“Two keys,” Bormain repeated. “Two halves of a whole, matched in power. A match in love is enough to open it, but not enough to make an end. Just because a door is open does not mean its threshold will be crossed, when there is shadow waiting.”
Red stood statue-still, scarcely daring to breathe, afraid any sudden movement might break the spell that gave them these answers, cryptic as they were. She recognized this, remembered it from the day she and Eammon had healed Bormain. Channeling messages from the Shadowlands, language from the magic that had roosted in him when he fell through the breach. But his voice didn’t sound malicious this time. It sounded almost weary.
“The door is you.” Bormain swayed slightly on his feet, eyes fixed to the carving. “You are the door.”
A beat of vast silence, all of them staring at this shadow-touched man and the shadow-touched carving.
The rumble under the ground was subtle. Welling up from the dirt like a buried heartbeat, reverberating in Red’s heels, up through her legs, rattling her bones and the forest held within them.
A tiny earthquake, there and then gone. Barely enough to mark. But to Red it seemed significant. Like something cataclysmic happening somewhere else, though she felt only the echo.
Whatever had seized Bormain let him go as abruptly as it’d come, his eyes clearing, his face rearranging itself into that sheepish half smile. He ran a hand through his pale hair. “Sorry, got lost in the clouds for a minute there.” His mouth slowly fell from half smile to confused line, brow furrowing as he took in their stares. “Did something happen?”
“You could say that,” Fife murmured.
Kayu, true to form, recovered from the strangeness more quickly than the rest of them. She gestured to the carving and the two flanking it. “These other markings… are they astrological? They look like constellations.”
“They are.” Valdrek spoke with forced good nature, trying to dispel the tightly coiled tension in the air. He tapped a finger on the carving that looked like the Sisters, oblivious to the shadow-touched wood that repelled Red, Eammon, and Fife. “This one is the Sisters. And that one, on the other side, is the Far-Flung Queen.”
“In Nioh, we call the first one the Sun-Handed and the Moon-Handed,” Kayu said. “And the other one the Blood-Handed. The story is that two rival queens harnessed the power of the sun and the moon, but the two powers were so balanced, they canceled each other out, and neither one of them could conquer the other. The Blood-Handed was another queen of a smaller territory, and she took over the other two queens’ countries without a fight after they both disappeared.” Her lip curled as she lifted a delicate shoulder in a shrug. “I assume the title was meant to be ironic.”
“Our ancestors had a similar story, but different names, though the direct translations don’t necessarily trip off the tongue or make much sense.” Valdrek moved his pointing finger to the carving on the right, the one Red had always known as the Far-Flung Queen. “This one is the Third Daughter,” Valdrek said. The ring-scabbed finger moved to the Sisters. “And they called these two the Golden-Veined and the Shadow Queen.”
Chapter Eighteen
Neve
Darkness was a thing she’d grown used to in recent months. Neve seemed to spend most of her time in it—in the gloom of the Shrine, bleeding on branches in an attempt to bring her sister home. Pacing in her room, unable to quiet her mind enough for sleep. And now, in the Shadowlands, not dark like she was used to but their own kind of flat, blank emptiness, all shades of gray.
She wasn’t used to darkness feeling restful.
There was pain. Sharp in her knee, a dull ache everywhere else. With a distant sort of clarity, Neve knew she teetered on the edge of consciousness, and the circumstances that had brought her there filled themselves in slowly.
The Oracle, an awful god in an awful bone-filled cave. Solmir, slicing its throat, taking its power. The mountain collapsing, all those fused-together bones finally breaking apart without the god to hold them together.
The way the Oracle had cut right through to the careful knot Neve had made of her emotions and unraveled it in an instant. Unspooled her soul like so much ragged thread.
A soft moan escaped her mouth, not just from physical pain. It was enough to jerk her from that wavering precipice of unconsciousness, ground her fully in her bruised body. Neve curled around her middle, eyes squeezed tightly shut.
“Neve?”
Solmir. He didn’t touch her, but she felt the way his hand hovered just above her shoulder, a slight disturbance in the cold, empty air. “Are you hurt?”