AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What?”
The world lurched one last time and steadied. Books became books instead of kaleidoscopes. The rug lay back down and returned to being only a rug. Windows ceased streaming gold.
But the gilded sweetness lingered. The brightness stayed, etching wild patterns into ceilings, twining new vines into old tapestries, turning stone stairs to swirled marble and lapis lazuli. It hung in the air like favorite scents, like fresh-baked bread and crisp green grass and spiced ale, like clouds of roses and cardamom and poppy and saffron and cinnamon; like the tightness of Tir’s fingers around his and everything that Ollie’d ever loved, rolled up into a glowing everlasting day—
And an alarmed castle maid with hiked-up skirts dashed through the library door and panted, “Majesty—Highnesses—in the courtyard, there’re horses and dancers and ribbons and flowers and fairies and a Queen—”
“My mother,” Tir said, laughter warring with disbelief; and Oliver looked at him, really looked, and he was stronger, more alert, brighter-cheeked, drinking in magic with every breath. Not healed, not completely; but sitting up on his own, and breathing easily, and glowing with newfound recognition. “I think you all guessed about the royalty part, but, well, I hope you don’t mind that the Prince you’re marrying is sort of a Fairy Prince—”
“Do I look like I mind? Come here and I can show you how much I don’t mind—”
“I love kissing you in the library.—but anyway I was wrong, I thought, oh, Ollie, I thought it just meant you’d have magic and I’d’ve sacrificed myself and the realms would grow closer over that, start to talk at last, perhaps, but—but you asked me to marry you—”
“What did your prophecy actually say?”
“That I’d fall in love with a human prince of the kingdom over the border, and I’d die to save him, and that would bind our realms more closely together—” Tir moved to get up; Ollie helped, offering support. “Oliver, I think we—”
“Tir,” Cedric asked pathetically, directed at the person who had marginally more answers than the rest of them, “what’s going on?”
Ellie got up as well; even brushing momentary fright and library-floor dust-bunnies and magic motes from the velvet of her dress, she was a monarch and a mother to her kingdom and her family. “I expect we should go down and greet Oliver’s future mother-in-law. Tir, please tell me how I’m supposed to address a Fairy Queen.”
“You’re my mother too.” Tir held out his spare hand to take hers. “Since I was twelve. She’ll know that. So…what I’m saying is I really don’t know. We’re family. And I think we’re a piece of Fairyland now as well.”
“We’re what?” Cedric put in, taking his mother’s hand on the other side: a family standing together, with magic beyond the library door. “Can we do magic now too? Like Tir?”
“No,” Ollie said, looking at Tirian, who’d stayed secure in the circle of his arm. “We’re not just a piece of Fairy. We’re human. Closer together, in the middle, sort of. Like you said. We’re…something new. Right?”
Tir’s smile was more brilliant than the newborn splendor around them. “Yes.”
“So let’s go meet your mother,” Ollie said, “and, I guess, open up…diplomatic relations with Fairy, and…plan a wedding? How do fairies get married?”
“I’m sure my mother’ll tell us,” Tir mused as they started down gold-wreathed surprisedly now-marble stairs, “which is good, because I’ve lived with you long enough that I literally have no idea. I think flower crowns may be involved.”
“I can live with flower crowns,” Oliver decided, as his mother gave orders, as the Home Guard raced each other to open up the palace gates and let the waiting enchantment pour in and the uncharted future begin, “because, y’know, I also get to live with you.”
Epilogue: Beginnings
Happy endings, Oliver discovered, came with complications. Imperfectly perfect. Thrilling anyway. Full of effervescence like berry wine in his veins, every time he glanced at Tir. But nonetheless: complicated.
Tir was wonderful. Tir holding his hand was wonderful. Tir sending him a shyly happy smile across the breakfast table was wonderful. Those chilly grey eyes lit up like springtime mornings when they found his: remembering all over again that they were each other’s and this could be real.
Tir hadn’t recovered quite as much as they’d all—including Tir himself—not so secretly hoped. Better, yes; he could explore the new telescope at night, and went out to the stables and flung himself onto Sprite’s back and took off, daring scattered clouds to keep up. Oliver laughed and rode with him, longer excursions each week, and watched the aftermath with taut alert protectiveness.
Tir and Fadi both said the general tiredness and lack of magic would improve, but gradually, over years rather than days; Fairy had come to Bellemare, and it was nearly like being home, but not quite.
Imperfect. But enough. Alive.
That wasn’t the problem, or not exactly. The problem was the Fairy Court, though not in the way anyone expected. The Court glittered and flashed and tumbled like jewels spilled across bewildered homespun cloth, but they were kind and they meant well and they wanted to get to know the family who’d welcomed and loved their prince.
Pixies and sylphs popped into the local cheesemaker’s shop, solid gnomes and woodsy dryads explored the grounds, and if any of them sniffed at a lack of wings or an inability to taste magic like candied apples, the majority only curiously asked how teakettles worked, and got delighted at telescopes and microscopes and badly-rhymed ballads recited in pubs. They came in multifaceted shapes and sizes, more and less human, winged and not, child-sized and not, fire-haired and slinky and graceful and fascinated as cats, most of them. They were manifestly not human, but they laughed and grew tipsy off local barleywine like anyone else, and several of them went and found Oliver’s art in the exhibition and accidentally gave away his pseudonym by saying it felt the same as he did to their senses.
Tir got very amused at this last story, and then properly looked at this year’s entry, with its first-place ribbon, and became gravely and pensively happy for a minute. “You put me in it.”
Ollie said, “It wasn’t a library without you.”
Tir said, “You know the judges knew all along, every year, it’s not as if it’s a subtle false name, it’s even got mine in it too.”
“I know,” Ollie said, even though he hadn’t known anyone had guessed. “You’re always part of me.”
