There was no night here. The not-sky was the same dim gray, no change in the monotonous horizon. But still, when Neve could barely keep her eyes open and grew unsteady on her feet, Solmir had insisted they stop at an outcropping of stones—real stone this time, not soldered-together bone. Neve had been asleep nearly as soon as she stopped walking, the fatigue of carrying a god’s power and then releasing it so draining that such vulnerability didn’t seem something to worry over. She knew Solmir would watch her back.
At some point, against all her better judgment, she’d started to trust him.
Valchior’s words, whispered in the dark. He’ll burn you in the end.
Not if I burn him first, Neve thought, a rebuttal to a memory. But it sounded hollow, even inside her own head.
Solmir’s sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, revealing muscled forearms as he carved. The rips in his sleeves gaped around the band of the tattoo circling his bicep.
“What’s that on your arm?” Neve drew her knees in toward her chest. She might be awake, but she wasn’t ready to start walking again just yet. And she was curious.
“Clan tattoo,” he said, clipped. “Old Alperan custom. They needled it into me when I became king.” He gestured to his arm with the knife, pointing at each band in turn. “Thick one is for the people. The one with all the lines is for the king before me—some uncle, I suppose, I didn’t really know the man before Elkyrathi assassins gutted him. And the thin one is for me. The least important part of the whole equation.”
He went back to his whittling. Neve bit her lip.
Here was another spit of common ground between them, unwelcome and unable to be ignored. The mantle of rulership, how it gave you power while stripping you of personhood. Especially when it wasn’t really something you wanted.
Neve had been raised knowing she would someday be Queen. The fact hadn’t held any sort of emotional weight; it was just what would happen, her inevitable trajectory. And once she did become Queen, she didn’t view the position as anything more than the means to an end. The circumstance of Red’s birth had condemned her to be sacrificed to the woods, and Neve resolved to use the circumstance of her own to save her. Queendom was something that had happened to her, not something she’d sought out.
Solmir was the only person to talk to here, but he was also one of the few people who would understand that.
She tucked her chin against her knees. “When my mother betrothed me to Arick, she didn’t even tell me before the announcement.”
The soft snick of Solmir’s knife against the wood stopped. “That’s less than ideal.”
“Quite.” Neve snorted. “It was… embarrassing, to be honest. He was so clearly in love with Red.”
“Hmm.” The sound of knife against wood grain picked back up, but slowly. Giving her space to talk about the man he’d inadvertently murdered.
But Neve didn’t think about that. Not right now. “I think that’s when I realized how little it mattered,” she said quietly. “The title, the power… you’re just somewhere for it to rest. The wheel of the kingdom keeps turning, whether you sit on the throne or someone else does.”
Solmir set down his knife and the piece of wood, looking out over the gray horizon. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “you would’ve been an excellent queen, in other circumstances.”
“I doubt it, to be honest. Though it probably would’ve been easier without you taking the form of my betrothed and twisting my desire to save my sister to your own ends.” It could’ve come out poisonous. Instead, Neve just sounded tired. Anger was a hard thing to sustain, even righteous as it was.
“Can’t argue there.” Solmir rubbed at his scars again.
She gnawed on her lip, pulling her knees tighter, a physical rendering of the anxious knot her stomach had become. When she finally managed to ask the question, it was quiet. “Why did you act like you cared, when you were him?”
He froze. Stared down at his hands as if they were alien things. Solmir’s brows knit, then his eyes closed, then the bitter line of his mouth pressed thin and tight. “At first, it was because I thought that was the part I needed to play.”
It ached to hear, even though she’d known it. Part of her was glad that at least he wasn’t lying. At least they’d arrived somewhere near honesty.
“He was your betrothed, and I didn’t know what kind of relationship you had. Even though he’d bargained with me to save your sister. But then…” Another tightening of the mouth, his hands knotting self-consciously into fists, and the next words sounded like he had to force them out. “Then I acted like I cared because I fucking did.”