24. Chapter 24
It’s Not What It Looks Like
Iwake up warm. This is the first thing I notice, before I’ve properly opened my eyes or remembered where I am or processed anything about the situation I’m in.
Just warmth, the specific, dense, comfortable warmth of being close to another person, which is not a sensation I have a great deal of experience with and which my half-asleep brain is cataloguing with something close to reverence.
Then I remember everything.
My eyes open.
I am on the futon. In the circle. And I am, there is absolutely no other word for this, snuggling.
My face is against something that isn’t a pillow.
Something cool and solid and smelling faintly of shadows and something older than shadows.
My arm is across something. Something that is, upon closer inspection, Dis.
I am snuggling Dis.
In my sleep. Without consent or planning or any of the decision-making processes I would like to have been consulted about. My body has simply gone ahead and snuggled an ancient shadow king and presented me with this as a fait accompli.
I don’t move. I lie very still and conduct an extremely rapid internal assessment of my situation.
The options are as follows. One, I could pretend I’m still asleep and delay dealing with this indefinitely.
Two, I could move away casually and pretend it never happened.
Three, I could address it directly, which would require having feelings about it out loud, and that option is immediately disqualified.
I decide to start with option two.
I shift, very slowly and casually, like a person who was simply repositioning in their sleep rather than performing a tactical withdrawal from a snuggling incident.
I make it approximately three inches before a voice says, very quietly and with the particular quality of someone who has been awake for some time, probably because he doesn’t sleep, being a shadow being and all,
“Good morning, Little Witch.”
I close my eyes.
“Morning,” I say.
There’s a pause. Dis says nothing. I say nothing. The circle hums quietly around us, that familiar frequency that has become one of the sounds of home in a way I haven’t examined and am not going to examine right now. Outside the window, Bristol is doing its morning thing. A bus. Some pigeons.
I become aware, gradually, that there is a third presence in the room.
I sit up.
Fiend is outside the circle.
He’s crouched at the boundary of it, waist-length black hair pooling over one shoulder, extraordinary face arranged in an expression of undisguised delight.
Those purple eyes are very bright. He’s wearing something impractical and gorgeous, and he’s peering in at us the way someone peers into a shop window at something that has caught their interest.
He sees me see him. His smile widens.
“Oh good,” he says. “You’re awake.”
I stare at him.
“How long,” I say, very carefully, “have you been there?”
“Not long.” He waves a hand. “Long enough.” The purple eyes are dancing in a way that absolutely means he saw me snuggling and is going to be insufferable about it for the rest of eternity.
“What do you want?” I say while covering my naked lap with my discarded tee shirt. I really don’t need any more shadow beings seeing my junk.
“Can’t a boy visit his former betrothed?” He says it lightly, reaching up to run a hand through all that extraordinary hair with the casual self-consciousness of someone who knows exactly how good they look doing it.
This, I decide, is extremely annoying. Everything about Fiend is extremely annoying.
The hair, obviously. The face, which has no business being that remarkable at any hour, let alone whatever hour this is.
The ease of him, the way he takes up space as if space was designed with him in mind and is grateful for the opportunity.
The purple eyes that miss absolutely nothing and find all of it privately hilarious.
“You were his betrothed?” I say. “I thought you were Hex’s betrothed?”
Damn it. I didn’t want to say that out loud. I think I already knew this piece of information, and if I wasn’t half-asleep and recovering from the snuggling incident, I would be able to recall this.
But more importantly, I don’t care that Dis was ever betrothed to this glamorous, gorgeous man. Don’t care at all. It’s irrelevant. No need to draw attention to it and mention it.
“I’ve had several,” Fiend says pleasantly. “One does accumulate them in politics.” He turns those eyes to Dis. “Hello, Dis.”
“Fiend,” says Dis. He says it with the measured neutrality of someone who has known this person for a very long time and has learned not to react to the theatrics. “Why are you here?”
Fiend sighs. It’s a magnificent sigh, long and expressive, communicating worlds of put-upon patience. He straightens up from his crouch and examines the ceiling of my flat with the expression of someone checking the craftsmanship.
“My current betrothed,” he says, “did not order your assassination.”
The room becomes very still.
“He is content,” Fiend continues, with the air of someone delivering a weather report, “with the promise you gave my other former betrothed. He considers the matter of the throne settled.” He pauses.
“My current betrothed, the current king, would like to make clear that he has no quarrel with you, provided you have no quarrel with him, and that he considers your survival to be, on balance, acceptable.”
Dis and I look at each other.
“Who has the amulet?” Dis asks.
Fiend sighs again. He wanders away from the circle entirely and starts investigating my living room, picking things up and examining them with the absolute lack of shame of someone who has never been told that this is rude.
He picks up my favourite book. Sets it down.
Picks up a small crystal I have on the windowsill.
“Not my current betrothed,” he says. “Somebody considerably more tiresome.” He holds the crystal up to the light. “You might survive the next attack, assuming you’re not catastrophically stupid about it. Which.” He glances at me. “You haven’t been, so far. Surprisingly.”
“Surprisingly,” I repeat.
“It was a compliment.” He sets the crystal down. “Of a kind.”
“Who is it?” I ask. “Who has the amulet?”
“Someone who wants chaos more than they want power, which makes them considerably more dangerous than someone who simply wants the throne.” He says it simply, and for just a moment the lightness in his voice drops a fraction, and what’s underneath it is something harder and more serious.
