Wait and see if her and Red’s love was matched enough to open a door between worlds.
It was oddly peaceful, sailing over the black ocean, the slight creak of bones beneath her boots and the groan of the scaled hide that made the sails the only sound. Solmir had gone to the prow as soon as he finished telling the ship where to go and loomed there still, elbows resting on a rail made from delicately fused ulnae and radii. He hadn’t spoken since.
Neve sighed, leaning far enough over the side of the ship to watch her reflection in the black water. Maybe telling him about Valchior had been a mistake. Maybe trusting him—more than she absolutely had to—had been a mistake.
One more in her long line of them.
It’d be over soon. That’s what she kept telling herself, watching her dark reflection slide by in an alien sea. When they reached the Heart Tree, when she opened it and its power pulled the Kings from their Sanctum, tugged them into the true world where Solmir could kill them, then it would be over. Then she’d return to her life and start making amends for all the things she’d done, the people she’d hurt. She’d never have to see the terrifying man at the prow again, never have to endure his mocking sense of humor, never have to see him rub at the scars on his forehead or twist his lips in amusement.
The thought didn’t comfort her. She pushed it away before she had to look at it too closely.
On they sailed. The ship stayed parallel to the shoreline on one side and the horizon on the other, following the trajectory they would’ve taken had they not been detoured by the fallen bone, the children of the Rat and the Roach. Hours slipped by that way, or at least what Neve assumed were hours. It should concern her, probably, how used she was getting to the way time seemed to shrink and expand here, where there was no night or day to count it by.
“You should sleep again.”
Solmir, at her elbow. She’d been so lost in her own thoughts that she hadn’t heard him approach. He adopted the same stance next to her as he had at the prow, forearms resting on the railing, peering out over the water.
She glanced at him, just once, before returning her attention to her slow-drifting reflection. “Not tired.”
“Opening the Heart Tree will take a lot out of you. You should try, at least.”
“Fine.” She wasn’t in the mood to argue. Wasn’t in the mood to do much of anything, really. The silence of the sea and the gentle creak of the ship had lulled her into a kind of stasis, calmed the low-level panic that had chewed at the bottom of her stomach ever since she entered the Shadowlands. Neve turned and slid down the wall, sitting with her chin tipped back. From this angle, she couldn’t see Solmir’s face—just the curve of his shoulder, the dip of his arm, the trailing length of his tied-back hair.
After a stretch of silence, she asked, “What’s going to happen when we get there?”
A sigh, lifting his shoulders, then lowering them. “The Heart Tree is inside the inverted castle,” he replied. “When I went there the first time, it took an immense amount of magic just to open the door and get inside.”
The power of two gods, the Seamstress had said. Two gods for the two of them. But back then, when Solmir first went to the Heart Tree—first tried to open it with Gaya, unmatched in love—he’d been a god himself. She pressed her lips together.
“So we use the magic we’ve stored away to open that door,” he said, “and then we approach the Tree.” He angled his head so he could look down at her, one split second before his eyes went to the horizon again. “After that, it’s up to you.”
“You have no pointers for me?”
“I don’t think you’d want my pointers, considering how utterly I failed.”
It sent them into silence again. The ship rocked slowly beneath them, drawing down Neve’s eyelids despite her pronouncement that she wasn’t tired. She tried not to think about whether the gentle tip and sway was due to the water or another quake far beneath the surface, the Shadowlands slowly dissolving and breaking apart.
Above her, Solmir shifted, pulling the piece of carved wood and his knife out from his boot. The soft scrape of the blade across the grain made a gentle counterpoint to the rocking ship.
By the time he started humming—deep and sonorous, that same lullaby melody he’d hummed once before, in an abandoned cabin deep in the upside-down forest—Neve was already asleep.
She has her key already.
One of those dreams again. Fog and roots and that familiar disembodied voice. She pushed up from the oddly smooth ground, the gauzy fabric of that white, shroud-like gown shifting over her legs.