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He wanted to know the sun the way a fairy would: a sentience, an awareness, slow and bright, steady in its rhythms, rising and falling. He’d once been able to speak to the moon, to the birds, to the tall rose-silver grasses in the wild meadows, when he held out a hand and sang along with them and felt their healthy roots in the earth and the joy in each tall rustling blade.
He knew every choice he’d made. He would never have chosen any other path.
For his land, which had asked: a future that brought Fairy out of rumor and myth, down to earth and real, no longer isolated and glittering as the knives and fangs of human folktales.
For his husband, who had not asked for any of this: the man Tir had grown up beside, here in this strange kingdom to the South, in which senses were muffled and no one sang to roses; someone who was a good man, an artist, a tall kindhearted shaggy-haired worrier over his people and his country and Tir. Oliver would have died, on that quest, facing a dragon; Tir had shoved him out of the way. Had taken that destiny. Without hesitation.
He knew all of that, and yet: he felt so tired, and the sunlight wasn’t preventing the cold, not just now.
He stayed put, trying to soak up the beams, the light. Summer in Bellemare was warm, or should be warm. Fairy, having come to Bellemare, had disrupted the weather. Unpredictable, but interesting. Bluebells one day, rain showers the next. Grapes ready for harvest, unexpectedly. Tea-bushes sprouting where tea had not historically grown.
He heard the door, an oaken announcement. He sat up, and turned, hastily; but Oliver was already sprinting across the room, heedless of princely clothing or the obstacles of Tir’s shed boots and inconvenient furniture. “Tir—are you—”
“I’m all right, only tired—”
But Oliver’s eyes widened in alarm, and he was stepping closer, over to Tir’s spot by the window; his big hands were gentle, so gentle, touching Tir’s shoulder, lifting Tir’s chin. “Polly came to find me. She said you weren’t well.”
Tir caught his wrists; Oliver’s hands had come up to cup his face, to scrutinize him for signs of illness. “Polly shouldn’t be interrupting your work, and she knows it.” That was unfair, though; he added, “She cares, I know.” All the palace staff did. They said so, in words, in pots of mint-leaf and willow tea, in fiercely proud protectiveness of their princes. He had grown up here, after all.
Oliver had been working. Meetings about earth and stone, gnomes and salamanders, mining rights and precious metals, and how that might be worked out when occasionally the metals themselves had opinions. Everyone involved wanted this to work, which helped; Oliver was an artist, creative and imaginative, and good at listening to people, which helped more.
“She worries,” Ollie said. “And you’re doing a little better, I know you are, but that’s not the same as being, y’know…”
“I just had a headache. That’s all.”
Oliver’s thumb rubbed over his cheek, intimate and fond and pensive. “Six months ago you died. Today. To the day.”
“It hasn’t been—” It had. Exactly six months. When he counted.
He should’ve remembered. He reached up, drew his husband down onto the window-seat with him. “I’m fine.”
“Are you? Should I call Fadi up here?”
“He’s busy blissfully lecturing his new research assistants about blood types and categories and magical transference and how it can help with who gets what blood. Don’t ask me to explain. I mostly nodded in agreement until he told me I could go. That wasn’t the headache.”
Oliver flung a small glare at Tir’s arm—Ollie never had liked needles or blood—and promptly gathered him up for cuddling. “You don’t have to be his test subject.” A lot of Tir’s empty cold spots filled up with joy, at the feel of him, the words, the large happy security, the gold in Oliver’s hair and beard and soul.
He answered lazily, basking in the joy, “Ah, but I’m unique. He wanted a fresh sample or six. To do whatever it is physicians do in their mysterious secret laboratories. Actually I might want to know. If I ever write a novel.”
“Will there be secret laboratories in your novel? If that wasn’t the headache, what was?” Oliver’d put a hand into Tir’s hair, fingers kneading gently, a massage. It felt glorious.
“Oh…no, it’s not anything you can solve. It’s not anything I can solve.” Though as he said that he wondered, just for an instant. If he went home, North, all the way to the heart of magic, the mists and veils…he and Fadi had guessed once before that that might help, letting him feel the land and Fairy inside and out, in every breath.
They’d also guessed it might not help, or might not matter. Fairyland had come to Bellemare; the air rang with it, infused and rushing with it. A combination, a joining, like Tir himself; he might be better off here. And part of the problem was sensitivity; the channels inside his head had been scraped out, drained, left exposed. Every drop of flowing magic he’d had left, he’d spent in trying to literally, physically, put himself back together. It’d been a finite resource. Rivers emptied. Left dry.
Oliver’s fingers paused. “I know I’ve said this before, but…just please tell me if you can’t, or won’t, tell me something. I’ll understand, or I’ll try to. I know you sometimes can’t. The way your land talks to you, if it asks for a secret. But please tell me if that’s what’s going on. I won’t ask what it is.”
“Oliver,” Tir said, sitting up. “I love you so much.”
“I know you do.”
“I would tell you. I would.” He knew why that promise was both a hope and a wound. He knew Oliver understood as much as possible—certainly about the initial prophecy, and the fact that Tir had not been allowed to explain, because it had to come to pass, without interference. He knew Oliver knew that it’d caused pain, real physical pain, if he’d tried.
He knew that the larger problem had happened after that. When he’d come back from the dead, or the nearly dead, or at least discorporated; and then he’d been so afraid that he hadn’t done what was asked, he hadn’t saved Oliver at all, and he’d come back with no magic and no power and pure horror that he couldn’t be any help when the next threat came, and he couldn’t tell any of that to the man he loved…
He could have. He knew that now. He’d been meant to sacrifice himself for Oliver; that’d been needed, to show the humans that Fairyland was more than unpredictable dangerous unfamiliarity. He’d been meant to come back, to marry or at least commit himself to Oliver, to solidify that alliance. He could’ve just said something, at that point. Oliver would’ve married him on the spot.
But he hadn’t known he could explain, then. And he hadn’t known how Oliver felt. He’d seen the relief, the joy, the fear for him, in Oliver’s face; he hadn’t known whether that had been the love of a friend, the guilt of a good person who’d watched Tir die for him, or a glimpse of something more.
