“No.” Barely sound, more a breath into her ear.
“Then can you take it?”
Slowly, Solmir shook his head. “It’s already claimed.”
Cold shot from Neve’s sternum, down through her middle. A numbing kind of fear.
The wall of darkness stood, impenetrable, pressed close. Then, in the darkness, a glint of white.
Teeth.
Teeth in the shadows, sharp and elongated, a hundred maws filled with fangs. At first, they just hung there, but then they all dropped open and spoke.
“The prodigal.”
A voice from everywhere and nowhere, layered and discordant. It took everything in Neve not to clap her hands over her ears. She tightened her grip on the god-bone in her other hand, wondering if it would work against something incorporeal.
All the teeth clicked together, a tandem fanged smile, before speaking in sync again. “Solmir, boy, we’ve been waiting for you. Welcome home.”
“Calryes,” Solmir breathed. Fear gleamed in his blue eyes, in his blanched face, and a terrified former god was the most terrifying thing Neve had ever seen.
But he recovered. Schooled his expression to cold, to haughtiness and impassivity. Almost casually, he turned, his death grip on her wrist his only tell.
Solmir shot a bladed grin into the shadows. “Hello, Father.”
Chapter Eleven
Neve
A pause. Then a laugh, even louder and more horrible than the speaking of the hundreds of mouths had been, echoing and distorting in the dark.
Terror and incredulity warred in Neve’s mind, her fingers tightening around the god-bone until her knuckles felt like they might crack. Calryes? Father? The legends said nothing of this, nothing of Solmir being one of the other Kings’ sons, and though she couldn’t quite make sense of why the revelation felt so world-bending, it was enough to make her stomach knot.
If Valchior was the leader of the Five Kings, then Calryes was his right hand.
Which meant they were in deep shit.
“Son.” Calryes still spoke from hundreds of fanged shadow-mouths, but there was a denser space of darkness right in front of Solmir that appeared to be shifting, twisting into something new. “You’ve returned with a companion, I see. How interesting.”
Solmir moved incrementally forward, placing himself between the swiftly coalescing shadows and Neve. Not protective, necessarily, more like he wanted to hide her from view, keep the King, swiftly coming into shape, from seeing the whole of her.
In every other circumstance, Neve refused to cower. But now, behind Solmir, she let her head bow forward, let herself hide behind him. Some deep instinct told her this was not the time for queenly arrogance.
The darkness before Solmir slowly solidified. The essence of shadow remained, even as the darkness became a thin figure wearing a spiked crown. It shifted too much to settle on any one shape, was only the suggestion of a person.
The Kings couldn’t leave the Sanctum, the Seamstress had said—they were trapped there, anchored down by all the magic they’d pulled in, becoming part of the Shadowlands. But they could send projections of themselves. This wasn’t Calryes, it was merely a simulacrum.
That should have been more reassuring than it was.
“The little queen from the surface,” the King continued, shadows seeping around his edges like mist on a moor. He didn’t call her Shadow Queen, not like the Seamstress had, and for some reason that made relief run a cool finger down her spine. “And whatever for, Solmir?”
“Got lonely,” Solmir said.
Neve glared at the back of his head.
“Here’s hoping it works out better for you this time.” The words were sly. The shadows around Calryes’s vague shape shifted and coiled, vipers in a pit. “At least she came all the way through without dying. That’s an improvement.”
Solmir’s hand clenched into a fist by his side, so tight it nearly trembled.
Behind him, Neve ran through quick calculations in her head, plans she knit together and then discarded. Calryes had known they were going to the Serpent’s cairn, so it stood to reason he knew why: to harvest the dying god’s power, take it before the Kings could. Was he here to try to take it himself?
No—no, that didn’t make sense. If the Kings were trying to pull dying gods to the Sanctum, where they were physically trapped, that must mean they couldn’t absorb magic unless they were truly present. Which meant he wasn’t here to try to take the Serpent’s power—he was here to try to keep Neve and Solmir from taking it.
And even though he couldn’t physically touch them, the realization made her nerves spike.