Solmir’s eyes narrowed, but it was Neve who spoke. “Why do you keep calling me that? Shadow Queen?”
The Seamstress shrugged. “Because that is what you are,” she said simply. “Or, at least, what you will be.”
Neve’s eyes darted to Solmir. But if the King had more insight, he kept it to himself, face cold and handsome and unreadable.
“The Shadow Queen, for the throne,” the spider-woman mused. Her segmented legs bent behind her, making a dark throne of her own to perch on. The insect parts she’d sorted stayed in neat piles on the table. “Though not the throne you thought. Wolves and woods and thrones and darkness, whole worlds trapped in mostly human hearts. You and your sister have been part of it since the beginning, sunk deeper than either of you realized.”
Neve’s heart jumped at the word sister; she couldn’t tell if it was in hope or fear or something caught between the two. “What do you know about Red?”
The Seamstress cocked her head. “Only what the stars told me, long ago. That she would become all light, while you do the opposite.”
Light and dark. That’s what it always was with the two of them. A dance of inversions, reflections in a mirror. “Is she all right?”
“I know not of what is happening on the surface,” the Seamstress answered. “But were something to happen to the Lady Wolf, you would know.”
A reassurance Neve had given herself over and over. If Red was gone, Neve would know.
She wondered if it went both ways. If Red felt her absence now as acutely as Neve had felt hers when she left for the Wilderwood.
“Don’t worry, Shadow Queen. You two will find your way home to each other. That much is certain, though the circumstances of such a thing are mutable.” The Seamstress’s faceted eyes turned away from Neve, looked instead to Solmir. “But you must find the Heart Tree first.”
There was a sense of capitalization there, of the words being more important than the sound of them let on. There was no reason for them to pit Neve’s stomach the way they did.
Next to her, Solmir’s crossed arms tightened over his chest. It pulled the fabric of his thin shirt taut, revealing the blurred outline of a strange, spiking tattoo circling his upper arm. “I figured as much,” he muttered. “It seems to be the only door between the worlds that will actually open.”
Irritation in his voice, calling back to a failed plan—a door ripped into the earth, blood on branches, and Neve in the center.
“Other ways can be forced open, well enough.” The Seamstress flipped a dismissive hand. “But the only one powerful enough to draw the Kings to it is the Heart Tree.”
Neve stiffened. Beside her, Solmir said nothing, but the look in his eyes was banked fire.
“That is neither here nor there, not anymore,” the Seamstress continued. “Now we focus on what we know will work.”
“Where is it, then?” Solmir asked, low and cold. Trying to mask anxiety with imperiousness. Neve recognized that; she did it herself.
“Where it’s always been.” Her offering finally sorted, the Seamstress’s segmented legs began lifting the insect pieces into the air, affixing them to her ceiling beams. “A castle upside down. Home made a dark reflection.”
Solmir’s teeth clenched, tight enough so that Neve could almost hear them.
“But things have deteriorated there, just as they have elsewhere.” The Seamstress plucked a leg from the piles on the table and popped it into her mouth. “Each of you will need the power of an Old One to enter the Heart Tree’s presence. Thankfully, three remain, so you have choices of which two you want to destroy.”
Neve’s hands felt numb, thinking of the worm-thing, all those teeth. How much worse would an Old One be?
“The Serpent, the Oracle, and the Leviathan.” The Seamstress spoke around a full mouth, ticking the leftover gods off on her human fingers. “If I were you, I would go with the first two. The Serpent is near death anyway, holding out against the pull of the Sanctum, and the Oracle is easier to deal with than the Leviathan, ever since you chained it.”
Solmir made a noise that was neither agreement nor dissent.
The Seamstress placed her hands on the table, her head tipping forward so her hair hid her face. “My Weaver would offer you its power, were it here,” she said quietly. “It was noble like that, willing to accept death for the greater good. And it knew that things must end, that a world made of shadow could not last.”
A pause, the Seamstress’s grief hanging heavy in the dusty air. “You can pass us the story of your god’s dissolving, if you like.” Solmir shifted on his feet. “It can make things easier to bear.”