“And when you were hurt, I didn’t think for a single second about not going.” I hold his gaze. “I want you to know that. There was no moment of deciding. There was just going.”
“I know,” he says, for the third time, and this time it means all three things at once.
I look at Hex.
Hex looks at me.
“So,” I say. “A barista in Bristol.”
“So,” he says. “A shadow prince without a throne.”
“Sounds like a terrible basis for a life.”
Something in his face does that unguarded thing, the one underneath all the others. “Or a rather good one,” he says quietly. “Depending on your perspective.”
He reaches across the table. His hand covers mine, cold and not quite solid and entirely familiar, and he holds on with theparticular ferocity that has always said more than anything he puts into words.
I turn my hand over and hold on.
His fingers weave through mine and hold on with the same ferocity they always have, the grip of someone who has no intention of letting go.
We stay like that for a while. The crown sits between us. Bristol does its early morning thing outside the window, the city stirring itself, indifferent and beloved.
Eventually I become aware that I cannot remember the last time I ate anything, and that Hex has fought a war tonight and is translucent at the edges and we have an ancient stolen crown to deal with and a coffee shop to investigate buying and a neighbourhood in Clifton to look at and an uncle coming back in April and any number of practical things that are going to need addressing.
I look at our joined hands on the table.
I look at the crown.
I look at Hex, who is watching me with those red eyes and that expression, and who gave up a kingdom and came home, and is now sitting in my uncle’s kitchen at whatever time this is, in a ripped shirt with his hair slightly wrong, looking more like himself than I have ever seen him.
“Right,” I say. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
Chapter 30
Happily Ever After
Thekitchenwindowisopen, and Bristol is doing something with the evening light that it only does in summer, that particular gold that makes even the ordinary terraces look like somewhere worth being. The garden smells of whatever Hex has decided to grow in it, which is apparently everything, because Hex’s approach to the garden is the same as his approach to the flat in that he has very strong opinions and acts on them immediately and the results are, infuriatingly, excellent.
Felix is on his second glass of wine and has reached the stage of the evening where he stops performing contentment and just has it, which is always the best version of Felix. He is sitting across the table with his rings on and his eyeliner perfect and his feet tucked up under him on the chair in a way that means he is comfortable and not going anywhere for a while yet, which is exactly right.
Hex is sitting next to me, which still strikes me sometimes as an extraordinary sentence. Hex, sitting next to me, in a house in Clifton, in the particular gold of a Bristol summer evening.
He has a glass of wine that he doesn’t drink because he doesn’t need to, but he holds it in the way he has learned to hold things in the human realm, with the easy familiarity of someone who has been here long enough to understand the texture of it.
He is telling Felix something that happened in the Shadow Realm last week, something involving a minor territorial disputeand Night’s response to it, which apparently involved a look of such devastating composure that the disputing parties simply stopped arguing and went home.
Felix is laughing. It’s a real laugh, the kind he doesn’t produce for just anyone.
“He just looked at them,” Hex says, and there is warmth in his voice that is always there when he talks about Night, the particular warmth of someone who made the right choice and knows it.
“Night could end wars with a raised eyebrow,” Felix says.
“He nearly did, last month.”
“Tell me everything.”
I lean back in my chair and let the conversation ebb and flow and wash over me. The food is long finished and the wine is good and the evening is soft and warm. And now Felix is telling stories about the coffee shop that still make me laugh even though I’ve heard them before and was there for most of the encounters.
