“What?” I ask.
Night looks at me. The severity is very present tonight, the comfortable warmth of his earlier visit tucked away in favour of something more measured. He looks at me for a moment in silence.
“Nothing,” he says, and then, after a pause that turns the word into something more than nothing. “It simply confirms.”
I wait for more. More does not come.
I look at Dark. Dark is looking at the middle distance with the expression of a man who has opinions and has decided not to share them, which on Dark is an extremely loud way of saying something without saying it.
“Confirms what?” I ask.
“It’s not my place to say,” says Night, in a tone that suggests this is both accurate and a significant understatement, and he is not going to elaborate further.
I look at Hex. Hex studiously looks at the map-thing.
I put the ring back in my pocket. I pick up my book. I look at the words on the page without reading them.
On the other side of the room, Hex and Night resume their conversation, and Dark goes back to whatever Dark was doing. The shadows settle. The temperature stabilises. Everything is perfectly ordinary and nothing has been said, and I am going to sit here and not think about it.
I don’t think about it for approximately four minutes.
Then I look at Hex again. He is talking to Dark now, and Dark is listening with the focused attention people bring to serious things, and Hex is gesturing at something on the maybe-map and his expression is intent and certain and completely in command ofhimself. He looks like a prince going home. He looks like exactly what he is.
A week. Maybe less.
Around nine o’clock, Dark moves with the unhurried ease of someone with no particular relationship to normal human tiredness, and announces that he has to return to the Realm. Night stands without comment, gathering whatever it is that Night carries with him, which seems to be mostly an air of quiet authority and a quality of attention that notices everything.
At the edge of the thick shadows in the corner of the room, Dark pauses and looks at me.
“I am honoured to have met you,” he says.
“Me?” I say.
“Yes.” He says it simply, not elaborating, and gives me one of those looks that manages to communicate a great deal without saying anything specific.
Night, at the threshold, glances back. His green eyes find mine and hold for a moment, and whatever is in that look is complicated and old and not unkind.
“You’re stronger than you know,” he says.
And then they’re gone, the flat settling back into its ordinary self around their absence.
I sit on the sofa. Hex stands in the middle of the room, looking at the space where Night and Dark were. A few seconds pass. Bristol does its quiet Bristol thing outside the window.
“A week,” I say.
“Yes.” He turns to look at me. “Maybe less.”
I nod. I have the ring in my pocket and my book on my knee and the mugs on the shelf in the wrong order, and all the things I’m not saying out loud, arranged very carefully in the box where I keep them.
“Right,” I say. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
Hex crosses the room and sits beside me on the sofa, close enough that I can feel the familiar winter chill of him, and when I move to get up, his hand catches mine.
“In a minute,” he says quietly.
I settle back down.
The candle burns on the coffee table, and outside a fox takes its chances with the Bristol night, and somewhere in the Shadow Realm, things are moving into position for something that is coming whether either of us is ready for it or not.
