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I’m not dead! Tir shouted. Or I am, or something, but I’m not human, remember!
I saw you—
I told you about forms and shapes and magic—
Oh no—oh stars no—
It’s real, I’m real—
You can’t be—I didn’t—we didn’t—I didn’t leave you, you were gone, I didn’t know—I never would have left you—
I’m not dead, Oliver! Tir hesitated, though: abruptly uncertain. At least…I don’t think I am. Not anymore. I think maybe I was.
You…
I don’t know. I’ve been shouting for a while and I’m very tired and I’m very cold.
How—what—
I don’t know! I don’t know anything. I only…Tir took two steps away. Sat down hard on a boulder. His face, Ollie realized suddenly, was pale. Strained. I only knew I needed to come back. But I don’t know whether it’s working.
You’re here. Ollie sank down on the rock beside him. The rock felt solid. Tir’s hand was right there. In touching distance. You’re really here.
Tir looked up at him. And the world tilted, grew vertiginous, lurched.
Because Tir was scared. And Ollie had never seen Tirian scared, not like this. No plan, no idea, no calm solutions to problems. No firm ground, in the big grey labyrinths of those eyes. I don’t know what I did. I don’t even know if I’m really present. But I think I’m getting more tired, and I can feel…something…like I’ve got a body, but it’s not…in good shape, maybe. I can’t open my eyes. It’s dark.
You’re alive.
I’m…here, at least.
I’ll find you. I’ll come and find you.
Tir smiled a little. The ravine wavered, thinned. Boulders and trees and stars became veils, shadows, diaphanous.
Tir—
Tir said something, but the words faded. The ravine dwindled into translucent light.
And Oliver woke, bolting upright in bed, dizzy with shock and wonder and belief.
Tir. Alive. Waiting.
Chapter 8: Rescue
“Tir’s alive,” Oliver announced to his family, hastily gathered in the library. They blinked at him, ruffled, half-awake, half-dressed; he’d gone running through hallways and thumping on doors. They blinked at each other as if searching for answers.
“I’m not crazy,” he told them. He’d needed to tell everyone, at once. “I can hear him.”
His mother’s face gentled with compassion. “Oliver, sweetheart…of course you want to hear him. We know you dream about him.” Books towered over them with compassion too, written large in leaves and spines and bindings.
“This is different.” They couldn’t see that? Couldn’t understand? “I hear things now. Magic. And I heard him, he’s alive, we have to go back.”
“To the Pool?” Cedric, wearing a hastily-grabbed sheet and an expression of concern, held out hands: what can we do, what haven’t we done already? His current lover, the stunningly handsome leading player at the renovated Queen’s Theatre, had—very much to the man’s credit—simply sat up and told him to of course go when a disheveled Crown Prince had hammered on the bedroom door in the middle of the night. “You said it was dead. Broken. Destroyed. And we looked, Oliver, we looked for a—a body, anything to bury, I took the Home Guard out—there’s nothing there. I swear.”
“I know,” Oliver agreed. “There wasn’t. Then. But he’ll be there.”
Oliver, said Tir’s voice in his head. Only that. Scared and alone, in the dark. Oliver?
