Nico was eleven now and had not, in the year and a half since Westover Hall, become simpler. The Hades bloodline was a specific kind of complicated: the Underworld in its fullest expression was complex, the domain of death and shadow and the particular weight of things that had ended, and carrying it in a child's body at eleven expressed as a combination of extraordinary power and the specific rawness of someone who had not yet had time to develop the capacity to hold what they carried.
He had also been through a great deal. His sister had left with the Hunt. He had met his divine father under difficult circumstances. He had been at camp for a year and a half in the Hades cabin — the Hades cabin, which had existed before the edict because Hades was one of the three eldest gods and his children were formally part of the camp's structure even if informally treated with the particular wariness that mortals and demigods extended to anything associated with the Underworld.
The Mythomagic evenings had continued. Not every Tuesday anymore — Nico had other things now, the specific busy schedule of an eleven-year-old at a demigod camp with legitimate power and increasing control over it. But regularly, when both of them had time, they played.
Nico had gotten considerably better. Not because Kael had let him win — he had not — but because Nico, like most people who were genuinely interested in something, improved through consistent exposure to a demanding standard. He played with strategy now rather than just enthusiasm. He had developed a specific tendency to sacrifice material for positional advantage that Kael recognized, with some amusement, as a very Underworld approach to game theory.
One Tuesday in late August, Nico put down his cards at the end of a session and said, without looking up: 'I miss Bianca.'
'Yes,' Kael said. Simply, without rushing to fill the space around it.
'She's still alive,' Nico said. He was working something out. 'Which I know is — I know that's because of you. Annabeth told me what you did. About the note.' He finally looked up, with those Hades-dark eyes that saw past the surface of things. 'I used to think if she'd died on the quest that it would have been my fault. Because I made the statue fall and that started it. But she didn't die. So I've been trying to figure out how I feel about that.'
Kael looked at him. Eleven years old and this was the thing he was working through. He thought: this is what Underworld blood looks like when it's being handled well — the willingness to go into the hard places of your own interior rather than around them.
'It was not going to be your fault,' he said. 'What happened with the statue and the quest was not caused by you. It was caused by forces much larger than either of you. Your guilt about it was — it was understandable. It was also not accurate.'
'I know that now,' Nico said. 'I'm still working out what I feel about it.' He looked at his cards. 'She said you tell her things honestly. Not managed. She said she prefers that.'
'Yes,' Kael said.
'Do you do that with me too?'
Kael looked at the boy across the Mythomagic cards and thought about every conversation they had had in the last year and a half, and whether they had been honest, and they had — he had made a conscious choice, with Nico as with Bianca, to give the real version. 'Yes,' he said. 'I try to.'
Nico nodded. He reorganized his cards with the deliberate care of someone who thinks better with his hands occupied. 'I think I'm going to be okay,' he said. 'Not right now. Eventually. I think I'm going to figure it out.'
'I know you are,' Kael said. He said it not as reassurance but as honest assessment, which was the register Nico received best. 'The figuring out is already happening. The fact that you know you're working through something is the beginning of working through it.'
Nico looked at him with those deep eyes. Then he picked up his next card. 'My move,' he said. And it was.