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“I am sorry,” he says, and something in his face falls, properly falls, the kind of sadness that doesn’t try to hide itself. “I spent months learning how not to frighten you. It seems that has all been undone.”

He steps closer, and the shadows around him settle slightly, folding back into something closer to ordinary dark rather than whatever hungry thing they were doing a moment ago. I can see him properly now, more of him showing through. The crown he isn’t wearing is somehow still visible in the way he holds himself, straighter, heavier, a person carrying considerably more weight than he was carrying the last time I saw him.

“I feel different,” he says, and there’s something raw underneath the careful precision of it, something I don’t think he’d admit to anyone else. “Since the ceremony. Since the crown. It is not merely power. It is direction. As though something in me has finally been given the shape it was always meant to take.”

His words sink into my soul, where they ring with familiarity, a chord struck against something already true in me.

“You knew,” I say, quietly. “Before any of this had a name. You’ve always known something was coming.”

“Yes.” He doesn’t try to soften it. “I told you once I was different, before you. Sharper. I did not know then what that sharpness was for. I only knew it existed for something, some purpose I hadn’t been shown yet.” His eyes hold mine, steady, unflinching. “I know now.”

I think about Magdalene, and Big Brian, and the other true believers. Forty years of goats and dreams and everything they tried to warn people about, only for most people to quietly assume they had lost the plot somewhere around the second decade of scripture readings.

I wanted, really wanted, for them all to be batty. Well-meaning but lost. Harmless and eccentric. I wanted to leave it all behind, move to Bristol and become a lawyer.

But in my heart, I knew. I always knew.

“I’ve always known too,” I say. “Not the details. Just the shape of it. Every time she talked about the light and the dark and the reckoning, some small horrible part of me believed her completely, and I just decided not to look at it properly, because looking at it properly meant admitting my whole life had a destination I hadn’t chosen and couldn’t see the end of.”

“You hoped ignoring it would make it stop being true,” he says.

“Yes,” I say, and the word costs more than one syllable should.

“It did not work for me either,” he says.

We stand there, a few feet apart, two people who’ve apparently spent our whole lives quietly bracing for exactly this conversation. Something about the way he’s looking at me, steady and open and entirely unguarded, makes the question rise up out of me before I’ve properly decided to ask it.

“Magdalene told me once that darkness is drawn to light. That it can’t help itself. Moths to a flame, she said, like it was the simplest thing in the world.” My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to. “What if that’s all this ever was? What if we mistook the prophecy pulling us together for actually wanting each other? What if there was never a real choice in it at all, just two roles finding their opposite number, the way they always were going to?” I suck in a shaky breath. “What if we mistook nemesis stuff for attraction?”

His amber eyes go stricken, properly stricken, in a way I’ve genuinely never seen on him before.

“No,” he breathes. “I know what I feel.”

Know. Not knew. Present tense, not past. My heart does something violent and hopeful in my chest at the specific choice of it, at the fact that even now, even here, even with everything about to come apart, he’s still choosing the word that means right now rather than the word that means once.

The air between us goes taut, charged, the kind of silence that has weight to it. For one long, suspended moment, neither of us moves, both of us simply standing here in a locked park, looking at each other like the answer to everything might be written somewhere in each other’s face if we look hard enough.

Then he looks away.

“I cannot let my people be destroyed,” he says, so softly I nearly lose it under the sound of my own heartbeat. “Whatever this becomes. Whatever they ask of either of us. I will not stand by and let my people and my realm be ended for a prophecy neither of us chose.”

I suck in a breath that hurts properly, all the way down. I don’t argue, because how could I possibly argue with that, when I’d say precisely the same thing about humans and the human realm.

And of course he’d say this. He’s honourable and caring, and he’s not going to take a throne without taking the responsibility.

“I understand,” I say, and I do, completely, which is somehow so much worse than if I didn’t. He understands me too, and that’s worst of all.

He can’t let me win. I can’t let him win. We are trapped with no way out.

He looks at me for one more moment, amber eyes holding mine like he’s trying to memorise something he already knows by heart. Then the shadows rise up around him again, gentler this time, folding him into the dark the way a held breath finally lets go. Then he’s simply gone, and the streetlamps flicker back on one by one behind him like nothing happened at all.

I stand there alone in the dark beside Doris’s bench, in a locked park at midnight, and I finally let myself properly fall apart.

Chapter 23

Team Building

Big Brian ducks through the door of Coffeelicious, rucksack over one shoulder, smelling of the wood smoke that’s followed him around for as long as I can remember. He drops the bag by the counter and looks me over properly, the way he always does. Checking for damage, the way you’d check a fence line after a storm. Then he hauls me into a hug that lifts me half off my feet. It’s exactly what he’s done since I was eleven, back when he still had to bend down to manage it.