She didn’t know how to respond to that. So she didn’t.
For a moment, it seemed like Solmir would leave it at that, leave the explanation bare and unadorned. But then he closed his eyes, opened them. Sighed. “You’re easy to care for, unfortunately,” he said. “You’re strong. You’re good.”
“I’m not good.” Neve nearly snarled it. “And I had to be strong. You made it so I had to be strong.”
“I did,” he said quietly. “So all your hatred is warranted.”
Something certainly burned in her middle, an alchemy of emotion that made her want to hunch over. But she couldn’t tell if it was hatred, warranted or not.
Solmir tugged all that long hair over one shoulder and started twisting it into a smoke-colored braid. When it was done, he let it drop onto his chest. “I didn’t kill Arick, there at the end.”
“Is that supposed to exonerate you?”
“Nothing can exonerate me. I know that.”
All that not-quite-hatred in her middle coiled tighter.
“If my plan had worked—if I had been able to bring the others through, destroy them—I would’ve let Arick go,” Solmir continued. “It was Red who killed him. To close the door.”
She and Red, both with blood on their hands. It should’ve been a surprise, but instead it was just another thread in their tragedy. All Neve could manage to do was nod.
They sat there a moment in silence, neither looking at the other. “Tell me about being a King,” Neve said finally. “When you were human.” She didn’t want to talk about herself anymore, whether she was good or strong. Better to hear about him, to learn what she could while she was trapped here with Solmir as her only way home.
Solmir tugged on his hasty braid, lips pressed together in thought. “Alpera wasn’t much, back then. Centuries ago, I’ve stopped trying to count how many. Just a handful of people in the snow, surviving. Holding out against the Oracle.”
The Old One they were going to next. The hair on the back of Neve’s neck prickled as she thought of the Serpent’s last confession, land laid to waste and water poisoned. “What did it do?”
“The Oracle isn’t like the others.” Solmir picked up the whittled wood he’d laid aside, twisted it in his hand. It was starting to take shape, though Neve couldn’t quite tell what it was supposed to be yet. “Monstrous, but in a subtle way. The Old Ones weren’t really the kinds of gods that garnered worship, but the Oracle did—peddling truth in exchange for sacrifice.” He swallowed. “Worshipping the Oracle always ended in letting it devour you.”
“Wonderful thing to find out right before we pay it a visit.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem.” His voice was dark, not trying for any kind of levity. “In fact, I can’t wait to kill the thing.”
With that, he stood, pushing his carving knife and the piece of wood back into his boot. Neve swung his coat over her shoulders again, patting the pocket to make sure the god-bone was there. It was a comforting weight against her hip.
“How much farther is it?” she asked as she slid into her borrowed boots.
Squinting, Solmir raised his hand, pointer finger leveled at the bone-mountains in the distance. It wavered in the air for a moment before he settled it over one particular shape—more rounded, with a jutting promontory that extended level to the ground. “There,” he said, letting his hand drop. “That’s where we need to go to find the Oracle.”
“Looks like quite the walk.”
“Looks farther than it is.” He started forward, long legs eating gray ground. “And it’s not the walk you should be worried about. It’s the climb.”
Chapter Fourteen
Neve
He was not being facetious.
The walk to the mountains was surprisingly easy. The ground was flat, making the distance look simultaneously closer and farther than it really was, and for once the earth stayed still. Being in the Shadowlands meant they didn’t need food or water, so they didn’t have to stop, and despite walking untold miles, Neve barely felt it in her muscles. It should’ve been disturbing, maybe—this reminder that, here, she wasn’t necessarily alive, at least not in the sense she was used to—but mostly, it was convenient.
Until they got to the edge of the range.
What had seemed like the smooth side of a hill was ridged and spurred with bone up close. Had there been a sun, this would’ve blocked it out, a huge shelf of piled ivory that looked somehow precarious, despite its size and age. She couldn’t shake the memory of what they’d seen on the way to the Serpent, the huge piece of mountain tumbling down to the ground in a cloud of bone dust.