Power was a black rush, wilder than she’d ever seen it before. It rushed from the back of the cavern, where the true Leviathan rattled in death throes, ropes of shadow flowing straight toward Neve like she was the ocean to its river.
She raised her hands.
It slammed into her with the force of a hurricane, the Leviathan’s power tangling in her fingers and slicing into her skin as if it were no barrier at all. It was cold, a chill deeper than she’d thought possible, ice poured over her head in a wave that just kept coming, a vein of darkness running congruent to her every limb, her every thought. Her mouth wrenched out a scream, but she couldn’t hear it above the rush of magic, the power of the strongest Old One making a home in her instead.
When the last of the magic finally drained into her, Neve collapsed. She barked her knees against the shell-pocked floor, her hands sliced on coral shards. Above her, in that window made by a hole in the cavern ceiling, the sea and the wall of pyramid-stacked bones flipped back and forth, sometimes one and sometimes the other. The very stone of the cavern seemed to thin, growing nearly transparent, as the Kings pulled them to the Sanctum, power drawing power.
She curled up on the floor, flooded with dark divinity, and tried to remember how to breathe.
“Neve!”
Solmir, freed with a final shattering—the coral prison sundered in half, and he burst through, hands bloody messes and a snarl on his face, eyes gleaming impossibly blue. Stalactites shook free of the ceiling as he ran across the breaking floor toward her, gaze tracking from the headless puppet to the rapid interplay of rock and bone as the cavern faded away.
A jagged spear of rock broke away from the ceiling right above Neve. She heard the groan but couldn’t make herself move—her limbs felt so heavy, so full of magic and darkness and cold.
Something landed on her first, softer than the stone, though not by much. Solmir stretched over her, wrapped his arms around her middle, and rolled, taking both of them out of the way of the falling stalactite seconds before it hit the ground where Neve had been. They landed with him atop her, hands on her shoulders, shock and fear and awe in his eyes.
“What did you do, Neve?” He asked it quietly. And the look on his face said he already knew the answer.
All her attention remained on him, on the blue of his eyes and the dagger-sharpness of his cheekbones, the line of puckered scars along his forehead. He was her still point as the world changed around them, rock fading away until it was gone, the sea merely a memory.
Power drew power, and they’d been pulled to the most powerful thing left in this dissolving underworld.
“You know what she did, boy.”
It wasn’t the voice she recognized, wasn’t exactly the one she’d heard in the cairn with the Serpent. Deeper, more graveled, as if it came out of the earth instead of a throat. But the cadence was the same, the royal arrogance, the too-friendly tone.
Valchior laughed, low and rolling. “She did exactly what we thought she would.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Raffe
Eammon looked like he hadn’t slept in days. In the shadows of the cloister room, Raffe saw him drop a kiss to Red’s forehead before heading to the door. He closed it softly behind him and ran a hand over his face. “This is the first deep sleep she’s had since she saw Neve. I suppose I should be grateful for that, at least. She’ll rest better on a land-bound bed.”
“There’s one good thing about being stuck here to add to the list,” Raffe said, leaning against the wall across from the room.
“How many things are on the list?”
“So far, one.”
The Wolf huffed a sound that was probably meant to be a laugh. “That sounds about right.” He rubbed his magic-addled eyes with one heavily scarred hand. “Did Kayu say when we’d be able to get another ship?”
“We’re headed to the main harbor now,” Raffe said. “We’ll have one by tomorrow morning. Maybe even tonight—at this point, I’m willing to sail back to Valleyda on a raft. Or someone’s buoyant spare mattress.”
“You and me both,” Eammon muttered. But Raffe thought the tinge of green on his face at the thought wasn’t only due to forest magic.
“Did she say anything else?” Raffe asked quietly. “About Neve?”
That night on the ship, when he left Red right before the key in her pocket pulled her to… somewhere else… had been chaotic, to say the least. Whatever force brought Red and Neve together had physically taken Red away, made her vanish from thin air in a wash of golden glow.