Chapter 19
The days after are quiet, and still, and Newt keeps waiting for them not to be.
He wakes up in the mornings with his heart already beating too fast, listening for footsteps on the stairs, for fists on the door, for the particular high ringing in his ears that used to mean a summons was forming somewhere in the townhouse below him.
It never comes. The days unfurl like lengths of soft cloth, slow and ordinary, and Newt keeps flinching at shadows.
He sits on the windowseat and watches the street below and expects, at any moment, to see a familiar face in coven robes coming up the walk to tell him he has made a terrible mistake.
No one comes.
Annabeth sent a single letter. It arrived the morning after, slipped under the townhouse door in a pale cream envelope with Newt's name—his actual name, because despite Annabeth’s shortcomings as an aunt she's at least always referred to him correctly—written across the front.
He had held it for a long time before opening it.
Malik had sat across the kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold in his hands and watched him. Inside had been two sentences.
The coven will not trouble you. Go where you like.
That was all. No sign-off. No seal. Just the letter, and the unspoken understanding beneath it, which was this: Annabeth has what she wanted.
She has the coven. She has the title. She has the power she has been quietly cultivating for decades while Mathilde ignored her, and she has it because Newt took a god into his grandmother's study and let him do what gods do.
Newt gave her a throne. She is not going to come looking for the thing that made her queen.
Not yet. Not until she has a reason to want it.
He folds the letter. He puts it in the drawer of the bedside table. He tries not to think about it.
It takes a lot to wrestle the guilt.
Mathilde had used him since before he could walk.
Had given him to Dimitri the way one gives a dog to the neighbors when one cannot be bothered to feed it.
Had called him by a name that was not his and a pronoun that was not his and had looked at him, always, with the particular measuring gaze of a woman evaluating a tool.
Had told Malik that the terms of the contract had included consuming him.
That Newt had been born to be eaten, by inches, his magic drained into her ancient sustained body until there was nothing left, and Mathilde had arranged the whole thing as casually as she might arrange a dinner menu.
She had deserved it.
Newt knows she had deserved it.
But their blood had been the same blood, and she had been old enough to remember the world before electricity, and Newt is human, and he has never watched a person die, and the sound of the thing that came out of the floor had not been a human sound, and some small soft part of him that she had not yet entirely unmade keeps whispering she was still your grandmother, she was still your grandmother, she was still your grandmother, and Newt cannot make it stop.
Malik holds him together.
He does not do it loudly. He does not make speeches.
He does not announce his intentions or frame them as kindnesses.
He simply is present, in a steady unfussy way that Newt has never experienced in his life—he makes tea in the evenings without being asked, and hands Newt the mug with the handle turned toward him; he sits on the windowseat beside Newt in the afternoons and reads with one arm draped along the back of the cushion, close enough that his thumb can stroke the back of Newt's neck absently while he turns pages with his other hand; he wakes up in the night, when Newt wakes up in the night, and does not say anything, does not ask what Newt was dreaming, just tightens his arm around Newt's chest and presses his mouth to Newt's hair until Newt's breathing evens out.
He suggests they leave the townhouse.
He suggests it carefully, after breakfast, on the third morning, when Newt has flinched at a loud noise on the street for the fourth time in an hour.
"The Old City," Malik says, as though it is a thing he has just thought of, which it is not, because Newt can feel in the bond that Malik has been turning this idea over for at least a day. "It's quieter. It's far from here. You have friends there."
Newt looks at him across the table. Malik is not looking back. Malik is looking at his tea with the careful studied neutrality of a man who is trying very hard not to seem invested in an answer.
"You'd come?" Newt asks. He hates how small his voice sounds.
Malik's eyes flick up.
"Of course I'd come.”
Newt has to look down at his plate for a minute.
"Okay," he says. "Okay, yes. The Old City."
They pack that afternoon.
Newt is not a person with many belongings.
He has never been allowed to be. The coven had preferred him portable, had preferred him dependent, and so he owns exactly what fits into one small suitcase and a box of books and a jar of dried herbs that Malik looks at, briefly, and decides not to comment on.
He stands in the middle of the living room with his hands on his hips, looking at the shelves.
Malik comes up behind him.
He fits his chin against the top of Newt's head. His arms come around Newt's waist and rest there, warm and steady. Newt leans back against him without thinking, the way he has started to do in the last few days, the way he used to be afraid to do.
"Take what you want," Malik says, into his hair. "Leave what you don't. We can get more."
Newt looks overwhelmed. “Okay.”
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, feels important.
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 simply Books.
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.
He does it slowly. There is no rush. He takes the coin purse out of his pocket and unshrinks it on the floor of the main room and opens it and starts pulling things out, one at a time, while Malik sits on the windowsill and watches.
He puts his books on the empty shelves along the wall.
He puts the kettle on the stove. He drapes his mother's quilt over the chair by the window.
He hangs his cloak on the hook by the door.