“What is that?”
A flinch; he hadn’t seen her looking. Solmir’s hand closed around the wood, as if he’d hide it from view, but then he opened his fingers on a sigh. “It’s not finished,” he hedged. “And it’s not very good.”
“Horseshit. Let me see.”
“Such a mouth for a queen,” he muttered, dropping the wood into her palm. Neve turned it over.
A night sky. He’d carved a night sky, a moon and scattered stars.
He shrugged again, looking out over the gray horizon instead of at her. “I didn’t realize how much I missed the sky until I saw it again.”
She rubbed her thumb over the whorls of stars, along the dip of the crescent moon. “I miss it, too,” she murmured.
“Keep it.”
“No.” She turned to him, holding out the carving. “You said it wasn’t finished.” A smirk picked up her mouth. “An unfinished carving is hardly a gift fit for a queen. Give it to me when it’s done.”
“Assuming I have time to finish it before the Shadowlands collapse.”
“You will.” She said it like a command.
They looked at each other, half anxious and half confused and wholly trying to hide both feelings. Then Neve turned back to the horizon to see where all her climbing had taken her.
They sat on a shelf of bone, the vertebrae of some impossibly large thing, pockmarked and shining white in the gray-scale dimness. Behind them, a gigantic skull, the eye sockets big enough to drive a carriage through. It took her a moment to comprehend its shape, blown into such epic proportions, but there was the long snout, ending right before the vertebrae on which she stood, and the remnants of fang-like teeth below it.
A wolf. A giant wolf.
“Another dead Old One?” She sounded so polite, though her eyes felt as if they were going to fall out of her head.
“The Wolf.” Solmir stood up, went to kick the toe of his boot against one of the oversize teeth. “The real one. Ciaran killed one of its whelps. That’s how he got his evocative nickname.”
Ciaran. The first Wolf of the Wilderwood. Even knowing that the monster of legend was technically her sister’s father-in-law, hearing him spoken of like a peer still made her thoughts stutter.
Solmir looked at the wolf skull with only vague interest, but there was something in his eyes that said his mind was turned toward the same story hers was.
“You’re the villain in that one, you know.” She said it lightly. “The tale of Ciaran and Gaya.”
Another kick against a giant tooth. “Every story needs one.”
“Having become a villain myself, I assume there’s more to that particular story.”
One knife-slash brow raised as Solmir turned to face her. “Do you consider yourself a villain?”
It’d been a jibe, not an invitation for scrutiny. Neve shifted uncomfortably, tugged at the loose thread on the hem of her tattered sleeve. “I’m sure Red does.”
“I think Redarys’s feelings about you are a bit more complicated than that.” His finger twisted at the silver ring on his thumb. “You were trying to save her, after all.”
“When she didn’t need to be saved,” Neve murmured. “When she told me to let her go. If I’d just listened…”
She trailed off, not needing to finish the thought. If she’d just listened, she wouldn’t be here. If she’d just listened, the cosmic question of the Kings and their souls and the Shadowlands and the Wilderwood could’ve been left for someone else to deal with.
“It takes more than not listening to make a villain,” Solmir said. “With the caveat that I’m not an expert on the subject, having left most of my humanity behind long ago, that sounds mostly like human nature. We’re rather predisposed to think we’re always in the right.”
Neve made a rueful sound. “What about you, then? Were you actually the villain?”
He crossed his arms, staring out into the gray sky. “It’s a more complicated story than you’ve probably heard. But yes, I was undoubtedly Gaya’s villain.”
She didn’t ask him to elaborate. But she did give him one arched brow, similar to the expression he turned on her when he wanted an explanation.
Solmir took the hint. He pulled in his knees, rested his forearms on them. Making himself smaller, almost subconsciously, before starting the tale that she’d heard so many times before.
“Gaya and I had been betrothed since we were children. I didn’t ever imagine a life that didn’t have us together. I assumed she didn’t, either.” A rueful noise. “I was wrong.