Red grimaced. “Hopefully he gets used to it.”
“For all our sakes.”
Kayu stared off into space, but when Red followed her gaze, space was Raffe. He stood at the opposite end of the ship, much like they did at the prow, leaning on his elbows and gazing at the receding horizon. At Valleyda.
Her eyes swung between them, her childhood friend and the far-flung princess, lips twisted.
“He loves your sister.” A statement rather than a question, as if Kayu had seen the play of thoughts across Red’s face. She shifted against the railing, face unreadable. “Always has.”
A pause before speaking—it might not have been phrased as a question, but it still wanted an answer, one Red didn’t quite feel qualified to give. “Raffe and Neve grew up together,” she said carefully, eyes on her dry knuckles. “And yes, they love each other. But it’s… it’s complicated.”
Kayu snorted. “I don’t expect anything to be simple with you lot. All tangled up in forests and gods.” She shook her head. “More fool me, I guess.”
Red made a rueful nose of assent.
A moment, and Kayu pushed off from the railing. “I’m going below to see about some food. Dinner should be soon.”
As she walked away, Red went back to Eammon. He and Fife sat beside the wall of the ship in comfortable silence, apologies having been made and accepted. She smiled to see it and felt a subtle rustling of leaves in her ribs, like the Wilderwood had wanted them to make up, too.
“I think I feel better,” Eammon said as she came to stand in front of him. He looked up at her, squinting, half a tired smile picking up his mouth. “As long as I don’t have to move.”
She settled in next to him. “Do you plan to sit there for the entire voyage?”
“Yes.”
“Noted.”
Lyra climbed down from the steering platform and ambled over, clearly the one of them with the best-adjusted sea legs. “Food in ten minutes,” she said. “Kayu is getting everything sorted.”
A grimace spasmed on Eammon’s face at the mention of food. “Perhaps I spoke too soon.”
Fife arched a brow. “I’m not seasick, and yet I am still not excited by the prospect of hard tack and questionable dried beef.”
“Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?” Lyra teased, sitting next to Fife so the four of them were in a line. “Sea rations are part of the experience.”
Three groans answered in chorus.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Neve
They climbed up the bony slope to get to the door, a feat that Neve managed to accomplish while barely thinking about heights. Petty fears seemed small and easily shoved away when faced with such a monumental and strange thing as an upside-down castle, faced with the prospect of home.
Home. She kept repeating the word in her head, trying to imbue it with more resonance. It should leave her elated. Instead, trepidation gathered weight in her chest.
Someone pays for the mistakes we make, the voice in her dream had said. And she’d made so many of them.
Solmir didn’t touch her as they made their way up to the doors. Not necessarily a strange thing, though before when they’d had to scale the side of a bone-pile, he’d offered a hand to help. Now he stayed away from her skin with almost methodical precision, keeping measured distance.
Neve was out of breath by the time they reached the cliff, the sharp side of it jutting beneath the inverted doors, one more improbable anomaly holding the structure sound. The bones here seemed more brittle, parts of them almost transparent in the cold light, a soft ivory glow that was beautiful and brutal at once.
The castle felt even stranger up close, even more precarious. The curve that would normally mark the tops of the doors instead arced against the cliff, and looking at it too long was enough to make Neve’s head feel light. Salt and bone-dust crusted the hinges, cementing the door half open. Inside, darkness.
“There’s a drop.” Solmir’s voice was low, his arms crossed. He looked at the doors as if he expected them to crawl off their hinges and attack. “We’ll have to climb down to the floor.”
“The ceiling, you mean.” It came out thin. She wasn’t sure if she’d meant it as a joke or not.
Regardless, he didn’t laugh, didn’t crack the hint of a smile. Ever since the ship brought them to this strange shore, Solmir had been quiet and stoic, as if something weighed heavily on his mind. “Call it what you want. The point is, you’ll have to be careful. The bricks stick out enough to make climbing simple, but you have to pay attention.”