Page 71

“It was not a small thing,” he says. “You did not bow. You did not flinch. You wanted nothing from me. You simply said hello.”

“I say good morning to everyone,” I say. “I don’t ration it. You got the same one as the man who wanted oat milk.”

“I know,” he says. “That was the part I could not stop thinking about.”

I laugh, and it catches halfway out. “In fairness, it was extremely rude of me. You were clearly hiding. But you were also sitting on your own behind a plant Felix keeps alive out of spite, and you looked like someone who could do with a good morning. I’ve never managed to walk past that.”

Something that’s almost a laugh moves through him, quiet and disbelieving.

“So no,” I say, answering the actual question I asked him a minute ago, the one I actually need answered. “I don’t think it was gravity. I think I looked at you and saw a person, not a title or a threat, and I said hello. That’s not a prophecy doing anything. That’s just me.”

“Thank you,” he says quietly, “for choosing.”

“Thank you for choosing back,” I say. “And for actually saying it out loud, when you absolutely didn’t have to.”

He looks at me like that’s the last thing in the world he expected to be thanked for.

The quiet that follows isn’t awkward, just full. Both of us sitting inside the size of what we’ve actually just said to each other. It’s somewhere in that quiet that Wraith’s face comes back to me, unbidden, small and shaking. A boy who chose to help the very first chance he got.

“Wraith chose too,” I say, thinking of him cowering on my shop floor, closing the portal with his own hands. “He’s free of that amulet and the very first thing he did wasn’t to hurt anyone. Nobody made him save us. He just did, because apparently that’s who he actually is underneath everything he was forced to be.”

Dark nods thoughtfully. “Then perhaps that is the real lesson underneath all of this.”

I want to believe that. I want it to be that simple, that choosing is the whole answer and the rest sorts itself out once you’ve made the right one. But Wraith chose with his own two hands, deliberate and awake and entirely himself. And the things I’ve done didn’t feel like choosing anything at all.

“I hurt Hex and Dis a few days ago,” I say, and the words come out smaller than I mean them to. “Properly hurt them. Threw them clean out of the room without meaning to, without even understanding how. And I keep thinking, if that’s what I actually am now, if that’s the thing this whole prophecy built, I don’t want it. I don’t want to be a weapon. Not even pointed at someone who’s earned it. Especially not pointed at anyone I love.”

“I understand that fear better than you might expect.” He looks away, out at the featureless grey, and for a moment he seems very tired. “I do not enjoy being king, Bunny. Some of my own people speak of ending your world with an eagerness that turns my stomach. An endless dark realm, ruling forever over subjects who cheer for conquest, does not sound like victory to me. It sounds like a very long, very cold punishment.”

“That is genuinely not the villain speech I was braced for,” I say.

“I am aware.” A small, tired smile. “Light is pretty, Bunny. I have always thought so. I do not particularly want to destroy the thing I find prettiest in either world, and I am becoming steadily less convinced that anyone actually needs me to.”

I nod to show I’m listening.

“Light is pretty,” he says again, softer this time, and his eyes don’t move from mine, not towards the mist, not towards anything else in this entire endless grey.

“Right,” I say. “Yes. Light. Excellent quality of light we’re having out here.”

He doesn’t look away. Doesn’t blink. Just keeps looking at me like that, steady and warm and entirely unhurried, until the actual meaning of it lands somewhere behind my sternum with something close to a physical thud.

“Oh,” I say. “You mean me.”

“I am simply stating a fact I have held for some time,” he says as his amber eyes flare.

“That is an outrageous way to compliment someone. Using an entire metaphysical concept as a chat up line.” Heat climbs straight up my neck into my face, and there isn’t anywhere out here for me to hide it. “You’ve made me blush!” I exclaim as I attempt to cover my cheeks with my hands.

Well, I suppose it’s my dream hands and a dream blush, which makes it even more unfair. My subconscious is bullying me.

“It’s a lovely blush,” he says, something wicked flickering at the corner of his mouth.

“You’re not allowed to enjoy this,” I tell him.

“I am enjoying it enormously,” he says, entirely unrepentant.

I laugh, properly this time, and for a moment it’s almost easy. Almost just the two of us being ridiculous somewhere nobody else can see. I let myself have it, a few full seconds of nothing but him grinning at me and me going pink about it. Then I feel the laugh start to run out on its own, the way laughter does when the thing underneath it hasn’t actually gone anywhere.

His smile fades with mine, slower, watching it happen on my face like he can read exactly where I’m about to land.