I don’t explain what I mean. I don’t have to.
Hex is quiet for a long moment. He leans forward in the armchair, elbows on his knees, and looks at the floor. “Soon,” he says. “A week. Maybe less.”
A week.
I knew this was coming. I have known it since the beginning, since he appeared in my bedroom and told me about exiles and curses and a throne he was going to reclaim. I have known through every morning and every rearranged bookshelf and every cup of tea and every night with him warm and present beside me. I have known.
But it seems knowing a thing and having it become real are not the same thing.
“Night and Dark will help,” Hex says. “They’ve been preparing. The timing is… as good as it’s going to get.”
“Right.”
“Dis will be expecting it. He won’t be unprepared. But neither will I.” A pause. “I’m stronger than he knows. Stronger than I was.”
“Because of the bond,” I say.
“Because of you,” he says.
I look at the candle. The flame is very steady. No drafts in the flat tonight, no supernatural temperature drops, just an ordinary candle doing its ordinary candle thing.
“And after,” I say carefully. “When you’ve won. You’ll be on the throne.”
“Yes.”
“In the Shadow Realm.”
“Yes.”
“With Fiend by your side.”
Hex shifts in his chair. “As a political thing.”
I nod. I am being very reasonable about this. I am handling it extremely well. I am a mature adult who understood the terms of this arrangement from the beginning and is not going to make it harder than it needs to be.
“That’s good,” I say. “That’s what was supposed to happen. That’s the whole point.”
“Adam…”
“No, I mean it. You get your throne back. Night and Dark get their liege back. Fiend gets his betrothed back and doesn’t have to marry Dis. The regime falls. That’s the right ending.” I am very calm. I am impressively calm. “That’s what was always going to happen.”
Kingdoms and princes and rebellions and wars have nothing to do with me. I’m boring and dull and ordinary. Being involved this much is truly remarkable. It’s astonishing that I can even talk about all this stuff so calmly. So of course it’s going to end, and my life is going to resume normalcy.
Hex doesn’t say anything. He is watching me with those red eyes and I cannot read his expression and I don’t want to because if I look at it too closely I am going to stop being impressively calm and I would very much like to stay impressively calm for a while longer.
I think about the mugs on the shelf.
World’s Okayest Person, pushed to the back. Handles all facing the same direction. Descending by size in a neat row that drives me absolutely mad and that I have not changed because if I change it, then one morning he will reach for his usual mug and it won’t be where he put it, which is ridiculous, and is now pointless because one morning soon he isn’t going to be here to know that the mugs aren’t the way he likes them, and that thought is completely unacceptable and I am not going to follow it any further.
I think about the mugs and something in my chest does something quiet and terrible.
“I haven’t moved them,” I say. My voice comes out wrong. Just slightly. “The mugs. I haven’t put them back how I had them.”
The silence is enormous.
“I know,” says Hex, very quietly.
“I was going to.” I am thinking about mugs and I am not going to cry about mugs, that would be absurd, that would be completely absurd, they are just mugs, they are just in the wrongorder, it is a perfectly correctable situation. “I just kept not getting around to it.”
