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He even managed to keep that resolution, at least for the morning. Hot spiced cocoa pressed into fairy-hands. Assiduous fetching of porridge and eggs and bacon. Asking whether Tir wanted yesterday afternoon’s book thrown into a saddlebag. The latter question earned him a suspicious gaze. “No, I’ve finished it. Are you all right?”
“Me?”
“You don’t normally stare at me while I’m eating breakfast—oh no. This is about last night. You’re hovering. Because of last night.”
“I am not.” He was. “I just, um, want to make sure you eat…so you, um, can…keep up. With me. Riding.”
Tir gave him a long flat look. Held out the last piece of toast. “We both know who needs it more. I’ll pick you up if you land on your face in a mud-puddle again.”
“One time,” Ollie said. “One time. And we were kids. No, you eat it, I had some.”
Tir smirked at him. Then licked marmalade off a fingertip: unfussy, familiar, casual as a kitten. Oliver’s chest did something. A strange little thump. Tir might not tease him over breakfast, after a Quest. After a rescue, and maybe a marriage.
He ate the last piece of bacon. This saved him from having to talk, but even bacon couldn’t alleviate the sudden wistful hole in his chest.
They said goodbye to Queen Ellie, who hugged them both, told them to be careful and that she was so proud of them, seeing them take up this tradition, going out to help someone in need. Tir was smiling faintly when she let go: expression fleeting and self-directed, as if at a private and not entirely happy joke. Oliver would’ve asked, but Cedric had flung exuberant arms around him and was rambling about heroic deeds and adventure and the possibility of Ollie seeing an ogre. This required some disentangling.
Freed, he—and Tir—waved at various castle staff and guardsmen and villagers; the turnout, by the north castle gate, was impressive. Well-wishers and the curious, people he’d drawn in taverns and inns, people who knew him and Tir. People who wanted to cheer on their Prince, who had a Quest to follow. Believing in him.
Ollie, not looking at all the celebratory joy directed his way, swung up onto his own horse, a big sturdy bay with a happy temperament, and looked at Tir. Tir, poised like artwork on his own favorite mare, all blue riding leathers and black hair and sleek black horse dancing underneath him, tilted that head: Are you ready?
No, Oliver thought, no, I’m not, not really, not for a Quest—
But he’d go. He did not, in a world of magic and possibilities, have any real choice.
He nodded back at Tir. They took off, in flight, heading North. Toward fairy country.
And, despite his reservations, the first day proved ominously uneventful.
They did ride North, but they rode through fields they knew, villages where people recognized Oliver and Oliver’s fairy-shadow and beckoned them in for a meal or a cup of tea. They paused to help a widower fix a fence. Oliver jammed a stake into ground, triumphant, and looked up to see Tir calmly walking out of the forest with all six missing pigs docilely trotting behind him. He made a few jokes, but only the amount any reasonable person would, because he was being nice. Tirian rolled those expressive eyes.
Of course Tir could find lost pigs. Tir could do anything; Oliver entirely believed that.
That old question sidled up anew, as he watched his fairy scratch a sow under the chin with no thought given to any incongruity of elegant fingers and bristly hair. It was a question that nobody’d ever outright asked, but the subject of vast speculation in taverns and below palace stairs. No one would put it to Tir, of course.
In every single legend, fairies who came across the border had some sort of purpose. Some form of motive. Light or dark, mischief or protection: always a reason. A few wicked sorcerers in old tales claimed to be able to summon and bind fairies to their will, but those stories tended to end bloodily and badly; in any case no one had ever claimed responsibility for Tir being here.
Nobody would ask Tir because, in the first place, it’d be terribly rude: one should treat fairies with good manners. In the second place…
In the second place it could be not only rude but conceivably dangerous, if the fairy was offended, if the fairy was under a spell or a geas not to speak of it, if consequences arose.
Tir, being Tir, had saved them a small amount of consternation by explaining, unasked, that he wasn’t allowed to say much. He’d been sent, he’d been told to find Bellemare’s royal family, and he’d obeyed. Ollie knew his parents—after welcoming their unexpected guest, finding Tirian a room, asking what he’d like for supper—had had late-night discussions about this sudden development, after the children had gone to bed.
He knew because, a couple of weeks later, he’d been invited to one of those discussions, as the Heir. His parents had been proud and worried and serious about it: Oliver needed to know what they were thinking. A stray bit of wild magic turning up meant some sort of magical presence, an epic brewing, a legend in the making, for one of their family. Potential glory. Potential peril.
They’d guessed Tirian had to be some sort of fairy royalty from the inhuman fineness of his clothes and the Court polish of his politeness; not precisely the same as their own customs, but Tir clearly knew about the way a court functioned, the duty of a monarch, the devotion to one’s people. Queen Ellie had looked at him and seen the fairy-creature but also simply a boy, twelve years old and in need of chocolate biscuits. Tir had not had the palace’s famous chocolate biscuits before. He’d taken one bite, and stared at it, wide-eyed.
He’d spent the most time with both Oliver and Cedric at first, another brother underfoot. Somehow gradually he’d spent more time with Oliver, permanently right there when Oliver needed a hand in the weapons training yard or a sounding board before public speeches or a partner in tavern-related mischief. That hadn’t changed. Not in all the long years.
In the present, Tir had continued petting the pig, simultaneously listening with apparently honest interest to the farmer’s story about the time the village cows ate strange indigo grasses after a wind out of the North. The cows had supposedly given blue milk for a month; the punchline of what was almost certainly a tall tale was, “…and they still do, once in a blue moon.”
Tir laughed. The farmer looked as if he’d just realized that he’d told this story to a fairy and was trying to work out whether he should be nervous or proud. Tir said solemnly, “Only once in a blue moon? If they ate moon-grass, you should be getting at least twice that amount of blue milk, or so I’ve heard,” and the man now looked as if he was trying to work out whether or not this was serious, at least until Tir grinned, and then he guffawed.
The closest Tir had ever come to revealing his reasons had been the night of his twenty-first birthday, which they’d celebrated by hosting an all-night party in his favorite tavern. Tirian could outdrink just about anyone, courtesy of fairy blood or maybe only fortunate inheritance, but neither of them’d been sober by the time they’d stumbled home. Tir’d said, leaning on Oliver’s shoulder in his bedroom doorway, obviously continuing a line of conversation only existing in his head, “Sometimes I think it won’t be that hard, when it’s for you…”
“What won’t?” Oliver had asked, struggling to balance tipsy fairy-muscles and his own sloshing brain and uncoordinated toes. “Hey, d’you mind if I just pass out on your bed too?”
“I never do, do I…?” They’d fallen heavily onto the mattress; Oliver, vaguely recalling that it was Tir’s birthday, had managed to tug his fairy’s boots off, though not his own. Tir had mumbled words that sounded like thanks, and then something else that sounded like, “I’m going to die because of you, that’s what.”
