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He scooped up a pillow to hug. It shook tassels and decades-old needlepoint at him in solidarity.
Tir and Oliver arrived about five minutes after this, while he was gazing blankly at an open antique star-chart framed by fanciful wyverns and scampering pooka-ponies, and not processing any of the rearing playful shapes. They sat down beside him, golden and dark, Oliver’s arm around Tir’s shoulders.
“Go away,” Fadi said.
“So,” Tir said, only that, though the syllable contained boundless compassion.
“Want to talk,” Ollie asked, “or do you want us to open the good whiskey? We can. There’s some up here.”
“No. Perhaps. I don’t know.” He put his head in his hands. “Yes, why not.”
Oliver wrapped Tirian up in blankets, went and found a battered cozy shelf in the corner, and came back with a bottle and glasses. “Here.” They were still wearing ballroom attire, blue and silver, embroidered and elaborate; they looked like two princes and the guests of honor, as they were. Ollie folded his arms around Tir, over plaid fleece and wool; a strand of Tir’s dark hair poked out along with his smile.
Fadi accepted a glass, stared into it, sighed. “I’m not going to be allowed to not talk about this, am I.”
“Well…” Tir freed an arm from Ollie’s overzealous blankets to pat him on the shoulder. “If you truly don’t want to, we won’t make you.”
“Thank you.”
“If, on the other hand, you would like advice—”
“About having a—a—whatever it is we were doing—with a member of the Fairy Court?”
“About being a symbol.” Tir’s smile went sideways: crooked, rueful, even a bit sad, but serene in its place.
Fadi remembered about ballads, and about prophecies, and about destined dooms and forfeiture of magic; and said, unhappily, “I’m sorry.” Tirian had lost more than he had; the ballads and the prophesied love carried the weight of myth, too.
“No.” Tir squeezed his shoulder. “That doesn’t make yours less real. You didn’t ask to be the face of unification for us.”
“We’re your friends,” Ollie put in, “and we owe you, besides. So, what can we do?”
“It’s happened, hasn’t it?” He waved a hand, forgot he had whiskey in it, spilled some next to his boot. “We can’t be going back now.”
“And no, it isn’t fair.” Tir let Ollie tuck his arm back into blankets, fussing over cold. “It isn’t anything you’ve had a choice in, and he didn’t mean to hurt you but he did, and so it hurts. You can feel it. You’re allowed to feel it.”
“Yes,” Fadi said, staring at his feet, staring at the whiskey-drops beside them. His feet were miserable. Every part of him was miserable.
“But after that,” Tir said, “after you’ve done that, I think…I think you might start to think about what you want. For you, I mean, for yourself.”
“It’s been a week. I don’t even know him.”
“Well,” Oliver said, in the tone of someone delivering a self-evident truth, “get to know him.”
“It’s likely too late in any case. I ran away from him in a ballroom.”
“We could—”
“I’m not one of your romance-novel heroines, Tir.”
Tir’s eyes lit up at this. “What if we—”
“Tirian,” Oliver interjected, “my one and only true love, darling, soon to be husband, we are not locking Fadi and your cousin in a bathing-room until they confess their hidden emotions.”
“It would’ve been the infirmary office,” Tir protested. “Where they first met. More romantic.”
“And you want one of these of your own,” Ollie said to Fadi, with affection, and dropped a kiss on the side of Tir’s head. “Warm enough?”
“Oh, fine,” Tir said absently, “I’ve got you draped all over me. Do you realize, though—” This was directed at Fadi. “—if you marry my cousin, we’ll be related?”
