She stretched out the hand not holding the shard of god-bone, stopping when warm scales met her palm, dry and rasping against her skin. Neve sensed a great bulk before her, a creature whose size would make her mind scramble, and was thankful for the darkness that hid it from view.
The Serpent sighed again, a massive sound that reverberated in the dark and in her mind. I was not kind, it said, in tones that recalled neither confession nor rebuttal. Just a statement of fact. I crawled from the sea to the land with the intention of ending worlds. Sometimes, I did. A city is a world, to some. A village. Something like a rueful laugh, stretched to strange in a god’s mind. I made waters undrinkable, land barren, poisoned whole stretches of earth.
“What did they call you?” It seemed like the right question to ask. Neve felt strange taking the life of something without asking its name.
Many things. The Serpent settled, a rumble in the dark. The World Serpent is the one that will come most easily to your tongue.
“World Serpent,” Neve repeated. She steadied the bone in her hand. “I hope you… I hope you rest well.”
Anything will be an improvement, the god replied. Then, almost an afterthought: None of your decisions will be easy, Shadow Queen, but I will tell you this: The Kings would be worse than we ever were. Humanity breeds cruelty in ways my kind does not understand.
“We’ll stop them,” she murmured, not realizing until it left her mouth that she’d said we.
One way or another. One last sigh, wind rippling through the cavern. Now make it quick.
The beat of its massive heart thrummed through its scales. Neve’s palms were cold against them. She closed her eyes.
Then Neve lifted the bone and plunged the sharp end into the Serpent’s side.
It didn’t take all that long, the dying of a god. The massive shape she couldn’t see jerked, displacing cold air; she stepped backward to avoid being flung aside. Another heave, the movement sending skitters of rock across the toes of her boots, making the atmosphere shudder.
And as magic began to seep out of its body, first in a trickle, then a torrent, Neve lifted her hands.
Chapter Twelve
Red
Raffe’s here.”
Red’s head jerked up from the book she’d been reading, fast enough to set a crick into her neck. “Raffe?”
Lyra leaned against the doorjamb of the library. Her arms crossed over her gown, a deep green that set off the golden flecks in her dark eyes. “He brought a guest, too.”
That made Red’s brow climb, her head swing to Eammon. He sat beside her, slouched behind a stack of heretofore-useless books, face tired and hair mussed. They’d been here for nearly the whole of the four days since the clearing, searching volume by volume through everything in the library. So far, they’d found nothing.
Still, Eammon pored endlessly over his books until his eyes drooped, and she often had to prod him awake to get him to come upstairs and sleep in their bed instead of slumped over the table.
But most nights, she waited. And when he was asleep, Red picked up the books he’d discarded as useless and kept looking for more mentions of voices in dreams.
She’d told him most of her strange dream, of course. The fog, the blood-warm apple, the Heart Tree, that there’d been a voice that spoke in cryptic loops. But she kept it vague, didn’t tell him everything about the voice itself. Didn’t tell him how familiar it felt, how personal.
That was part of it, somehow. She could tell, with the deep resonance of an unquestioned truth—whatever had to happen in order to save Neve would be personal, would reach into her in a way Eammon ultimately couldn’t help with.
She knew he’d hate that, so she kept it to herself.
Red’s hand stole into her pocket, to the key she kept there. Eammon didn’t like looking at it, had only given it one cursory glance when she first showed it to him. But Red carried it everywhere, tracing her fingers over it like it was a worry stone, twisting it in her palm. It felt like a tangible link to Neve, the only thing she had to hold on to.
The Wolf closed his book, brows drawn low. His eyes flickered to Red’s, a question—she shrugged. There hadn’t been anything in her note that would’ve made Raffe think he needed to come here, at least not that she could figure. Especially when they all agreed it was best to try to keep the Wilderwood out of Valleyda’s collective thoughts as much as possible right now.
Eammon stood, shoving a piece of scrap paper into the spine of his book to keep his place. “Won’t do to keep them waiting.” A weary hand rubbed over his mouth. “Why in all the shadows would he bring someone else into all this?”