Chapter 29
Handing Over the Crown Jewels
The flat is very quiet without Felix in it.
Different from the quiet of the days after Hex left. That quiet was wrong, an absence where presence should have been. This quiet is something else. The particular quality of a room that contains exactly the right people and nothing unnecessary.
I sit down at the kitchen table. Across from Hex. Across from the crown.
I look at the crown on my table. It sits there, taking up exactly as much room as a crown takes up, which is more than its physical size in every possible sense.
For a moment, neither of us says anything. I look at him properly in the kitchen light, the translucence at his edges, the ripped shirt, the hair slightly wrong, the eyes that are watching me with an expression that is exhausted and certain and entirely itself.
He’s sitting in his usual spot.
“You won,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
He is quiet for a moment, gathering himself, and then he tells me.
Not everything, I don’t think I have the framework for everything, and I don’t think he has the energy, but enough.
The fight was long and it was costly, and there were moments when it could have gone differently.
Night and Dark were there. Others too, allegiances that had been quietly held in place for years, waiting for the right moment.
Dis fought well. Honourably, even at the end.
He had a code and he kept it, which meant that when it was over it was genuinely over, not a grudging surrender but an acknowledgment of a thing fairly done.
I think about sapphire-blue eyes and a tiny flicker of something that might have been curiosity. I think about Fiend, passed along like a political asset to that precise and ancient man. I think about Felix on the sofa, very calm, saying he has plans.
“And Dis,” I say carefully.
“Gone from the throne. Not destroyed.” He holds my gaze. “I gave him terms. He accepted them.” A pause. “He will not go back on his word.”
I think about the alley. The sapphire-blue eyes. The formal posture. The way he declined to fight Hex because it wouldn’t be fair.
“No,” I say. “I don’t think he will.”
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 in shadow 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.”
“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 in Bristol, 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.”
“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 the particular 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.”