Now Neve was focused. Controlled. He wouldn’t have this magic until she decided to give it to him.
His brows drew down farther, but Solmir didn’t say anything. After a moment, he dropped her hand.
“It feels so different,” she murmured. Neve looked down at her wrists, twisted them gently back and forth to admire her thorns. There was a delicate beauty to them, for all their sharpness.
“It is different.” An emotion she couldn’t name wavered beneath the surface of his voice. “The Serpent let you kill it, but you still did the deed yourself. Power you gain through your own actions sits differently than power that’s given.”
Didn’t she know it. How power conferred by nothing but name or title was never truly yours alone, always tugged at and picked apart by those who bestowed it. How power could be nothing but the strings that held you up; maybe it hiked you higher than others, but you were still a puppet.
All Solmir’s vitriol against the other Kings made sense, given that framework. Especially now that she knew Calyres was his father, that he’d had less of a choice here than she’d always thought.
Odd, how much more she seemed to understand him with all this shadowed god-magic coursing through her.
Neve cocked her head. She felt loose and strung thin, the weave of her made threadbare by the magic she carried. “You didn’t tell me Calryes is your father.”
His expression shuttered, all that worry choking itself out, becoming hard angles and arrogance. “I wasn’t under the impression you were interested in my family history.”
“I am if your family history is going to interfere with me getting home.”
“I’ve wanted to kill the Kings for longer than you’ve been alive, Neverah. The fact that one happens to be my father is inconsequential.” Solmir crossed his arms over his chest. “We have no warm feelings toward each other. As I’m sure was made clear earlier.”
Earlier, when he’d been shackled by shadows, tortured by them. Kept busy.
She hadn’t thought of Valchior as the Serpent’s power settled into her veins, but now her conversation with the King’s projection came to the forefront of her mind. He’d called her Shadow Queen. Said the Kings knew why she was here. Said they welcomed it.
None of it made sense to her. If the Kings knew she was here as part of Solmir’s plan to bring them into the true world, where they could be killed, why would they welcome that?
The Kings were playing a different game than Solmir was. Same pieces, disparate moves. And Neve was caught in the middle.
It made her decision easy: She’d keep what Valchior said to herself.
“It was made perfectly clear that you and your father are estranged.” She crossed her arms, too, mirroring Solmir’s closed-off stance, still inside the lip of the cairn. “But you should’ve told me. If we’re supposed to be working together, you should tell me everything.”
Different games, different pieces, different rules. Just because she’d decided to keep secrets didn’t mean she wouldn’t try to tear Solmir’s out.
Still, Neve had no expectations of sudden honesty. So when the former King slid his blue eyes away from hers, softened his crossed arms, and sighed, it was as much a surprise to her as it seemed to be to him. “I’m a bastard. Calryes slept with my mother when he visited the walled city that became Alpera. Didn’t know I was a result until later.”
So he was from Alpera. It made sense—he looked like ice and snow, smelled like pines.
“My mother was the third-born daughter of the king. But once Calryes found out he’d sired a son—one who could use magic—he had everyone in the way of me becoming the heir killed.”
“Including your mother?”
His voice became slightly quieter. Still clipped, but roughened. “Including my mother. And my two half brothers.”
It made something in her chest simultaneously numb and burning, that he’d lost his mother, too. That he’d lived through that grief, and then let it be inflicted on her.
“We weren’t close,” he said, almost like he could read her emotions in the air around them. “To phrase it more kindly than it deserves. She wanted to forget I existed. My older brothers were cruel, to me and to everyone else—they would’ve made terrible kings. So when I realized what Calryes was doing, I didn’t try to stop him.”
The numbness passed, became only burning—sympathy or anger or something in between. Neve didn’t know if she was comforted or horrified to know that she and her villain had so much in common.