor rows of teeth. “Step before her all you want, boy,” it said quietly, “but you can’t hide that kind of magic.”
And for the first time since he’d given it to her, before she stepped into the Heart Tree, Neve truly looked at what magic had made her.
Before, it had only darkened the veins at her wrists, her neck, places where skin was thin and the nexus of blood showed through. But now, as she pushed up the sleeves of Solmir’s coat, her arms were dark-laced all the way to her elbows. And when she shrugged the coat off her shoulder, all the veins there were black, too, coalescing in a knot of shadow right over her heart. Thorns made vambraces around her forearms, studded the jut of her collarbone.
She looked up at Solmir and saw the reflection of her own eyes in his. Black, the whites swallowed, with only a slight hint of brown at her irises. Her soul, still in there.
She thought of how Solmir’s eyes had flickered in those moments when he took in so much magic, like his soul wanted to sink into it, become part of it. Neve didn’t feel anything like that, didn’t feel anything that might be a sinking soul, and she didn’t know what that meant.
“You held all this?” she whispered. “But you didn’t look… I didn’t…”
A swallow worked down his throat. “I’m rather accustomed to holding shadow, Neverah.”
Another chuckle from the Leviathan, standing before its driftwood throne. “And this isn’t even the power of a god. You’ve only killed two, correct? The Serpent, the Oracle? And you had to use that up to get to the Heart Tree. So this is just all that magic from the lesser beasts you’ve slaughtered along the way.” It shook its head, bones clicking. “It appears you had a practical reason for holding it all, once-King, if she changes so with such a small amount of power.” Black eyes narrowed, and the seaweed tendrils attached to either side of its mouth pulled rubbery lips into a sinister, too-wide smile. “More than one practical reason, I mean.”
Solmir’s jaw clenched beneath his beard.
“You had a change of heart.” The Leviathan’s bony hand rose to rest over where its heart should be. “Or should I say a change of soul?”
Neve’s brows drew together. “What is it talking about?”
“Yes, Solmir.” The Leviathan steepled its fingers, smiling again. Behind it, the flash of a massive dark eye, there and then gone. “What am I talking about?”
Silence in the cavern, other than the drip of salt water from the ceiling.
Solmir’s eyes closed. He pulled in a breath. He shifted forward in front of Neve, so no part of him touched any part of her.
“I changed my mind about sacrificing you,” he said finally.
For a moment, Neve stood motionless, thoughtless, as much a marionette as the corpse before the throne. When she found her voice, it wasn’t articulate, wasn’t anything but wounded. “What?”
He’d tensed as if he expected her fist, but the broken sound of her question seemed to wound him more. Solmir kept his eyes closed, reached up to rub at the puckered scars on his brow. “The easiest way to bring the Kings to the surface is with a vessel,” he murmured, like he didn’t want the Leviathan to hear, like he wanted this confession to be between them alone. “Something to hold their souls and take them to a place where they can be killed. And magic and souls… you know how that goes. It’s hard to carry both.”
“But you did. I am, currently.”
“Hard, not impossible.” He dropped his hand, finally looked at her. His expression… she’d seen Solmir look pained, but this was different. His eyes were almost beseeching, a shine in them that spoke of deep aches unable to be hidden, no matter how he wanted to. “I was going to let them use you as a vessel. When the Heart Tree opened and they were drawn to it, the one of us with no magic would’ve been the easiest for them to take.”
He said it quick and harsh, almost like he thought it could hide that look on his face, the way his hand kept twitching toward her and falling.
Neve swallowed. She knew how to keep calm when receiving terrible news, knew how to remain poised even in the worst circumstances. So she tilted her chin and steeled her spine and hoped that was enough to hide the burn in her eyes. Foolish. She was so foolish, to have thought he…