“So many bones,” he said quietly. He inspected the ground at his feet, thoughtfully clicking his tongue. Then he bent, picked up the bone with the sharpest end.
“Outside of the Sanctum, we can’t touch anything when we’re like this. Projecting, showing ourselves as we used to be rather than as we are.” He hefted the bone in his hand. “But here, where our power is greatest, there are certain perks. Our projections are more closely tied to our physical bodies. To hurt one is to hurt the other.”
It happened too fast for Neve to react. Valchior lifted the bone and shoved it through his neck.
She didn’t know what to make of it, that her first instinct was to step back, to raise a cool brow. Surely, someone compassionate, someone good, would step forward, body driven with the intent to help before their mind caught up and told them it wouldn’t make a difference.
But Neve didn’t.
And when Valchior realized it, his grotesquely wide eyes finding hers with a false look of alarm, he cackled.
He gripped the bone, pulled it from his neck. Open skin and ivory spinal cord shuddered back and forth as the superficial wound closed. “You take your lessons well,” he chuckled, testing the point of the bone again before letting it clatter to the floor. “Just wanted to let you know it was pointless, before you got any ideas. It takes more than the bone of just any god to unravel us, Neve. And even if you did manage to start that unraveling, all you’d do is release our magic. Release our souls. And then they’d need somewhere to go, either into you or into Solmir.”
“Shouldn’t you tell me how to do it, then?” It was too easy an opening, deliberately leading her to a question she sensed he wouldn’t answer, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking. “Isn’t that what you want?”
“Clever Shadow Queen.” He reached out, cupped her cheek. His hand was ragged skin and gleaming bone, and Neve jerked away. Valchior caught her chin in an iron grip she couldn’t pull out of, dragged her closer to his face. One eye was whole and green and fringed in auburn lashes; the other an empty hole in a bare skull. “Only the bones of a god can kill a god, but it must be a god made in the same way. And we made ourselves gods.”
The last word was a sneer, his mouth barely a breath away from hers, lush lips blinking to overgrown skeletal teeth.
Neve snarled right before his mouth reached hers, arm coming up to knock his grip away with such force that she stumbled backward in a racket of bones.
Valchior laughed again, bright and jovial. “Kisses are only for Solmir, I see,” he said. “Noted, noted.”
The King’s projection turned away from her, moved farther into the bone labyrinth. Neve followed, with the god-bone the Seamstress had given her still clutched in her hand, regardless of how useless it’d just been proven.
They wound through the rubble some more—Neve couldn’t tell how long; her body had lost the ability to count time passing—until Valchior came to a stop, the dark space before him cavernous and too dim for details.
“Here he is,” he said, waving a dismissive hand. “Your traitor.”
And Neve rushed forward, nothing timid or queenly about it.
A rib cage. At least, Neve assumed it was a rib cage. Curved bones arced overhead, attached to a central piece that looked segmented. More bones crowded the spaces between the larger ribs, fused together by time, like the mountain where the Oracle had lived. A small fire burned in the center of the stone floor, spitting gray flame and acrid smoke.
And among all the bones, Solmir, bloodied and bruised. He’d been sitting, but on her approach he stood, a long chain rattling as he did. One wrist was wrapped in a gleaming ivory manacle—bone-built, too, then. Even the chain that secured him to the floor looked made of tiny interlocking pieces, wrong-shaped vertebrae with enough give to let him walk around the room but not beyond the threshold. Dust swirled around his feet, marked with skids and bootprints, like he’d tried pulling the chain free from the floor and failed.
“Take some time to think,” Valchior said. “Though do remember that you don’t have much. The Shadowlands grow more unstable by the minute.” He grinned, eyes glittering. “Have fun deciding who gets to be the martyr. We’ll even give you some privacy.”
The feeling of a weight leaving her head, a presence lifting and pulling the illusion with it. The shape of Valchior winked out, leaving only her and Solmir and a weak fire in a prison made from a carcass.
She stared at him. He stared at her. Firelight glinted over the planes of his bloodied chest, the dips and hollows of lithe, fine-honed muscle. She’d thought him built like a dagger, once, and the comparison had only grown more apt. Long and slender and sharp, made for harming, dangerous to hold carelessly.