Solmir stood in one fluid motion, wincing. Another shake moved through the ground, clattering bones. “We need to go.”
“What makes you think I can open the Tree?” Neve asked, still sitting. She looked up at him, worry in her furrowed brow. “What if Red isn’t reaching at the same time?”
“We’ll figure it out when we get there. There might be a way to communicate with her through it.”
“And what if the same thing happens?” Now that her worries had been given a voice, they wouldn’t leave her alone. “The same thing that happened to Gaya? What if Red—”
“It won’t,” he cut in quickly, keeping her from finishing the awful thought. She shouldn’t be grateful for it.
“How do you know?”
“Because your love is matched.” He grasped her elbow and pulled her up to stand. “Mine and Gaya’s wasn’t.”
He kept talking about the love between her and Red as some foregone conclusion, a fixed and unchanging thing. But Neve thought of the betrayed look in her sister’s eyes as the sentinels in the Shrine collapsed, the distance they’d held between them. What if she’d wrecked it? What if she’d become something unworthy of her sister’s love, and Red had cut it loose?
She wouldn’t blame her if she had. Neve’s sins stacked up too high to climb over.
“How can you be sure?” she whispered.
The look on his face made it seem like Solmir could read her anxieties in her eyes. The line of his jaw softened beneath his beard, the furrow in his brow smoothed. His hand half raised to her, sparking with silver, then dropped by his side as he turned away and started to walk. “The two of you have overturned worlds for each other, Neverah. It’s hard to get more matched than that.”
They walked until they ran into another pile of bones.
A few heaps of rubble from the mountain’s collapse had blocked their way already, but they were easy enough to climb or skirt around. This one, however, was not. Upon a closer look, it seemed like one massive bone rather than a pile of them, smooth and strangely jointed, stretching from the larger mound of shards that had made the mountain out toward the shining line of the horizon.
Solmir approached the bone and rubbed his hand over it, trying to find a foothold. Then he stepped back, crossing his arms. “Well,” he said conversationally, “shit.”
Neve had to squint to peer up to the top of the bone. “Can we go around?”
“Not without ending up in the marshes.”
“Is that bad?”
“The marshes were the Rat’s territory,” Solmir said. “And the Roach. Their children are hard to kill.”
So they were probably still around. Neve grimaced.
With a kick at the bone, like it had personally offended him, Solmir pivoted, stalking down its length. “But it looks like we don’t have much choice. Stick close.”
Chapter Nineteen
Neve
Maybe an hour of walking later—still next to the massive bone—the landscape finally started to change.
First, there were trees. Nothing like the white, inverted trunks at the edge of the Shadowlands, but small and needlelike, spearing upward and laced with thin leaves that looked more like thorns. Then the ground changed, going from cracked and dry to almost muddy, pocked with pools of shining black water.
It was just as desolate as the desert had been, with no places for anything to hide. Still, disquiet prickled over the back of Neve’s neck.
“The Rat and the Roach,” she muttered to herself, picking her boot up from the marshy ground. It took effort; the dark mud sucked at her soles. “Of course there would be a giant rat and a giant roach.”
“It is the underworld,” Solmir said quietly from up ahead. “And technically, it’s only their lesser-beast children who are left.” He turned her way, face stern. “But keep your voice down. We don’t want anything to know we’re here.”
Sound advice. Neve pressed her lips shut.
“And from here on out, watch where you put your feet.” He twisted on his heel and placed his boot very deliberately, a test before he stepped with his whole weight. “The ground here gives way easily, and the Rat’s children like tunnels.”
“Ew.”
“Precisely.”
The jagged end of the massive bone was finally in sight, thrust out into the air above their heads. The sight of it drew a relieved sag into Solmir’s shoulders. “Once we get to the end, we turn around,” he murmured. “We’ll be safer near the mountains.”