A low, rumbling sound, surrounding her so completely she didn’t know which of the shrouded figures started it. A laugh, all of them together, the sound of a rockslide.
“The traitor is where all traitors go,” Valchior said. “Even here, kingdoms have dungeons.”
Her fists clenched, magic surging down her veins, painting them black and raising spikes. “If you hurt him, I’ll kill you.”
A groan behind her—another monolith, leaning down, the King’s face level with hers. No eyes, but if they were lost in all that rock somewhere, they’d be looking directly at her.
“Neverah,” Valchior murmured. “Isn’t that precisely what you came here to do?” The stone head cocked to the side with a groan, obscenely slow. “Or, at least, what you think you came here to do?”
Dust from the Kings’ movements peppered the air, made a cough claw up Neve’s throat. How long had it been since they’d moved? She imagined centuries of sitting still, swallowing shadow and sinking deep into a rotten world, and suppressed a shudder.
She still held the shard of god-bone in her hand. The corpse of the Leviathan had no blood to stain it, so it gleamed white in the gray of the Sanctum, in the light filtering through the gaps of the massive skull above. All of them could see it, all of them knew she had it. And it didn’t appear to bother them at all.
That, more than anything else, made a numbing terror prickle between her shoulder blades.
“Vessels,” Valchior breathed. “You know a bit about them. When things changed at the Heart Tree—when Solmir gave you the magic—we felt it happen. We sent the Leviathan to collect you.” The stone effigy wasn’t capable of facial expression, but Neve sensed something like exasperation. “That didn’t exactly work out how we planned, of course.”
The Leviathan had decided to believe in her, instead of in the Kings. Neve’s hands curled, darkness staining her palms.
“So now you are faced with another choice, Neverah.” Valchior’s inhuman voice was calibrated for comfort, but it still rang cold. “Give up what the Leviathan gave you and join with us instead. Become the vessel you were meant to be, and finally find some of that control you so desperately want.”
The vessel she was meant to be. What Solmir had planned for her, before… before he decided he couldn’t kill her, for whatever reason. Reasons she couldn’t think of right now, didn’t have the time to look at, because that would require her to look at her own.
Valchior was asking her to become a vessel for the Kings’ souls. To be the vehicle that brought them to the surface.
To be part of the reign of terror they planned.
The key the Heart Tree had given her burned cold on the back of her neck. “And if I don’t?”
“If you don’t,” Calryes said, his voice sharper and less warm than Valchior’s, “Solmir will take your place. And we all know how poorly he copes with his own soul—I can’t imagine he’ll do well with four more.”
More rumbles of awful laughter, the deep sounds of cliffs collapsing and continents splitting.
It took her a moment to put it all together, how this was an answer to two questions. What would happen if she refused to be the vessel, and what Solmir had meant in the coral prison when he said there was another way.
Here was why he’d tried so hard to make a different plan work. Why he’d come to the surface, tethered to Arick, why he’d led them to make the shadow grove. A desperate attempt to hang on to himself, to write a different destiny where he could be saved.
If Neve wasn’t the vessel for the Kings’ souls, Solmir would be.
And then what would he become?
She didn’t realize she’d let go of the god-bone until she heard it clatter to the floor.
Another sound of groaning stone, a King leaning forward. “Perhaps this would be easier,” Valchior muttered in a voice of gravel and shale, “if we were face-to-face.”
He reached out, as slow-moving as the shift of a mountain. She could’ve run, but where would she go?
The giant stone hand touched Neve’s brow. She clenched her jaw against expectant pain, but there was none. A moment of rough-hewn fingers, then the hand on her forehead felt only like flesh, an illusion spun straight into her mind.
Neve opened her eyes to the man she’d seen in the cairn, bright-eyed and handsome. The image of him was stronger this time, less wavering, and the vision he crafted covered everything she could see. Instead of billowing shadows, there was only the Sanctum, empty of everyone except the two of them.