“They won’t stop at one attempt. Hence the visit.
Hence the.” He gestures vaguely at nothing.
“Peace-brokering. Which, incidentally, I am doing entirely without being asked, because someone has to and everyone else is busy having feelings about it.”
He looks between Dis and me with an expression that suggests he finds the feelings deeply entertaining and only slightly exhausting.
“Really,” he adds, with another hair adjustment that I am choosing not to watch because it’s annoying how good it looks, “at this point they should just give me the throne and be done with it.”
Dis and I stare at him.
“I’m joking,” he says, in a tone that doesn’t entirely confirm this.
“Mostly. The point is, peace is in everyone’s best interest. Yours especially.
” He looks at Dis directly. “Don’t go seeking vengeance on the wrong people.
You’ll know the right ones when they come for you. ” A pause. “If they come for you.”
“If,” I say.
“When,” he concedes. “But you’ll be ready. Probably.”
I have had enough of this sassy shadow twink.
I don’t entirely mean to say this out loud, but apparently I do because it comes out before I can stop it, clear and heartfelt in the quiet of the morning flat. “I have had enough of this sassy shadow twink.”
There is a silence.
Then Fiend laughs. It’s a genuine laugh, surprised and delighted, nothing like the theatre of the rest of him. He presses a hand to his mouth, and his eyes crinkle at the corners, and for a moment he looks considerably younger and considerably more real than the performance usually allows.
“I like you,” he says, when he’s recovered. “I told Adam I liked you. I meant it.”
“Thrilled,” I say.
He wanders further into the flat, apparently having decided the diplomatic portion of the visit is complete and we’ve moved on to tourism.
He inspects a poster on my wall and then straightens it.
He glances into the kitchen from the doorway.
He comes back and examines the broken window, still covered in plastic, with interest. He looks at the Scrabble board, which is still on the floor from the last game, and his expression does something complicated and knowing.
“Scrabble,” he says.
“What about it,” I say.
“Nothing,” he says in the tone of someone who means several things by it. His gaze moves to the futon. To the blanket, which I notice is still slightly arranged around where I was lying, which Dis must have done. The purple eyes slide to Dis, then to me, then back again.
“You know,” he says, conversationally, “you make a rather sweet couple.”
“We’re not a couple,” I say.
“We are not,” says Dis, at exactly the same moment.
It comes out in perfect, terrible unison. Both of us. Immediate and definitive.
There’s a silence.
I don’t look at Dis. I look at the floor.
At the Scrabble board. At the letter tiles still laid out from the last time we played, and I think about the first time we played, all those words we laid out while drinking wine and talking about things that cost something to say.
There’s a feeling in my chest that I’m not going to name, something that arrived the moment Dis said, we are not, with such complete conviction, such immediate certainty.
It’s fine. It’s the right answer. We’re not a couple. The situation is what it is.
It’s absolutely fine.
Fiend looks between us with those purple eyes. He sees everything, I’m quite sure of it. He sees the Scrabble board and the blanket and the both of us not looking at each other and all the things we just said and didn’t say.
He rolls his eyes.
“Whatever,” he says, with the serenity of someone who has seen this particular form of self-deception many times before and has strong opinions about it that he’s decided not to voice today.
He drifts back toward the centre of the room. He looks at the ceiling once more, then at Dis, with something underneath the theatrics that might be genuine.
“Take care of yourself,” he says. “For once.” It’s almost exactly what he said to Hex, I remember it from what Adam told me, and I wonder if this is just what Fiend says to people he’s assessed and found worth something, this particular instruction, as if taking care of oneself is radical enough to need stating.
Then he looks at me.
“And you,” he says simply.
Then he’s gone. Not through the door. Just gone, the space where he was, empty in the particular way that spaces are empty when shadow beings have decided to stop occupying them.
The only evidence he was ever here is a faint smell of something dark and expensive and the crystal on the windowsill, which he’s put back in slightly the wrong place.
The flat settles.
I sit on the edge of the futon and look at my hands.
The morning has come fully in through the broken window and the plastic covering it, pale Bristol light doing its best. Somewhere downstairs the coffee shop needs opening. The world is carrying on, as it does.
We had last night. That kiss. Whatever last night was, whatever that kiss was. Whatever it meant, we had it. And it was something I don’t have proper words for, something I’m going to be turning over in my hands for a long time.
But then morning came. And Fiend came with it, breezing in with his politics and his hair and his peace-brokering, and the world came crashing back in with him.
The unknown enemy. The next attack. The amulet.
All of it still out there, still real, still pressing against the small bubble of warmth we’d made.
And Dis saying, we are not, immediately and without hesitation, because of course he did. Because what else would he say. Because this is what it is, and neither of us gets to want it to be something else.
I stand up. I find my boxers and hop into them. I pick up the blanket from the futon and fold it, which gives my hands something else to do.
“Tea,” I say, to nobody in particular.
“Yes, you should have tea,” says Dis. He’s watching me with those blue eyes, and I can’t read his expression and I’m not going to try.
I go to the kitchen. I fill the kettle. I stand there while it boils and I think about last night and I think about this morning and I think about the specific weight of we-are-not, and how much heavier it landed than it should have, and I tell myself, very firmly, that I’m fine.