It wasn’t like she had many other options. “Fine,” Neve said. “Talk.”
He relaxed behind her, slightly, though his hold on her arm remained unyielding. He wore silver rings on almost all of his fingers, and they bit into her skin, spots of deeper cold in a cold world. “You’re in the Shadowlands.”
“I gathered,” she replied, trying to let fierceness carve out any fear in her tone.
“Smart woman.” He adjusted his hold, silver chilling the fragile length of her forearm. “You’re in the Shadowlands,” he continued, “because I need your help.”
“What if I don’t want to help you? Why would I ever want to help you?”
“Because you don’t really have a choice.” He turned her around to face him then, apparently satisfied that she wouldn’t take a swing until he gave her the word.
Solmir was handsome, a fact she hated twofold—hated that it was true and hated that she noticed. Long, straight hair spilled over his shoulders, almost to his elbows. She didn’t know its color, since the monotone of the Shadowlands washed it out, but it looked a middling gray, like it’d be somewhere between gold and brown in a place with color. Dark brows slashed like dagger strikes on a high forehead; his nose was straight and prominent over a thin mouth with a wicked curve. Considerably tall, so that when he peered down at her, he looked almost like a bird of prey eyeing something caught in a trap.
And his eyes. They were blue. Blue in all this gray and black and white.
“I’m not going to attempt to justify myself to you.” But the look in those blue eyes said he might want to. “I will simply tell you, with complete honesty, that everything I did on the surface was for a purpose.”
“And that purpose was?”
A bladed smile without any warmth bent his mouth. “To kill the Kings.”
Neve was very good at keeping her emotions off her face and out of her limbs, playacting impassivity, so she stood statue-still as confusion and the stomach swoop of blasphemy churned in her mind, attempting to take this piece and fit it somewhere that made sense.
“You,” she said finally, “are going to have to explain more than that.”
“Come on, Neverah.” He shook his head, all that hair swinging to brush her chest. “You didn’t think they were something good, did you? I know you didn’t. I saw how you never wanted to touch that branch shard. All of this was for your sister, never because of some misguided piety.”
“Do not talk about my sister.”
Queenly, an order, and his eyes briefly widened. “Understood, Your Majesty.”
Inexplicably, the title brought heat to her face. Neve wrenched her arm from his hold, though she didn’t try to hit him. Yet. “So you want to kill the Kings. Is that why you tried to bring them through?”
Solmir nodded, a solemnity that sat strangely against the mocking way he’d spoken to her.
A terrible, twisted grove, blood on white branches, darkness dripping. Her memories of what happened before she woke here were scattered, hard to gather, hard to meld into a whole picture. But she knew, deep in her bones where cold magic twined, that before she’d been pulled into the Shadowlands, Kiri and Solmir and the other priestesses had been making a doorway between the worlds. Using her to make a doorway. Anchoring her to the inverse of the forest that anchored Red, making them dark mirrors of each other.
Red. Shadows damn her, she couldn’t think about Red right now.
Neve swallowed, banishing the itch of grief that hung in the back of her throat. “You’re just going to try to kill the Kings here instead, then?”
“I’d love to. But I can’t.” That cold smile again, all angles. “Nothing can truly die in the Shadowlands, I’m afraid.”
The fact itself might’ve been comforting were it not for the way he delivered it. As both a challenge and the winning card in a hand, eyes glittering and mouth a harsh line.
But Neve didn’t have much of a chance to ponder it.
The inverted trees whipped from side to side, the spindly roots stretching into the cold sky and waving like skeletal fingers. A sound like tearing metal echoed through the gray, and with a crash, the long-bodied monster shot out from the forest, toothed mouth gnashing at the air and coming straight toward them.
“Dammit,” Solmir muttered, and thrust Neve aside.
She stumbled over dry ground and tangling branches, landing on her knees and away from the careening teeth. She still wore a white nightgown, flimsy against the cold and the press of rough bark. Had she known she’d be journeying to the underworld, she would’ve chosen her attire with more care.