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We’re standing very close now. Something in the mist has changed, gone taut somehow, charged. Like the whole space has finally noticed what we’re circling and is holding its breath along with us.

“I’m scared,” I say, plainly, because there doesn’t seem to be any point pretending otherwise, not here, not to him. “This is the actual biggest thing either of us has ever said out loud, and I’m properly, thoroughly terrified.”

“So am I.” His hands find mine, both of them, cool but solid, gripping tight enough that I can feel it even here, even in a place made of mist and wanting. “I have led armies. I have taken a throne I never asked for. I have never once, in the entirety of my existence, been as afraid as I am standing here, about to say this.”

My stomach is fluttering and my knees are shaking. “Then say it with me.”

The grey around us seems to pulse, once. Like something enormous just turned to look at exactly this spot. I grip his hands back just as hard. Whatever’s listening, whatever’s watching to see which way this breaks, I am not doing this without him holding on.

“What if we just,” I say, “don’t.”

“Don’t fight,” he says.

“Don’t destroy anything,” I say. “Don’t play the parts we were handed.”

“Don’t let a destiny that never once asked either of us if we were willing decide how it ends.” His voice shakes on it, actually shakes. Somehow that’s the thing that steadies me completely, the proof that this costs him exactly as much as it costs me.

“I refuse it,” I say, and my own voice comes out fierce and unsteady all at once. “All of it. Whatever it costs me with my own side.”

“Then I refuse it too,” he says, “whatever it costs me with mine.” The mist around us shudders properly this time. Light and dark both flicker through it at once, like the whole space can’t decide which one we’ve chosen.

We’re both shaking. Both of us gripping each other’s hands like the ground might actually give way if we let go. Then he laughs, unsteady and disbelieving and utterly delighted. I feel myself laughing too, the two of us grinning at each other like idiots in the exact middle of the bravest, most terrifying thing either of us has ever done.

He lets go of one of my hands. His newly freed hand comes up, slow, cupping my jaw like he’s giving me every chance to step back before he closes the distance. I don’t step back. I lean into it instead. Then his mouth is on mine, warm despite everything cold about the space we’re standing in. I feel him breathe out against me, unsteady, like something in his chest has finally let go too.

I kiss him back properly, both hands fisting in his shirt, holding on the way you hold onto something you nearly didn’t get to keep. He tastes like nothing and like everything at once, mist and certainty and him, unmistakably him. For a moment there’s nothing else in this entire grey endless place except the two of us and the fact that neither of us is letting go first.

Somewhere behind us the light keeps shifting, gold and shadow chasing each other round the edges of everything, and neither of us pays it any attention.

Then the mist starts thinning, light bleeding in grey and gold at the edges of everything. I feel myself being pulled backward, out of the dream and up through layers of sleep I don’t remember falling through. His hand slips out of mine one finger at a time, like the dream itself is trying to be gentle about the parting.

Then my eyes open.

Grey light. A cracked bit of ceiling plaster shaped vaguely like Wales. Adam’s breathing, slow and even, off to my left. A camp bed creaking under me as I shift.

I’m awake.

I lie completely still for a second, heart going far too fast for someone who was technically just lying here the whole time. My hand moves on its own, checking, as if his fingers might somehow still be laced through mine.

They’re not. Instead, my broken bunny ears are still clutched against my chest, plastic headband digging faintly into my palm.

I stare at the ceiling and grin, helplessly, uncontrollably. The whole enormous, impossible thing we just did, out loud, together, sits warm in my chest like a coal I’m hoarding. For one entire glorious minute I let myself just lie here being happy about it, wide awake at whatever hour this actually is.

Then it properly lands that I’m going to have to say all of it out loud, to everyone currently breathing in this room.

Chapter 28

Held Breath

Idon’t get long to lie here enjoying the peace. Adam stirs a few feet away. And the second one person’s properly awake in a room this small, everyone else seems to wake up out of pure, unspoken solidarity. As if sleeping through someone else’s yawn would be rude.

Adam sits up first, stretching with a groan that suggests the camp bed has not been kind to his spine. Felix surfaces next, blinking at the ceiling like it’s personally responsible for him being awake. Hex’s eyes are simply open, all at once. No transition at all. No stretch, no groggy middle stage. Not for the first time, I find myself wondering whether he was ever actually asleep in the first place. Or whether shadow men do something else entirely with the hours the rest of us call night.

I look down at the floorboards while everyone else stirs and stretches. That’s when I properly notice them for the first time. Faint chalk marks worn almost invisible by foot traffic and time. A circle, symbols I don’t understand, right there under the edge of Dis’s camp bed. This is the exact room. The one Felix summoned him into, the one he kept him captive in, long before either of them had any idea what they were going to become to each other.

Dis is lying directly across the spot, eyes already open when I glance over. I couldn’t honestly say when they opened, or whether they were ever properly closed at all. I wonder whether either of them has noticed the chalk beneath them. Or whether it’s simply become part of the floor to them by now, the way old scars stop meaning anything once you’ve lived with them long enough.

Big Brian’s already up and gone, presumably out communing with whatever’s left of Bristol’s wildlife. Morgana’s sitting cross-legged on her camp bed, doing something quiet and private with a small crystal that nobody’s brave enough to ask about before coffee.