A moment, a breath. She was standing very close.
He couldn’t afford to get them all to the Rylt on his own. And trying to bring Kiri back here would be both too visible and too dangerous—he didn’t want that woman anywhere near Valleyda. Not to mention the complications of bringing Red and Eammon to the capital. It would be nigh impossible to hide what they were, now that they barely looked human. Maybe he could cook up some kind of explanation, give a half-truth, but it would be strained, and he couldn’t stanch the gossip.
He didn’t have any other options, and it almost felt like a relief.
“Fine,” Raffe said, low and dark. “But if any of this gets out, I’ll know exactly who is to blame. And I will not go easy.”
“I would never expect you to,” she said coolly.
And there they stood, too close and too heated, until the tension in the room was broken by the earth shaking.
The quake came out of nowhere. A pitch, a slide, a rumbling in the floor that sent them careening against each other and then to the ground. Instinctively, Raffe braced himself over Kayu, expecting falling rock and ruin.
But the rocks never came, as if the earthquake was centralized—focused on the pieces of sentinel trees. Around them, the stone walls groaned, but only the branch shards bent and twisted, like someone awakening from a long sleep. Shivers of color trembled over the white wood, gold and black, a dance of light and darkness that lasted only a blink.
Panicked, Raffe checked his palms, then grabbed Kayu’s and checked them, too. No blood, no tiny cuts that might’ve accidentally awakened the shards. This was different, something new—
As soon as it began, it stopped. No more groaning, and the floor was once again level, unmoving. They crouched on the ground, both tense and ready for another round, but the Shrine was still and silent.
A heartbeat. The very ends of the branches twitched, once, like dying hands. Then, with a crack, they all changed their shape.
Keys. They all looked like keys.
A blink, and they were just branches again, so quickly Raffe wondered if he’d imagined it. But next to him, Kayu’s eyes were wide, her mouth agape—she’d seen it, too.
“What in all the shadows was that?” she whispered.
“I don’t know.” Raffe sighed, shook his head. In for a sip, in for a pint. “But I know who will.”
Chapter Ten
Neve
After two days of walking—she assumed, at least, since they’d stopped to sleep twice, taking turns watching the unchanging horizon while the other dozed fitfully far enough away for the comfort of the other—the landscape up ahead finally changed. Neve was embarrassed by the way her heart leapt to see something other than flat, cracked ground.
It looked like a mountain range, cragged and rough, a darker shade of charcoal against the ash-colored glow of the sky. The range stretched from side to side, like the curve of a bowl’s edge, and seemed to grow larger as they walked closer, the only marker of time or distance she’d noticed since they left the inverted forest.
Solmir stayed a few yards ahead of her, but she didn’t have to raise her voice to be heard. The silence of a dead world made sure her words carried. “How big are the Shadowlands?”
“Big enough,” he answered, without turning around.
“And was it always like… this? Even before it started breaking apart?” The ground had stayed steady since the huge quake that shook magic from the depths of the earth, but Neve still stepped cautiously, prepared for the world to lurch at any moment.
“It’s never been exactly vibrant,” Solmir said drily, “but when the Old Ones first came here, with all their lesser-beast children, it wasn’t quite so dead.” His hand cut backward in the direction they’d come, then forward, toward the mountain range. “The whole of the Shadowlands is hemmed in by forest—the borders of the Wilderwood, though the exact measurements of the edges obviously don’t match up—but the Old Ones shaped it as they wished. They each made their own territories here. The Serpent underground, the Weaver in the forests, the Dragon out past the Endless Sea, where the Leviathan lives. They fought against each other, took territories over, lost others. Treated it mostly like they treated the surface, just without humans getting in the way.” He shrugged, dropped his hand. “It’s never been pleasant. But it’s been more than this.”
She couldn’t decide if the world he described sounded better or worse than the one they walked, but something else he’d said stuck out to her even more than the slapdash geography lesson. “The lesser beasts are the Old Ones’ children?”