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“I know,” Oliver echoed, lifting his chin with a finger, leaning down for another kiss. “I heard.”
They held each other, this time.
Steps boomed in the hallway, on the staircase. The world clamoring in, coming to find them. They’d have a moment more in their private literary oasis; only a moment, and they’d need to reassure the rest of the family.
But for the next moment, this moment, this space was theirs. And the future could be theirs. Together.
“Tir,” Oliver said, head tipped to rest against that darker one, Tir’s hair silken on his skin, thinking that he could do this always, that he’d never tire of doing this, “how’re you feeling?”
“Tired,” Tir sighed, breath warm against Ollie’s throat. “A bit worse than usual. But only a bit. I didn’t know I could still do that.”
“I didn’t know you could do that.”
“I tried so hard not to use it…to save it. For saving you. I didn’t know what might be asked. How…” Tir hesitated. “How much it might take.”
All of you, Ollie thought but didn’t say. All of you. But you came back, you came back.
He kissed Tir again, tenderly, there on the library floor by the histories.
“It’s not too bad,” Tir murmured, understanding. “I don’t think I did any more impressive damage.”
“We’ll get Fadi to look at you. And if you’re hurt, if you’re not well…it’s my turn to take care of you.” He stopped, met Tir’s eyes. “I do mean that. Everything you’ve done, for me…it’s about time I did that for you. More than time. I’m fifteen years behind. I know I am. But I had a question, if you’re up to it.”
“Not all fifteen years,” Tir corrected. “I didn’t know it was you at first. A human prince, they said, the soothsayers. A human prince—they did say prince, not princess, so that helped narrow it down a bit—of this kingdom.”
“So…you might’ve been here for Cedric?” He failed to picture that. Especially now. “No.”
“I knew I’d fall in love with one of you, and die to save that one…even when I thought I knew, I had to make sure. Not a passing childhood daydream, not a single summer. But of course it was you. I waited, and it never went away, just got stronger. Always you. Never Cedric.”
Ollie snorted reflexively, but his heart’d gotten trapped by an earlier phrase. “You knew all along. You—you knew you were going to die—for me—how did you live with—”
“With that.” Tirian’s smile turned up and filled the library: tattered but luminous. “With knowing it would be to save you. And before you ask, I’d’ve chosen to in any case. I did choose to.”
“Oh…you…oh, Tir—”
“Of course before that I spent a lot of time being terrified that any random day might be the day, and hoping it would come so I’d get it over with, and then just being glad to have one more day with you, year after year.”
“Year after year…” He cleared his throat. Stunned by the depths of devotion. Standing quietly at his side all this time. He’d never guessed. Now he knew. “About that. I did say I had a question.”
“By all means,” Tir said, closer to his sarcastic affectionate self than Oliver had seen in weeks, smiling. He loved that smile. Always had. He knew that now.
“I love you,” he said. “I can’t say always, not like you can, except I sort of can, I just didn’t know. But when I thought about my future you were in it. And I did know before you—before I lost you. When we left. Before we left, even. I started to think—the only thing I knew I wanted was you. And then, um, acid sand, and—and your hands, and I thought—I didn’t want to finish the Quest. I wanted to hold your hands in mine again. So, um, if that helps, I was starting to figure it out, I’m not completely oblivious.”
Tir was laughing through tears, through emotion transcending enervation.
“Tirian,” Oliver said, Oliver asked him, “will you please marry me, because I’m a disaster without you and because you make me smile and you make me stronger, and I love you—and you know you’re my prince, you’re my destined True Love, the magic water said so—and also I really like kissing you in the library?”
Tir, laughing even more, got out, “Yes, Oliver, of course yes, you’re my disaster—” and they were kissing again when the library doors opened and the world changed.
That change wasn’t just hearts and admissions. Ollie thought it must be, thought the golden haze in the air and the faint blowing of trumpets and the taste of sugared violets were only his delirious senses; but Tir was sitting up more and looking around too and then Cedric and Queen Eleuthenia burst in and Cedric spluttered, “Is that an earthquake—”
Tir breathed astonished words, not human, the low cadence he’d once used on Oliver’s sword, the language of magic and desire. The language of enchantment. “It’s Fairy.”
Five Home Guard belatedly rushed in to take up stalwart but baffled protective positions around the royal family. Nothing to be fought off had immediately materialized, but the sense of quaking, of seismic shifts, built and built, stronger and stronger—
Ollie held onto Tir. Whatever else might be happening, he could do that, and he did. Faint halos of otherworldly colors appeared; book spines streaked and swirled and iridesced. The rug beneath them grew impossibly soft, puddling outward to the corners of the room. Glass rattled as windowpanes billowed with rainbow-and-gold light.
“Oliver—” Tir’s eyes were huge, thrilled, full of sudden rainbow-washed insight. “It’s us, it’s the end of my prophecy, I thought that meant you but I was wrong—”
