Silence from Solmir. Neve didn’t look at him, staring out instead over the gray horizon. The desert seemed to end, somewhere out there, becoming a gray gleam that reflected the light instead of dry ground that ate it.
“Would you like me to give you more reasons to hate me?” Solmir asked.
He could do it, she knew. He had eons’ worth of material.
But it wouldn’t change anything.
Neve shook her head.
Solmir’s mouth twisted wryly, though the look in his eyes was far from amused. “Give it time.” He reached into his boot and pulled out something gleaming. The god-bone. He held it out but didn’t look at her.
Neve took it. Slipped it into the pocket of her coat.
Another rumble. They both marked it—tightening shoulders, stiffened backs—but they didn’t mention it, and neither of them made a motion to move.
“What about you?” Neve turned to look at him, tearing her eyes away from all that gray emptiness stretched out before them. “The Oracle got in your head. Something about the past. About Gaya.”
She tried to keep the extent of her curiosity out of her tone.
Something in his face shuttered, closed off. He stopped twisting the ring around his thumb and instead sat perfectly still and perfectly silent.
A heartbeat. Two. Neve flushed, looked away. “If you don’t—”
“Do you want to know the real story of me and the Second Daughter and the Wolf?” His voice was clipped, devoid of feeling. “Of how I found the Heart Tree the first time?”
“Yes,” she said softly. “Tell me the true story.”
He didn’t move. But a breath shuddered out of him, long and slightly shaky. “When the other Kings and I had been here for centuries,” he said, still in that expressionless tone, “we approached the Oracle to see if there was a way for us to get out, since we all still had souls back then. A way that wasn’t open to the Old Ones. It said there was.” A sharp sound, not a laugh. “A door that could be opened by matched love.”
Neve pulled her knees toward her chest, a sudden chill raising gooseflesh on her arms.
“I was the only one of us who had any chance at that, slim though it was,” Solmir spat. “The Oracle told me that if I walked along the edge of the mountains, I would find the Tree, hidden in a place I knew well. It said that by the time I got there, the one I loved would be reaching for me.” He swallowed, like he was trying to drown the small measure of emotion that wanted to creep into his voice. “I was elated. The thought that Gaya would try to save me, that she might believe I’d been forced to come with the others when they came to tear the magic back out of the Wilderwood—it kept me from asking what kind of strings might be attached.”
“What happened?” Neve breathed.
He shrugged, sharp and jerky. “I walked. I walked along the edge of the mountains, down where it meets the marshes. I walked for what felt like weeks, and then I arrived at the place I knew well.” A derisive snort. “A castle. Upside down. It looked almost exactly like Valchior’s on the surface, where Gaya and I had met. Something about all the magic he did there made a reflection of it form in the Shadowlands.”
The idea of something known so well being inverted like that unsettled her. Neve pulled her knees in tighter.
“And the Oracle was right,” he continued. “The Tree was there. Churning roots, shadows. And a hand, reaching through. Hers.” His fingers twitched, as if even now they wanted to reach for that phantom, remembered hand. “I got there just in time to watch it spasm as she died. The Wilderwood she’d knotted herself into, for Ciaran, slaughtering her to save itself. The door closed before I could try to get through.” He rubbed at the scars on his brow. “After that, I broke with the other Kings. Stopped pulling magic from the Shadowlands, mostly stopped using it at all. Went to the edges, where the tower is, the forest. Watched this underworld grow unstable and start to dissolve as Valchior and the others sank further and further into it, their souls miring in magic until they couldn’t be extracted. I stayed at the end of the world, and I waited.”
“Waited for Arick,” Neve said. “Waited for someone to be foolish enough to try bargaining with a shadow-infected tree.”
“I didn’t really know what I was waiting for. I just took what I could get.” Finally, his eyes turned to hers, vivid against the gray sky. “You know something about that.”
Neve sank her teeth into her lip.