The Leviathan’s sharklike eyes were hard to read, but she saw its head tilt toward her hand as if it noticed something. Solmir’s silver ring, glinting on her thumb. “What a hold you have on each other,” it murmured.
“I don’t know what you mean.” Not her strongest rebuttal, but Neve couldn’t let something like that hang in the air unchallenged. It was too vulnerable, like an organ pulsing outside the boundaries of a body.
“Oh, but I think you do.” One of the Leviathan’s hands dropped to the table, the other propping up its tilted head. It was a posture one would adopt while speaking freely to a friend, and seeing it on the corpse of the Leviathan’s once-human lover made her stomach knot. “You were there, Neverah Valedren. In the nexus between the worlds, with the sister who would do anything to bring you home, and you chose to stay.” Its smile widened. “Strange, how you and she toss roles back and forth. Savior and saved, villain and victim. Though you’re the only one who’s ever truly been a villain, aren’t you?”
Her jaw firmed. She didn’t respond.
“So I suppose it’s not that odd, after all, how you and the once-King are drawn together.” The Leviathan lifted a piece of bread, bit into it with those rows of shark teeth. The glamour on it wavered just as it entered its mouth—a gray, spongy mass of seaweed, making Neve glad she hadn’t tried the wine. “You both have experience being villains in complicated stories. Shouldering complicated mantles. Like that of the Shadow Queen.”
The god fell quiet. For a moment, silence, then the slam of something colliding with stone.
Neve’s head whipped around to follow the sound. The prison the god had built for them in an instant was a knot of spiking stone and coral, impenetrable and solid in the middle of the cavern. Another slam came from inside.
“Let him out.” It seethed from behind her teeth, an order she hadn’t meant to give. “It’s cruel to keep him in there.”
“You care enough for him to be treated kindly? After everything he’s done?” The Leviathan sounded positively delighted. It took a sip of not-wine. “No, I believe I will leave our once-King where he is for now. Let him cool off.”
A swallow worked down her dry throat. Neve almost reached for the wineglass by reflex, but then remembered the mess of seaweed the bread had turned into when the Leviathan ate it. Her hand curled back in on itself, empty.
“You’ve complicated things for him,” the Leviathan said quietly, with an air of someone thrilled to be delivering bad news. “Made it all so much more layered. This was never going to be an easy thing for either of you, but you’ve made it positively tragic.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve brought me out here to tell me anything useful.” Spine rigid, voice cold, a queen to her dark-wreathed bones. “I’d think gloating was below a god.”
“And I’d think you’d have learned enough of gods in your time here to realize that nothing is below us.” The Leviathan shrugged, the movement made jerky by the seaweed filaments attached to its shoulders. “Divinity is less complex than humans would like to think. Half magic, half belief. You don’t become a god until you think of yourself as one.” Another shark-sharp grin. “And I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think myself a god, worthy of worship.”
“You haven’t been worshipped in eons.”
“You’d be surprised.” The eyes of the puppet were blank, but they still managed to look almost sly. “And you’d be surprised how easy worship is to get back, under the right circumstances.”
Neve looked away from the puppet’s empty corpse-eyes, turning her attention instead to her surroundings. The table was in part of the cavern she hadn’t seen before, a small alcove carved by years of saltwater currents, set up on a rocky platform. Gaps in the stone above their heads shone with watery light, the ocean suspended like a glass ceiling.
“To answer your question,” the Leviathan said, as if annoyed that Neve’s focus had wandered, “I didn’t take you from your prison to impart any particular wisdom upon you, though if you have questions—good ones, clear ones—I might be moved to answer.” It folded its hands on the table, almost demure. “No, Neverah, Shadow Queen, I took you from your prison to satisfy my own curiosity. To take the measure of your soul and see what I thought of it.”
The answer took her aback, enough so that she couldn’t hide it with an icy, poised exterior. Neve blinked, then trapped her questions behind her teeth. The Leviathan clearly wanted her to ask, simply so it could have the pleasure of saying no, and it was a game she had no intention of playing.