Neve stopped running, slamming against a trunk hard enough to knock the breath from her lungs. She felt half mad and looked it, too—fleeing from a tower into a nightmare landscape, where trees grew upside down and everything was shades of black and white and gray.
Shadowlands. The prison of monsters, the prison of gods. An underworld, a half world, darkness anchored beneath the Wilderwood.
It made a twisting sort of sense. One had consumed Red, so the other consumed Neve.
Minutes ago, she’d woken in a glass coffin, woken with her veins inked black and her mind muddied. And he’d been there. And Neve hadn’t thought, hadn’t spared a second for niceties or explanations. She’d pushed up out of that coffin, and she’d run.
Now, of course, she was slightly regretting it.
She tried to calm her breathing, soften its rattle, panic closing in as she eyed the thing in the forest—can you still call it a forest if the trees are upside down?—ahead of her. It was too large to see in its entirety, shifts of gray against the white trunks, just enough to give the impression of slow, ponderous movement.
Her heartbeat was almost calming to a regular pace when a hand closed around her arm, heralding a harsh whisper in her ear.
“And where,” Solmir murmured, “do you think you’re going, Neverah?”
Instinct had her elbow shooting back, aiming for some soft part of him—assuming he had any; the body pressed against her was all slender hard angles and sharp planes, a man built like a knife. Still, her elbow elicited a quick grunt, though it was more of surprise than pain, and that was bolstering enough for her to kick out with her foot, trying to stomp on his heel.
“On every soulless Old One, you’re barefoot.” He sounded more exasperated than anything, still speaking in that close whisper right at the shell of her ear. “Do you really think you’re going to—”
He cut himself off with another grunt as Neve’s fist drove into his hip bone.
It hurt her as much as it sounded like it hurt him, and Neve’s lips peeled back from her teeth with a hoarse, angry cry. It wasn’t loud, but in the strange silence of this place, it echoed.
Solmir froze, eyes darting from her to the creature in the forest, still moving slow and sinuous through the trees. Then his hand clapped over her mouth.
Neve writhed against his hold—she’d rather take her chances with the thing in the inverted trees than be so close to him. He solved the issue of her clawing hands by wrapping another arm around her waist, trapping her elbows against her ribs and the small of her back flush to his hips. “Listen,” he murmured in her ear, and damn him, it sounded like he was trying to be soothing. “I know you hate me. That’s fine. But I promise you will hate what that thing does to you more.”
Her lips moved vainly against his palm, and Neve had half a thought to bite him, to tell him that there was nothing in this world or the one she’d just left that she hated more than him at that moment. But then the thing in the trees turned, enough for her to see its face.
Face might not be the most accurate thing to call it. Really, it was just a mouth. A mouth with rings on rings of teeth, razor-sharp and as long as she was tall.
Neve made a small sound behind Solmir’s hand. She stopped struggling.
The toothed thing in the trees breathed, and the stink of it washed over Neve like a wave, carrion-thick and fever-hot, heightened by the cold of the air. Solmir pulled her tighter against him, arm a vise around her middle. They stood still, and waited.
After what seemed like an age, the thing turned, that awful mouth facing away from them again. It resumed its slow meander through the inverted trees.
A heartbeat, then Solmir let her go.
Neve rounded on him, a snarl on her mouth and fingers curled into fists. She raised one of them, but he was faster. Solmir’s hand closed around hers in midair, stopping it before it reached his jaw.
“Come now, Neverah,” he said, the ghost of a hateful smile on his lips. “All those lessons in diplomacy, and you won’t even hear me out?”
“Diplomacy is for honorable men.” Their linked hands shook in the air, oppositional forces. “It doesn’t apply here.”
“Fair enough.” A quick twist of his hand, and her arm was pinned behind her, between her body and the hard plane of his. “Then we’ll do this the undiplomatic way. I think you secretly like that better, anyway. You seem to jump at any excuse for violence.”
She jerked against him. He laughed, dark and humorless. “Tell you what, little queen. I say my piece, and then you’re welcome to hit me. As hard as you want. Anywhere you want.” There was an edge to his voice, something she couldn’t quite identify. Rueful and angry, a low burn of ferocity like a banked fire. “Do we have a deal?”