Other than the wardrobe, the only furnishings left in the cabin were a broken table listing against the opposite wall and a threadbare rug in the center of the room. Something was stuck in the rug’s weave, spiny shards flecked with odd fibers.
Neve bent down to lightly touch one of them. Feathers.
“This was the home of the Hawk’s lover. He’s been dead a long time, almost as long as the Hawk has been.” Solmir sat down against the wall and began unlacing his boots. “The Old Ones’ lovers don’t seem to outlast them for long.”
“That’s the trouble with religion,” Neve said. “Tying the reason for your existence to a god seems to naturally lead to your existence not mattering much.”
Solmir cocked a brow, still working his laces. “For someone who ushered in a new spiritual order, you hold religion in great contempt.”
“You knew that already.” Neve didn’t follow his example of making herself as comfortable as she could, instead standing stiffly next to the rug. She still had his coat clutched around her. “I might’ve tried to show piety in the true world, but I don’t think I fooled you.”
His hands stilled; Solmir looked up at her, blue eyes narrow and blazing in the gray-scale gloom. It made Neve want to call the words back, cage them in her throat.
The moment passed; he turned back to his boots. “You fooled everyone else well enough, if it’s any consolation.” He snorted. “Except Kiri, maybe.”
It was the opposite of consolation, but Neve didn’t tell him that. Didn’t tell him that the two villains in her story being able to read her better than anyone else was a fact that clawed her gut and hollowed her chest.
“I didn’t fool Raffe,” she said quietly. Almost a weapon. Proof that someone else looked at her and saw truth.
Mostly.
The name made Solmir’s mouth twist as he leaned his head back against the wall. “Raffe would believe whatever you told him.” He snorted. “That’s what true love does, isn’t it? I wouldn’t know.”
Her hands closed to fists in the too-long sleeves of his coat. True love. Right.
She shook her head, banishing thoughts of Raffe and whatever lay between them and all the invariable ways she’d broken it. With a sigh, she settled on the rug, then lay back, head cradled on threadbare fabric and broken feathers.
“Comfortable?” Solmir asked.
“Better than a glass coffin.”
Silence. She heard Solmir shift against the wall. “I would say I was sorry about that,” he said, voice nearly as sharp as hers had been, “but it was to keep you safe, actually. I understand that you have a hard time believing I’m concerned with your safety, but it’s true.” Another pause, longer, heavier in the cold air. “I need you, Neverah. Unfortunately for us both.”
“It wasn’t worth it,” Neve said, curling up on her side. She pillowed her head on her arms, the fabric of his coat scratchy against her cheek, smelling of pine and snow.
“What wasn’t?”
“Keeping me safe,” she replied.
Fog. Not just around her—it felt like the fog was in her, like she’d dissipated and become nothing but smoke herself. It was peaceful, almost.
Dreaming. She must be dreaming.
Neve wasn’t one to dream deeply or often, wasn’t one for ascribing some sort of richer meaning to whatever her brain spilled out in sleep. But something felt… different here. Heavy. Aware.
She couldn’t feel the floor, but she knew she was lying on it; couldn’t feel the weave of the coat pressed against her face, but knew it was there. The pinions of old feathers poked through her nightgown, and she felt them as if they were pressing through thick fabric instead, present but distant.
And she felt magic.
Not much, nothing like what she’d carried before Solmir took it with that bruising, terrible kiss, or even the cold slither that had been a constant on the surface, when she was stealing it daily with blood on a sentinel. But there was a breath of it deep within her, the prick of thorns in her very center, like something had been permanently altered in ways kisses couldn’t fix.
Her soul, maybe.
Slowly, the fog around her dispersed. As it did, the feeling of being incorporeal faded, Neve’s consciousness weighting back down into her limbs.
The shifting fog revealed a massive tree.
But only part of one, the lower half. A tower of roots, twisting in on each other, tall as three of her. If she craned her neck, she could almost see where the trunk began in the fog, what seemed like miles above her head. Looking down, she saw she stood on roots, too. The tree was the only solid thing she could see, the rest of the world made only of mist.