“I did not personally choose to pursue the throne, it was not a plan born of greed,” Dis says. His voice is low. He’s looking at Adam, and there is something in his expression I’ve rarely seen there, something stripped of the usual composure. Honesty, plain and unarmoured. “I want to be clear about that. Not because it excuses anything. But because I need you to understand that I did not set out toharm people. I set out to survive. Everything else was in service of that.”
Adam looks at him steadily.
“What was done to me,” Dis continues, and something shifts in his voice, something careful and controlled that suggests there is a great deal beneath the surface that he is choosing, precisely, not to show. “From the very beginning of my existence, carved one truth into me above all others. That the throne was the only worthy objective. That power was the only currency. That attachment was weakness and sentiment was failure and anything that did not serve the singular goal of dominion was to be excised.” He stops. “I was not taught this gently.”
The silence that follows is a different kind of silence.
Adam’s face has changed. I watch it change, the anger and the hurt shifting into something more complicated, something that is trying to accommodate new information about a person he had already categorised.
Hex’s expression is its own kind of eloquent. He knows, I think. He knows more than he’s saying about what it means to be made into a weapon, about the specific cost of being something ancient and powerful with nothing to hold onto except the thing you were built to want.
“That’s...” Adam starts. Stops.
“Horrible,” I say quietly, because it is, and because someone should say it plainly.
“Yes,” Dis says. Just that.
Adam looks at me. “You knew this.”
“I found out. Gradually.” I think about the Scrabble board. The hand through the circle. “He doesn’t talk about it easily.”
“No,” Dis agrees. “I do not.”
Adam looks at Dis for a long moment. Then he looks at Hex, and something passes between them that is private, and I don’t try to read it.
“The things I did,” Dis says, to Adam specifically, with the gravity of someone who has thought carefully about what needs to be said and is saying it precisely. “Using Felix. Using you. It was not personal. I want you to know that, for whatever it is worth. You were not people to me then. You were variables. Elements of a strategy.” He pauses. “I am aware that this is not the comfort it might seem. I am not offering it as comfort. I am offering it as truth, and as the closest I can come to an explanation that does not excuse.”
Adam is quiet for a long moment.
“You were horrible,” he says finally.
“Yes,” Dis says.
“You nearly killed my fiancé.”
“Yes.”
“And now you’re in Felix’s jumper on Felix’s sofa and you’ve apparently been cosy this whole time and Felix has been lying to me about it.”
“Yes,” Dis says. “I am sorry for my part in that. Felix was protecting something that mattered to him. I could have made it easier for him to be honest, and I chose not to, because having him keep my presence secret served my interests.”
I look at Dis. He meets my eyes briefly with an expression that says far more than words could ever hope to.
Adam waves his hands around in a gesture of pure exasperation. I can see the conflict in his eyes. He islistening. He is horrified by Dis’s past, but he can’t forget the terror Dis caused him. “Felix, how can you trust him?”
“Adam,” Hex’s voice is quiet. The room attends to it the way rooms attend to Hex when he uses that particular tone, the one that carries the weight of what he actually is underneath the ordinary Bristol life he’s built. He moves to stand beside Adam, close, and Adam’s shoulders drop slightly just from the proximity. “Will you let me explain something?”
Adam looks at him. Nods.
Hex is quiet for a moment, in the way he’s quiet when he’s choosing words carefully, when he’s trying to translate something that doesn’t have a clean human equivalent.
“Shadow beings,” he says, “do not love the way humans love. It is not a feeling that comes and goes. It does not diminish. It does not transfer.” He pauses. “When we love, it is complete. Total. It is the whole of what we are, directed at one thing, one person, and it does not answer to reason or circumstance or the wars we have fought or the wrongs we have done.” His red eyes find mine briefly. “It is the most powerful force in all the realms. More powerful than thrones or magic or old grievances. It is reverent. Sacred. In the Shadow Realm it is treated as such, because it cannot be controlled or commanded and it is always, always respected.”
Adam’s eyes have grown enormous. His mouth has formed into an O shape. Colour is flushing across his cheeks. I strongly suspect that this is the most openly Hex has ever talked about what love means to his kind. Because the prince is charming, affable, and often shameless, but he’s rather constipated about emotions.
“So…” Adam stutters. “Dis loves Felix so…” he trails off.
“There is no one in all the realms I can trust more,” I supply.
