Malik huffs, very softly, against his scalp. "Take what you want, love."
Newt conjures a bag. It is a soft leather thing, the color of old tea, and when he opens it he can see that it is much larger on the inside than it has any right to be. He looks down into it and sees the dim suggestion of a space about the size of a carriage house.
"Huh," he says. "Is that—should I be able to do that?"
"You dropped Mathilde into the underworld four days ago. I think we're past the point of wondering what you're capable of."
Newt flushes to his throat.
They fill the bag. His books. His clothes. The jar of dried herbs, because Malik is wise enough not to suggest leaving it. The quilt off the bed, which his mother had made, and which he does not often think about but cannot quite bring himself to leave. The kettle he likes. Two mugs. The soft blue blanket that had been draped across the windowseat the morning after their first kiss and which, for reasons Newt cannot quite articulate, feelsimportant. When the bag is full—when it is still somehow light as air—Newt shrinks it, the way he might reduce a spell diagram, until it is the size of a coin purse, and slips it into his pocket.
They walk out of the townhouse without looking back.
The Old City is a forty-minute train ride from Haven proper, through neighborhoods that get greener and quieter as they go. Newt spends the whole ride pressed against his side with Malik's arm around his shoulders. Malik does not try to make conversation. Malik seems content, in a way that makes Newt's heart ache in the good way, to simply have him there.
The Old City is a district of crooked streets and slate rooftops and narrow buildings that lean toward each other across the alleys as though sharing secrets. They stop on a street called Acanthus Row. There is a shopfront on the ground floor of a tall narrow building, painted a deep blue-black, with a hand-lettered sign that reads simplyBooks. The hours posted in the window are eccentric.
Open when Perrin is here.
Closed when she isn't.
Don't knock.
Above the shop are three floors of apartments. Malik has arranged for the top one.
The landlord—a thin tall woman with gray hair and ink under her fingernails, who introduces herself as Perrin and who is clearly the author of the sign—hands Malik a set of keys and looks at Newt for a long moment and says, "You're a witch."
"Um," Newt says. "Yes."
"Don't blow the place up."
"I'll try."
"Good. The wards up there are old. They'll hold most things. Tea is in the shop if you need any. Don't knock."
She is gone.
Newt looks at Malik. Malik is trying, valiantly, not to smile.
They climb the stairs. Three narrow flights, old wood that creaks pleasantly under their feet, and at the top is a door. Malik hands Newt the key.
"You open it," he says.
Newt opens the door.
The apartment is small. It is smaller than the townhouse. It has a main room with sloped ceilings and exposed beams, and a kitchen along one wall with a little round table, and a bedroom through an archway, and a bathroom with clawfoot tub, and that is all. The windows are set into the slope of the roof and the afternoon light is coming through them in warm gold bars. There is dust on every surface. The previous tenant has left a single chair by the window.
It is the most beautiful place Newt has ever seen.
He turns to say so, and Malik is already watching him, and Malik's face is doing the soft quiet thing it has been doing since that night in Mathilde's study, the thing Newt still has not quite gotten used to, and Newt's throat closes up.
"It's good?" Malik asks.
Newt nods. He cannot speak.
Malik crosses the room in two steps and kisses him.
Newt unpacks.
