“And the coffee shop I work in might be for sale. The owner wants to open a yoga retreat in the Cotswolds.” I look at him. “I’ve always thought about it. Buying it. I never had the money. I still don’t.”
Hex looks at the crown. Then at me.
“There’s a neighbourhood,” I say. “In Bristol. Clifton. Big houses. Nice streets. My mother mentioned it at that awful dinner party, in the context of things I would never be able to afford.”
Something moves in Hex’s expression that I have learned to read as him being quietly, deeply pleased about something. “I remember.”
“Thought you would.”
“Clifton,” he says, as if trying the word.
“It’s about twenty minutes from the coffee shop. Good transport links. Has a particular kind of house I have always liked the look of when I walk past and have never once seriously considered because it was not a thing that was going to happen for a person in my situation.”
Hex is quiet for a moment. He looks at the crown. He looks at me.
“I am a shadow prince without a kingdom,” he says. “I have, to my name, one ancient stolen crown, strong opinions about the organisation of domestic spaces. That is what I am bringing to this arrangement. The rest is up to you.”
My throat does something inconvenient.
“The ring,” I say, because I need to say something that isn’t what I’m actually feeling right now, and the ring is a safer subject. “You gave me a door. To you. That’s what it was.”
“Yes.”
“You did that deliberately. From the beginning.”
“Yes.” His eyes are very steady. “I knew, when I gave it to you, what I was doing. What it meant, in the traditions of my realm.” A pause. “I suspected you might need it eventually. I did not know I would be right quite so soon.”
My heart flutters against my ribcage. What was I thinking? The ring isn’t a safe subject at all. But it’s too late now. There is no going back.
“What does it mean?” I ask. “In the traditions of your realm.”
He looks at me for a long moment. The unguarded expression, the one underneath all the others.
“It means,” he says quietly, “that you are the one I would give a door to. The one I want to be able to find me. The one I am choosing, above all other things, to let in.”
The kitchen is extremely quiet.
I look at the crown on the table. I look at the mugs in their descending row, handles all facing the same direction. I look at Hex sitting across from me in my uncle’s kitchen inBristol, looking like someone who has fought a war and come home, and who is completely confident that he is in the right place.
“Hex,” I say.
“Adam.”
“You gave up a kingdom.”
His eyes are very steady and very red and entirely certain, the expression of someone who has made a decision and is completely at peace with it.
“For a barista in Bristol and a very tiny flat,” he agrees softly.
I look at him. Something in my chest has been doing a quiet and complicated thing for this entire conversation, and I decide, sitting at my kitchen table with a stolen crown between us and Bristol outside the window, that I am done being careful about it.
“I didn’t move the mugs,” I say. “While you were gone. I couldn’t.”
“I know.”
“And I kept the ring in my pocket. Every day.”
“I know that too.”
