Her eyes opening to smoke-fogged glass, a familiar face on the other side. Red. Tearful and tattered, dusted with dirt. Red slamming her fists against the glass, screaming for her. A small part of Neve had been meanly satisfied to see that, to see Red trying to get to her as desperately as Neve had been trying all those months. Back when it felt simple.
She remembered looking down at herself. The pulsing, external veins, pumping darkness, connecting her to the inverted grove of sentinel trees. Making her a doorway to the underworld.
There’d been another face on the other side of that glass, too. Raffe. Even now, it felt like a spear through her middle. Raffe yelling for her, Raffe trying to save her. Always trying to save her, even after she’d made her choice back in Valleyda, plunging headlong into the darkness of the Shrine and her blood on branches.
In search of her sister, yes. But in search of other things, too.
And when faced with another choice, there in the grove, she’d pulled all that shadow inside.
Neve lifted her hands again, finally tearing her eyes away from the coffin to look down at her palms instead. Still unblemished by dark veins, but if she tried to call up magic, like she had outside—
“It won’t work.”
Solmir had moved nearly silently; he stood directly in front of her, face unreadable. “You don’t have the magic anymore.”
Her eyes narrowed. “If you think you can control me by making me think I’m powerless, you’ll have to try a different angle. I haven’t been powerless a day in my life, and I won’t start now.”
His brow arched, a cruel smile curving his mouth. “I would never presume to call you powerless, Neverah.”
And that shouldn’t have felt like a victory, but it did.
“However,” Solmir continued, “using that power is going to take a bit more planning on your part from now on. Because it lives in me.”
Her hands still hovered in the air between them, open-palmed, like she was waiting for him to give her something. “What are you talking about?”
“You don’t remember that kiss?” His eyes glittered. “I’m wounded.”
That kiss, a kiss that wasn’t for heat or romance, but something cutting and calculated, a well-timed move in an intricate battle. The rush she’d felt, like something drained out of her.
Solmir tapped the center of her palm with a pale, elegant finger. “Pulling power from the Shadowlands itself is a dangerous game. It changes you, tangles up in you, anchors you here. Better to pull it from a different vessel. Something that can take in power and give it to you when you need it.”
“You.” Her teeth clenched on the word. “You’re the vessel.”
A muscle feathered in his jaw, but Solmir’s slash of a smile didn’t waver. “Precisely.”
Her hands closed. “So I have to kiss you anytime I want to use my magic?”
She didn’t have to tell him how much she hated that; her tone, frost and fury at once, did it for her. She’d just as soon kiss whatever that toothy thing was outside.
“It’s not your magic, Neverah. It doesn’t belong to anyone or anything but itself.” Solmir turned back to the shelf and shoved a few more handfuls of whatever was in the ceramic pot into his bag. “And it doesn’t have to be a kiss, though that is the most efficient method of transfer, for reasons I cannot possibly fathom but assume have to do with the melodramatic nature of the Wilderwood and the Shadowlands and their making. Just a skin-to-skin touch will do.”
That was better, but not by much.
One last handful from the pot, then Solmir slung the bag over his shoulder. “I’ve done you a tremendous favor, really. Believe me, you don’t want to let the Shadowlands alter you any more than they have to.”
“So you’re going to let it alter you instead?”
“I know what I’m doing,” he replied, which wasn’t really an answer at all. “Why, are you worried about me?”
Neve crossed her arms, still uncomfortably aware that she was wearing his coat. It smelled like pine, like cold and snow. “More worried that you’re going to start growing fangs.”
“Not yet.” He turned, disappearing into the dark of the stairs and leaving her no choice but to follow. “The marks the Shadowlands have left on me are harder to spot, I’m afraid.”
If she trained her mind only to pay attention to the tree trunks, it was easy to pretend that this was a normal walk through a normal wood. Not that she’d spent much time in forests of any kind—not with the specter of the Wilderwood looming so large over her whole life—but it kept her thoughts mostly quiet, calmed the lurking panic just beneath her sternum.