Hex looks at me for a moment with an expression that says he has noticed what I’m not quite saying and has filed it away. Then he looks at the crown.
“And the throne,” I say.
Something moves in Hex’s expression. “I found, when it came to it, that I didn’t want it. Not anymore.” He looks up at me with those red eyes. “I found that what I wanted was considerably different from a throne.”
I swallow tightly.
“I stood in that throne room,” he says. “Looked at it.” He pauses. “Night was beside me. He was looking at it too, with the expression of someone who has been yearning for something for a very long time and is trying not to show it.” A slight smile, the first I’ve seen tonight. “I asked him if he wanted it.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that was not how succession worked.” The smile deepens fractionally. “I told him I was the king now and I could make it work however I liked.”
I look at the crown on the table. All that history and weight and centuries of significance, sitting on scratched cheap pine.
“Night took the throne,” I say.
“He took it. With considerably more dignity than I would have displayed, but that is Night.” Something warm moves through his expression. “He’ll be good. Better than me.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, actually.” He says it without any self-deprecation, just as a statement of fact. “I was never meant to be a king. I was meant to be a prince, which is a different thing. I’m very good at being a prince.” He tilts his head. “I am considerably less good at staying in one place and governing responsibly.”
“You reorganised my flat seventeen times in one week,” I say.
“Eighteen,” he says. “You missed the condiment drawer.”
I stare at him. “There’s a condiment drawer?”
“There is now.”
I make a mental note to look at the condiment drawer later, and turn my attention back to the crown. I look at it for a long moment. It looks back at me in the way that ancient objects look at you, with the patient indifference of something that has outlasted everyone who has ever argued over it.
“You gave away your throne but kept the crown?”
Hex shrugs. “It was stolen from the human realm.”
“Stolen?” I repeat.
“Approximately four hundred years ago. A king who made a bargain he didn’t fully understand.” Hex looks at the crown with an expression that is not quite regret and not quite satisfaction but something between the two. “It was always going to come home eventually. I simply thought I’d help it.”
That makes a strange amount of sense. Or maybe Hex has changed the way my mind puts things together and I now think inshadow being logic. Whatever the reason, Hex keeping the crown seems sensible. He definitely deserves it. A souvenir. A prize. A gift to fund a new life.
“How much is it worth?”
He considers. “The gold alone is significant. But the provenance, the age, the craft. The right auction house with the right documentation.” He pauses. “Considerably more than a barista’s salary.”
He has clearly given this some consideration.
“You’d be… okay with selling it?” I ask.
Hex nods. “Absolutely. That’s why I took it. The human realm runs on money.” He pauses again. “Gold can buy a very comfortable life for the ones you love.”
I look at the crown. I think about Clifton, about a house in the neighbourhood my mother referenced at her dinner table as proof of everything I would never have. I think about the coffee shop where my whole life changed, where I stood behind a counter and apologised to rude customers and had no idea what was coming.
“This flat,” I say slowly. “It belongs to my uncle. He comes back in April.”
“I know.”
