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“I’m your friend.” Tir hesitated. “Aren’t I?”
Oliver said, out loud, “Maybe my only real friend, honestly,” and heard the truth of it echo from canyon walls and bare-branched bushes and shaggy spots of green.
“But,” Tir said. “But…no, Oliver, that’s not true, that isn’t…your people love you, and I—you know if you asked any of them, from University masters to village cheesemakers, they’d say you were a good person…”
“Not the same, and you know it.”
“But I…” Tir shook his head again. “I think you’re wrong but I don’t know how to argue. Either way, though—you have me. If that means something. I’m here.”
Ollie eased a step closer. Hand on Tir’s arm. He couldn’t not, just then. “It means a lot.”
“Oliver—oh, fuck, your boots—come here—!”
Right. Acid sand. And a very badly placed step.
His feet weren’t burning yet. They were good boots.
“Sit down,” Tir said sharply, not panicked but taking charge, and shoved him onto a convenient log. Oliver’s feet tingled. Hot.
Tir swore to himself. Yanked off Oliver’s left boot. Bare-handed.
And Ollie, who had barely processed events so far, entirely processed that. “What the fuck—Tir, you can’t, you’ll die—that’ll eat right through—”
“I’m a fairy, idiot.” Ollie’s right boot went next. Tir was kneeling at his side, on a tuft of grass. Oliver hoped it was safe grass. Would Tir have cared?
Tir said, sitting back, “How’re your feet? I think I got your boots in time.”
“Me? Tir, you—”
“It’s not—”
Oliver lunged forward, onto the grass. Grabbed his fairy’s arm.
Tir’s hands had not been eaten away to bone. They had not seared and scorched and melted.
But the burns were real. They laced those long musician’s fingers. They discolored skin, violent and angry.
Tir’s hands trembled. Only a fraction. But for Tir to show that much—
Oliver swore. In his head, in his heart, aloud. “You—don’t move, stay still, I’ve got the medical supplies, we have burn ointment—why would you—what the hell, Tir—”
“It’ll heal.” Tir sounded distracted, unfocused, too unworried. Shock, Ollie thought. Shock and acid burns and nerve damage and—
It was healing. Both hands. Blisters beginning to shrink, already visibly less vicious. “Don’t worry.” Tir exhaled, shaky but more present. “It’s not bad. And you still have feet.”
“You’re hurt.”
“One of us can recover,” Tir pointed out, exquisitely dry, more so with pain, “and one of us is human. It seemed the fastest way to get your boots off. Would you like spare socks? I also packed your spare boots.”
“I have spare socks,” Oliver said, because that was easier, the back-and-forth was simpler, more familiar, than the gaping yawning treacherous pit that’d opened up in his gut. Tir’s hands, that tremble of agony—
He insisted on winding bandages and burn ointment around Tirian’s fingers. Tir looked away while he did it.
Oliver didn’t know what that avoidance meant. He couldn’t count how many times Tir had saved his life—literally and metaphorically, every time the Crown Prince got drunk in a tavern or started hyperventilating before a public audience, soothed by the weight of one of those hands on his arm, his shoulder—over the years.
He wondered how many more times he’d get. How their lives might change, shift, alter. A Quest, a destiny. Would he have Tir at his side?
What if someday he didn’t?
