“Yes.” That same shade of pain and regret lurked in his tone; he wasn’t quite able to mask it. “You’ll need your strength.”
Neve shrugged out of his coat, bunched it up into a makeshift pillow. “Don’t let me sleep too long. And wake me up if there are more monsters.”
“On my word, the only monster here you’ll need to worry about is me.”
She scoffed, turning her head back and forth to find a comfortable angle.
“What part of that strikes you as funny? That I’m a monster?” It wasn’t joking, not really. There was a chord to his voice that begged earnestness.
“Not that part,” Neve said, already half-asleep. “The part about me needing to worry about you.”
He didn’t respond. But his jaw tensed, and his arms tightened over his chest as he stared out over the dark water, a monster watching for other monsters.
Chapter Twenty-One
Neve
She woke to Solmir’s hand on her shoulder, though he took it away as soon as he saw the slits of her open eyes. “We need to move.”
Neve sat up, rubbing sleep from her face; immediately, she sensed the cause of his urgency. The ground was rumbling, bits of rock shaking loose of the cliffs to clatter onto the beach below. Ripples spread across the black water from the shoreline. Not a full quake, not yet, but enough of a reason to get going, and a reminder that their time was short.
They didn’t make a show of leaving. Solmir hurried across the beach, parallel to the cliffs and the edge of the sea, and Neve followed.
“How long will it take to get there?”
“Not long.” He looked over his shoulder toward the flat black water, mouth pressed thin and a calculating look in his eye. “Not if we take the ship.”
“The ship?”
But Solmir was already striding toward the shoreline, determination in his gait. “It takes magic to call,” he said, almost to himself. “But there should be enough.”
She remembered what they’d been told by the Seamstress, about needing the power of two gods to get to the Heart Tree. Solmir had used quite a bit of magic to kill the children of the Rat and the Roach, but he’d taken some in, too. And he still held all the power of the Serpent, of the Oracle.
Solmir waded purposefully into the shallows, bending to place his fingertips gently to the water’s surface. Closed eyes, furrowed brow, then darkness seeped down his veins, spreading from chest to elbow to wrist before finally flowing outward, ribboning into the water like blood from a wound.
The shadows were a deeper black than the sea; Neve could see them race from Solmir’s hand out toward the horizon.
“Will that let the Leviathan know we’re here?” she asked quietly. Telling the most powerful Old One left that they were near its kingdom didn’t seem like the best idea.
“The Leviathan might be powerful, but it’s not all-powerful.” Solmir straightened, taking his hands from the water. “It keeps to the deep, and the Bone Ship always makes itself from things on the surface.”
“Makes itself?”
He gestured to the sea.
Something pale raced across the water toward the horizon line. Many somethings—ripples wavered from multiple directions as shapes Neve couldn’t identify skimmed over the surface of the sea, called from far-away shorelines to the center of the black ocean. In the distance, the shapes came together, cobbling themselves into something large and gleaming.
Something like a ship.
It crept toward them, slow and stately across the water. The closer it got, the easier it was to make out.
A ship, yes. But a ship made entirely out of bones. Smaller and more delicate than the massive things that formed the mountain range where the Oracle had made its home, fused together in graceful shapes to make something at once beautiful and macabre. The only thing not made entirely of bone were the sails—those appeared to be pieces of huge, scaled hide, still glistening with water, as if the skin had been in the shallows on some farther shore.
The ship glided toward them on an unfelt wind, finally washing up on the rocky sand and coming to a stop. With a creak, a makeshift gangplank lowered to the ground, made of interlocking pieces of vertebrae.
Solmir stepped up onto the gangplank, shoulders set like a soldier marching into a doomed battle. “You coming, Your Majesty?”
Of all the strange things she’d done since waking up in the Shadowlands, sailing on a ship made of bones might have been the strangest.
Solmir had directed the ship to where they wanted to go—some complicated ritual involving pricking his finger and writing a series of symbols on the deck in blood—and now all they had to do was wait. Wait for the ship to bring them to the inverted castle that held the Heart Tree. Wait and see if the power they’d stolen from murdered gods would be enough to get them inside.