“The possibility of having a son ruling the land to Elkyrath’s immediate north was valuable enough to him to employ his famed assassins,” Solmir continued. “So yes, Calryes is my father, and the reason I’m one of the Five Kings. It wasn’t exactly my idea.”
The notion of Solmir being bullied into anything, even being a King, seemed utterly at odds with the man who stood before her now. But Neve knew about that, too. How family could crumble you, even when nothing else could.
So she wrenched her thoughts away from family. Refused to dwell on how the wounds in her and the wounds in him reflected each other, matching points of pain.
“It’s still so strange to me, to think of people just… born able to do magic.” Neve leaned against the cairn wall, tipped her head back to study the stone ceiling. It was almost comfortable to speak to Solmir like this, him in the light and her in the dark. “The world was so different.”
“So much worse,” Solmir muttered. He mimicked her, leaning his shoulder against the wall on the outside of the cairn. If the rock hadn’t been between them, their shoulders would’ve touched. “No good came of magic being loose, uncontained. There was no moral test to determine who could wield it and who couldn’t, and most people are terrible.”
“That reveals a rather bleak view of humanity.”
“I include myself in the assessment.” He slanted those blue eyes her way. “Are you saying you disagree?”
“That’s a trap.”
“Such a clever little queen.”
Neve worried her dry, chapped lip between her teeth. “Some people are good,” she murmured quietly. She thought of Raffe, steady and sure and kind. Of Red, who would probably never think of herself in such a way, but who loved so fiercely, so intensely that she was willing to walk into the Wilderwood in order to keep everyone safe. “I’ll admit that I haven’t met many of them, but I have to believe that people—most people—are good.”
Solmir was quiet for a moment. She couldn’t see his face, but she saw the way his body shifted, as he looked away from the cairn and out at the gray landscape. “For someone who has seen all the lies behind belief, you have a great capacity for faith, Neverah.”
Idly, Neve pressed the pad of her finger against one of her thorns. A prick, a warm well of blood, crimson leached to charcoal in the monotone of the underworld. Already, she could feel the magic settling in, trying to make a more permanent home of her. Trying to anchor her to the Shadowlands, make these changes permanent. Make her something that couldn’t go home.
With a sigh, Neve pushed off the wall and stalked out into the flat gray light of a sunless land, thorn-wreathed hands rising before her. “Let’s get this over with, then.”
No kiss this time. Even a bruising, cruel kiss like the one they’d shared to transfer power before felt like too much closeness right now, with the strands of history strung between them, the ghosts of understanding hanging close.
He’d killed Arick. He’d hurt Red. He would’ve killed Red’s Wolf, and though Neve certainly had no love lost for the monster who’d married her sister, one more grudge to stack up against Solmir was a good thing to have.
She couldn’t forget who he was, no matter their similarities. No matter how the longer she spent with him, the less like a complete villain he seemed. He was a former King, a fallen god. A means to an end.
So Neve put her hands on either side of Solmir’s face, pressed all those thorns against his sharp angles, and let the magic of the Serpent go.
It left as easily as it had come, sliding out of her and into Solmir, though it took longer than it would have if she’d kissed him. The thorns on her wrists shrank as his eyes blackened, the veins in her arms paled as his darkened. The changes flickered, not permanent, only flashes as Solmir took the magic and stored it away, a vessel for power. He shuddered between her palms.
When all the magic had been drained from her, Neve dropped her hands. Solmir stayed with his head bowed, shivering a little before opening his eyes to hers. “I half believed you were going to keep it.”
He said it like he knew, like he’d mapped her thoughts on her face. Neve was less and less concerned with the changes this power wrought in her. Less and less concerned with what it might mean for her soul. It’d be so easy to keep the magic, keep the control it offered. To let herself become part of this dead world, mighty and untouchable, damn the consequences.
But Neve had a life waiting. People waiting, people the man before her had hurt. Who he’d hurt again, if he had to.