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He said again now, under sunlight, in their familiar bedroom, “I’m so sorry, Oliver.”
Oliver looked away, at a bookcase, the edge of an intricately patterned rug. “It’s all right.”
“No, it really isn’t, but I’m trying.” He put out a hand, found his husband’s fingers, ran a touch along the metal of Oliver’s wedding ring. His own matched; the rings were an alloy, a joining of Bellemare’s raw gold and a metal Tir didn’t actually know a good translated name for, from a seam that opened because it liked to sometimes, up in the hills beyond the Singing Larkspurs. He’d always heard it called lightglow, and it did: a shimmering pale silver that shifted under sun and moon and candle. They’d wanted—and both kingdoms, politically, had wanted—a coming-together, for the symbol.
“You tell me what you can,” Oliver said. “I do understand about obligations, you know.”
“Oh, you turnip. No.” That made Oliver smile: success. “I want to be honest with you. I have been. All right, I know I told you I was fine on that ride back from Heartwater in the rain, last month—”
“I’ve also learned that we have different definitions of fine.”
“I did tell you when it got bad enough.” He had. He should’ve said so earlier. In his defense, he’d thought he could manage—he was a good rider, Sprite was fabulous at understanding her person’s directions and moods, and the dizziness and exhaustion had been a slow build, lurking under the rhythms of motion and rain. It’d been bad already, before he’d turned his head to answer a question from Oliver, and had realized how awful he felt. “I just didn’t…I am trying.”
“I know. Come here.” Oliver put an arm around him, held him. “We’re good. And I love you.”
Tir put his head on his husband’s shoulder. Shut his eyes. “Talking to my mother, talking to Rae…not at once, I mean, one after the other…”
Oliver made a small wordless sound of comprehension.
“Mother…I don’t know. She loves me. I love her. She adores you.”
“I like her, too.” Oliver did; Tir knew that. His mother wasn’t human, and did not quite understand a world that did not speak to and shift and flow in response to the emotions of the life within it; but she loved the man who loved her son, who’d ridden out to find and save her son, when Tir had hauled himself back from the brink and then promptly collapsed into unconsciousness in a mountain ravine, and stayed not conscious for a week.
He said, “She just…sometimes, when she looks at me…I can tell it hurts. She’s the Queen of Fairy—she is magic. She feels the land, its wants, its needs…she can think a thing, or want a thing, and the skies will rain, or the pumpkins will grow, or a star will fall…and I’m her only son. And the Prince of Fairy. And I can’t even talk to the grass.”
Oliver took this in with the equanimity of someone who’d got used to Tir, over the years they’d been friends and—now, finally—lovers, and husbands. “You think she’s disappointed in you?”
“It’s not that. I did what we needed. I did exactly what we needed. What the land, the magic, asked of me. It’s more…when she assumes I’ve heard something, felt something…that I can do something, when I can’t…and then I think she wants to cry.” That morning she’d said casually, of course the first frost-wind will tell us when the seasons want to change, even if we’re further South; perhaps you can speak to the rivers…and stopped there, abrupt.
He’d said he’d find someone to ask. His responsibility, as their Prince.
He added, “And then Rae had wanted to talk to me—you know that, it was on my schedule—and apparently she’s serious about picking up that idea you had of starting a sort of…magical school, or not exactly school, more like organized apprenticeships. I didn’t know she was that serious about anything much, but she thinks it’s worth doing. To make magic more…comprehensible, for your people. And for us, really; we’ve never done any proper studies of it. And for the human people who have some fairy blood—people like Fadi, who never got any training, who kept it secret for so long—that would be helpful.”
“I’m happy to let her take over that one. She wanted your blessing? As the Prince?”
“Not exactly.” His favorite cousin Istrael—the next Heir Apparent, after Tir, to the rule of Fairy; maybe even the actual Heir under the circumstances, though the land was being quiet about that for the moment—possessed the best world-sense and magical attunement of anyone Tir knew. Especially with himself removed from consideration. Which he might or might not be. That was another part of the headache. “If she thinks she should be involved, she probably ought to be. She wants my help. Instruction. Exercises. Ideas.”
Oliver moved, a startlement of response. “You can’t—”
“No,” Tir said, looking down. “I can’t. I really can’t. I can’t…I could tell someone what it should feel like, what I used to feel, but…I won’t be able to do it. I can’t.” He heard the fractures under his own voice. He hated them. He’d always been the strong one. Knowing what to do. Knowing his purpose. Rescuing his land. Rescuing Oliver.
Who held onto him more fiercely. “She should damn well know better.”
“I think she thinks she’s helping. Telling me I’m not useless.”
“You’re not—”
“Magically speaking.”
Oliver said a few words. They were short and blunt and very human.
Tir tucked his face into the crook of his husband’s neck, breathing in. His hair slid along the side of his face, a shield with tiny sparkles braided in. The tears lurked right there—he felt them—but he didn’t want to cry. “I said no. Actually, I said no, and that she should ask someone else, and then I more or less ran out of my own office.”
“Oh, stars. I’m sorry, Tir. Do you want me to talk to her?” Oliver paused. “Do you want me to ask Cedric to talk to her?”
Oliver’s youngest sibling and Tir’s favorite cousin had been engaged in some sort of teasing flirtatious courtship for the past months, involving playful dances, terrible song contests, and pleasurable physical intimacies in woodland clearings. Tir knew that last part not because he’d asked but because Istrael had told him, merrily unprompted.
He had not previously known most fairies, or Cedric, to have relationships that lasted more than a fleeting season, whimsical, the span of desire; he had been gone from Fairy long enough to not know Rae well, any longer. He remembered her as a small girl with loose flower-strewn hair and a serpentine ability to navigate the rules of any magical game to her own advantage, not maliciously.
