Valchior gave her a small, sad smile, bittersweetness shaped by perfect teeth. “Oh, Neverah,” he murmured. “What has our wayward brother done to you?”
She wished she had an answer. She wished she knew what exactly had woven itself between her and Solmir, a complicated kind of caring that wasn’t quite friendship and wasn’t quite something more, but lived somewhere outside both, heated and strange and volatile.
Her lips stayed shut. Valchior didn’t deserve that explanation.
The King watched her through warm eyes, waiting. When it was clear she wouldn’t talk, he clasped his hands behind his back, began a slow meander around the falsely empty room. Circling her like a predator, though he spoke like protection. “Solmir has always been more in touch with his humanity than the rest of us, I’ll admit. Even before that whole debacle with my daughter, he didn’t sink into this as readily as we did.”
That whole debacle with his daughter. Valchior spoke of Gaya’s death so flippantly.
“So when we felt the Shadowlands begin to dissolve—long before Gaya’s whelp become the Wolf, long before he found your sister—we knew we would need a vessel, if we were to reenter our own world. If we were to escape the destruction of the prison we created.” He flashed a smile, crooked and endearing. “That’s why Solmir was so desperate for the Heart Tree to work with him and Gaya, why he tried to bring us through with the shadow grove when that failed. We would’ve been happy for either to work, but of course, they didn’t. He’s always been looking for an out, Neve.”
Her shortened name was a murmur as he reached toward her, his fingers—solid, and though she knew that was illusion, too, she still shuddered—slipping into her hair. They brushed her temple, the back of her neck, came to rest against the cold shape of the key she’d hidden there, still faintly beating with a pulse that wasn’t hers.
Neve’s spine locked. She didn’t breathe.
But the King didn’t yank the key out of her tangles. Instead, his grin widened as he withdrew his hand. “Between you and me,” he said, resuming his slow circling, “I don’t think it’s the loss of self that he’s most afraid of. I think he’s more afraid of becoming more like himself, with all of our souls subsumed into his. Solmir is not so far removed from monstrous godhood, and he knows it.”
He’d told her she was good, once. Standing by black water and washing themselves free of mud and blood. You are good, he’d said. That’s why it has to be you.
Because he was afraid of what would happen if it was him. He’d clawed his way free of the dark once and didn’t know if he could do it again.
“And yet, he was willing to face that fear for you.” Valchior chuckled. “Malchrosite said Solmir was always able to turn heads easily, but it means his head is also easily turned. He would make himself a monster for you, Neverah, but do you want that?”
She thought of him wreathed in dark and thorns, stalking toward her on that cracked desert plain. Fear had sparked in her, yes, but also recognition. The thorns in her seeing the thorns in him and knowing they were the same.
He’d made his decision at the Heart Tree, when he kissed her and passed power to her. Decided to become something terrible if it meant saving her life. But Neve had never been good at letting others’ decisions stand if she thought they were the wrong ones.
Almost unconsciously, Neve looked down at her hands, the black veins, the studding thorns. She kept forgetting they were there, forgetting how the magic Solmir gave her and the power she took from the Leviathan had wrought her into something dark and inhuman, brutal and beautiful.
Valchior gingerly picked up her hand. “It wouldn’t look much different than this,” he mused. “You wouldn’t become something terrible if you contained us, not like he would. You could use that power for good. Keep everyone you love safe.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Even him.”
She snatched her hand from his grip but didn’t speak. She didn’t know what to say.
“You’re so different from us, Neve, different in a way Solmir never could be.” He didn’t touch her again, but his eyes traced the angles of her face with such focus that it felt like he did. “Full of contradictions, full of love and anger in equal force, the two of them so tangled together, sometimes you can’t tell one from the other. You were cast in shadows long before he was ever part of your story, darkened from your endless need for control.”