Page 56
“He’s the rising dark, isn’t he,” I say, to the room, to my tea, to nobody in particular. “The big bad. The thing I’m supposed to defeat once and for all.”
The silence that follows is the loudest silence I’ve ever sat inside.
I feel it land, properly land, the way words do once you’ve finally let them out of the box you’d been keeping them shut inside. My whole body goes strange and light, like I might float clean off my chair, or possibly just be sick. Honestly, it’s a coin toss at this stage, and I hold very still and wait to find out which one it’s going to be.
“That’s,” Adam starts, and stops, and tries again. “That’s not necessarily. I mean. Solar flares happen. Eclipses go wrong sometimes. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe there’s a totally unrelated cosmic event happening at exactly the same time as his coronation, purely by chance, and none of this actually means anything.”
“An unrelated apocalyptic sky event, one on the same day he becomes king,” Felix says, flatly.
“It’s not impossible,” Adam protests weakly, while turning an interesting shade of red.
“It’s astronomically impossible. That’s rather the whole point of astronomy.”
“Maybe it’s geese,” Adam tries, with the air of a man who knows he’s already lost but has decided to go down swinging anyway. “Migrating geese can apparently confuse radar systems. Maybe they’ve confused something bigger.”
“Geese,” Felix repeats.
“It was just an idea.”
“It was a genuinely terrible idea.”
“I’m trying to help.”
“You’re inventing excuses to avoid a hard conversation. It’s sweet, honestly, but it’s not helping.” Felix’s tone is dry, but his eyes are warm.
Adam deflates fully, and I feel a rush of fondness for him for trying, for reaching for anything at all rather than just letting the silence win.
“It fits,” I say, quietly. “All of it. The rising dark. Dark rising. I don’t know why none of us said it out loud before now.”
Felix lets out a short, humourless laugh. “Because it’s a ridiculous sentence, and none of us wanted to be the one who said it first and made it official.”
“Like I just did,” I say, and my voice sounds hollow.
“Someone had to do it eventually. Better you than the rest of us standing round being cowards about it. I include myself fully in that criticism, for the record.”
“Yes, saying it makes it real,” Hex says, from the corner, the first thing he’s said since we got here. “And none of us wanted it to be real. Least of all me.”
“You’ve known him a long time,” I say.
“Longer than I’ve known most things.” Something moves across his face, complicated. The amusement is stripped right out of it, for once. “I did not expect to watch him become a thing of prophecy.”
I’ve never once seen Hex go serious for longer than it takes him to make a joke about it afterwards. There’s something almost worse about watching him try and fail to find one now. Like the universe has quietly taken away the one trick he always reaches for first.
Dis speaks next, careful, precise. “The prophecy, as I understand, speaks of an ending. A final battle. Light defeating dark, once and for all.” He pauses, choosing his next words with obvious deliberation. “I have some understanding of what once and for all tends to require, in matters such as these. I have been on both sides of such an ending before.”
Nobody asks him to elaborate. Nobody wants to hear the elaboration. I suspect Dis is rather grateful for that, given how carefully he’s avoided saying anything more specific than he absolutely has to.
“So what happens now?” I say. “Do I just… wait for the universe to hand me a sword and point me at him?”
“I do not know,” Dis says, and it’s the plainest, most human thing I’ve ever heard him say.
“That’s not hugely comforting,” I say.
“I did not say it to comfort you,” Dis says. “I said it because it is true, and I think you would rather have truth than comfort right now.”
He’s not wrong, though I don’t tell him that.
Felix is looking at Dis with an expression I’ve never seen on him before, something raw underneath the usual dryness. Fear sitting plainly in his eyes.
