“And you swallowed the lies without question, didn’t you?” His gaze pinned her in place, spots of cold as chilling as his rings on her skin had been. “Even when the deepest part of you knew there was something happening. Even when you knew I wasn’t Arick.”
“I didn’t know that.” But that falling feeling in her stomach said she did, she did, she did.
“Don’t insult your own intelligence. You didn’t know the whole of it, maybe, you didn’t know exactly what had happened, but you suspected. You knew he’d changed, that he was being influenced by more than Kiri. And you said nothing.” He paused. “Not even when you knew they killed your mother.”
Another quake saved her from trying to defend herself, trying to pretend what he said was a lie. It shook through the ground beneath them, enough to knock her off-balance, to send her stumbling against Solmir’s chest. His hands came up to steady her, his palm against the sliver of her wrist his coat sleeve left bare.
Neve didn’t take a moment to think. She turned her hand and closed her fingers around his.
He realized what she was doing. She felt him jerk against her, try to pull away, but she pulled first, tugged at him like a planet to its moon.
And that dark, thorned power he housed spilled into her waiting veins.
It stung, ripping at her insides, carving familiar wounds. Her palm eclipsed, then her fingers, veins going inky and running up her shoulder, toward her heart, then down her other side to mark the hand that didn’t hold his.
Solmir wrenched himself away, but she was faster still. Neve opened a frost-laced hand between them like she was offering him something, and her offering was a bramble, flecked with dagger-long thorns, wrapping around his neck, a collar he couldn’t pull out of.
But Solmir didn’t look afraid, not in the slightest. Instead, he looked almost pleased. “Oh, yes,” he murmured. “It looks like this is going to work out just fine.”
“You told me you had nothing to do with my mother’s death.” Neve’s voice was so calm. That was a difference between her and Red, one of many—Red wore her emotions where everyone could see, making no attempt to hide them. Neve was skilled in burying them deep, far down and distant, something to be dealt with later if they were dealt with at all.
“I didn’t.” Solmir’s voice was just as calm, despite the shadow-made thorns digging into his neck. “The killings were all Kiri. But that was the moment you knew. The moment you were sure that whatever was happening was bigger than what you’d planned for. And you did nothing to stop it.”
“Neither did you.” Neve’s fingers twitched; the thorns around Solmir’s throat tightened, enough that she saw the flicker of a grimace at his mouth. “You said you tried to do this in a way that didn’t hurt me, but when you saw that it did, you did nothing.”
“Did you want me to?” His face was all harsh angles. “You never asked me to stop any of it.”
Her lips lifted back from her teeth. “I can’t be your conscience.”
A spark in his eye, a snarl to match hers. “And I can’t be your spine.”
They stood there, locked together by magic, a Queen and a King and the darkness of an underworld.
“It was always going to come to this.” Solmir shifted, his collar of thorns digging into his skin. One pushed in at his throat, enough to pucker, not quite enough to pierce. “It was always going to come down to you to stop them, to annihilate them so that they can’t make a world in their image. It was always going to be you and Redarys.”
“Not if she’d just run.” Neve shook her head, a shiver working over her at the contrast of this familiar argument happening in such a wholly unfamiliar place. “If Red had listened to me and not gone to the Wolf, none of this would’ve happened.”
“You know that isn’t true. You made the choices that led you here, Neverah. They’re yours as much as they are hers. You could’ve run from it, but the two of you are for the Wolf and for the throne, and such things have a way of finding you even if you hide.”
Her choices. Letting Kiri convince her there was a way to save Red from a fate she’d greeted with open arms. Bleeding on the sentinel shards to grow their inverted grove. Pulling in all that shadowed magic as she lay there in a glass coffin.
All these things she’d done for a measure of control, and it all led to the same place. To her choosing to go, the same as Red had, both of them trying to save the other.