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“No,” Tir said finally, ending the odd silence. “I’ve never been in love like that.”
“And that’s how this Quest is supposed to work, I think. For my family.” Which should prove his point. Except he couldn’t quite recall his point. What had he been trying to say, about love and falling head over heels?
He eyed his best friend again. Something still felt off. Something felt not…well, not right. Nothing he could put a finger on. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“You have an actual headache, don’t you? Not, like, me just wanting to complain.”
“No. Yes. Not as such.” Tir looked away, into the leap and flare of the fire. He had a finger marking the spot where he’d stopped, in the novel. “It’s…it’s the North. That’s all. It’s a fairy-place, of course. One that ended up on your side of the border. It’s just the sense of it in my head. Like an itch, but inside. Prickly.”
This was almost certainly true; Tir never had lied to him. Oliver had the sense that there was more, though.
Maybe the magic itchiness was worse than Tir was letting on. That’d be something Tirian would do: not complete denial of it, not a lie about it, but minimizing the impact. Practicing self-discipline. “Hey,” he tried. “You know I’m here, right? Whatever you need.”
And Tir did smile. And it seemed like a genuine smile, no trace of…whatever that’d been. Before. “I know.”
“I can work on keeping a record. For, um, posterity. If you want me to leave you alone to read.”
“If you feel like starting that, then yes. Your mother did ask.”
“I can…make more tea? Mint?”
“If you’re offering,” Tir said, picking back up his book, “then I won’t say no. Perhaps it’ll feel good for both of us.”
Chapter 5: Obstacles
The landscape grew rockier. Drier. More grey. Hills sprouted stone boulders and crags like bewildered stone faces. Temperatures fell precipitously; plants took on iridescent hues, shimmering white and turquoise and primrose. Magic in the air.
Tirian shot him a look of sheer delight, the second day into the North, and nudged heels into his mare and took off: a streak of fairy wildness, person and horse, enchanted as the wind. Ollie sighed internally—he couldn’t breathe magic like vitality, and this wasn’t home for him—but Tir all lit up and glowing and daring him to follow, well. That made him want to follow. Made him grin.
This was home for Tir. More or less. The borderlands. The closest he’d got. Ollie wondered, pounding after his fairy-companion down a crooked defile, leaping a stream, catching up and playing tag on horseback among merry towering rocks and indecently iridescent hummingbirds, whether Tir missed it.
He wondered also, for the first time, why Tir had never ridden this far North. Never come so close to home. With that joy in each breath, in those chilly excited eyes.
He thought that this might be because of him. Because of himself: Tirian had spent years looking out for him, finding his missing boots and correcting his arithmetic sets before the tutor checked. Ollie had never cared much about riding up toward Fairyland, seeking out the perilous and the wondrous and the strange.
His chest did that odd twist and ache again, the way it had over bacon and toast the morning they’d left.
“Oliver,” Tir yelled over, laughing, pink-cheeked in brittle wind, “you’ll get stuck, that ravine’s a dead end—!”
“Carrot can turn on a penny!” Ollie shouted back, tugging at reins, getting Bellemare’s Autumn Harvest Joy to rear and spin obligingly, “and you didn’t tell me where we were going!”
“North!” Tir came back and reined Sprite in and waited helpfully while Ollie figured out directions. “You know. That way. Not down a dead-end ravine.”
“Ridiculous fairies and your ridiculous country,” Oliver grumbled at him. “How do you know it’s a dead end, anyway?”
“One, because I, unlike you, pay attention to my surroundings. Two…” Cool grey eyes got a little more cloud-like, pensive. “I don’t exactly know. It’s like…knowing.”
“Oh, right, that’s completely clear, thanks.”
“No, I mean…” Sprite matched Carrot’s pace amiably, without active direction from her rider. Ollie’d always half-suspected Tir had a mysterious magical bond with most animals, though when asked his fairy’d only started laughing hard enough to be useless for answers.
“I mean,” Tir said now, thinking aloud, “not like that. It doesn’t work if I think about it. It’s a little like remembering.”
“Like…you…” Came this way? When you were only twelve and alone in a brand-new human land?
He thought: I couldn’t’ve done it. I don’t know how you did. And you don’t talk about it. And I can’t ask. In case it’s a spell or a geas or a charm. In case it hurts you.
