“Why didn’t you?”
A pause before he answered, the column of his throat bobbing with a swallow. “Because you were terrified, Neverah,” he said. “And the magic was such that I could only pass you enough to make any difference by kissing you. I wasn’t going to do that. Not with the way you were looking at me.”
Then he brushed past her, headed into the endless gray horizon. Neve frowned after him a moment before following.
Carefulness, consideration. Things he’d shown her on the surface, things that felt somehow dangerous here. She didn’t want his care—it made things too complicated—but she was afraid of how this world would be for her if she didn’t have it.
They walked in silence for a while before she spoke again, not quite sure how to phrase the question. “Your eyes…”
His pointer finger worked at the silver ring on his thumb as he walked, turning it in nervous revolutions. “What about them?”
“They almost went black, too.”
A shrug. “Holding on to a soul and that much power at the same time is quite a feat. Souls and Shadowlands magic aren’t things that can be held simultaneously—at least, not if you plan to keep them both.” His head cocked toward the gray sky, the wispy impressions of faraway roots looking like smudged clouds. “Maybe I do want that medal.”
The reference to an earlier jibe might’ve made her roll her eyes if she hadn’t been so focused on the matter of magic and souls. “Is that what happened to Red?”
Solmir stopped then and turned to look at her. His arms crossed over his chest, the diffuse light of the Shadowlands limning his frame. “No,” he said finally, almost soft, or at least as soft as his voice could get. “The magic of the Wilderwood is different. It… harmonizes with a soul, is the best way to put it. Amplifies it, instead of consuming it utterly. Redarys still has her soul.” His brow climbed, a smirk playing at his mouth. “Just as stubborn and irritating as its always been.”
Neve cracked a tiny smile despite herself. “Good,” she murmured. “That’s good.”
He watched her a moment more, face unreadable, still twisting that ring around his thumb. The arms of his shirt were hopelessly torn from the thorns he’d grown, the tattoo circling his bicep visible. Three lines, the one at the top thickest, the one in the middle marked through with tiny vertical dashes, the one on the bottom simple.
Solmir turned on his heel, walking into the wasteland again. “I’m glad you think it’s good,” he said. “I’m sure Redarys has more use for hers than I do for mine.”
Chapter Nine
Raffe
The Shrine gave him the shivers.
It always had, really. He’d never been much for religion—in most countries, day-to-day veneration was more for folk heroes and figures of local legend, faith on a smaller and more personal scale. If you weren’t an Order priestess—or an unluckily fertile Valleydan queen—your dealings with the Kings were few. One might light a red candle a couple times a year, and you’d be married in white and buried in black, but the religion that had sprung up around the Five Kings wasn’t one that required much of its penitents.
Raffe very much wished he could go back to that kind of distance.
He stood in the second room of the Shrine like one might stand at the edge of a cliff, hands held stiff by his sides, shoulders tense. The note from Red that Fife had delivered dangled from his fingers, so many words to tell him there was still no news, still no sign of Neve, still nothing. Another day passed with the Queen of Valleyda missing, and he was the only one who knew.
Well. Him and Kayu.
“Shit,” he muttered, crumpling Red’s letter in his hand.
The broken branches in the Shrine’s second room looked a little worse for wear after Neve’s campaign against them, but not by much. A little more crooked, a little more withered, but they stood strong in their stone bases, and though there were bloodstains on the floor, there were none on the bark.
Not that the Shrine was even necessary anymore, not really. Hardly anyone but the priestesses came to pray, and all of them were in the Rylt, either sent there by Neve or by him. He didn’t know if it was the same in other Shrines in other kingdoms, but Valleyda had always been the most pious. Their religion was dying a slow death.
Now that Raffe knew what the Kings were, that the whole thing was built on lies and half-truths and power, being in the Shrine at all made him feel slightly ill.
Raffe didn’t know why he was here, really. He’d searched the Shrine already, every inch of it, trying to see if there was some clue they’d missed, some leaving of Neve’s strange experiments that might reveal the way to save her.