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It was a dismissal. Oliver choked down anguish like a thousand spears, and stumbled up out of the chair to go.
“Oliver,” Tir said.
He spun around.
“Something…warm?”
The small question blunted spear-tips. Melted them into joy. “Yeah,” he scraped out through overwhelming dizzy elation, “yeah, sounds great, I’ll just—go tell them—” and went.
After breakfast Tir vanished. Somehow not in the hall, not in the breakfast room when Oliver turned to double-check. Oliver promptly panicked.
No one’d seen fairy thinness and inexplicable quiet. No glimpses from assorted family or palace staff. Not since porridge and cream and brown sugar and blueberry preserves and mountains of eggs and hot cinnamon cakes. Tir had smiled at Ollie then, brief as dandelion fluff in a breeze, when sitting down.
Tirian had been behind Cedric as they got up to leave the breakfast room. Ollie had wanted to catch his arm, to take his hand, to say—
He felt dizzy now for a whole different reason. Not elation. Cinnamon seared his tongue, a reminder.
“Oliver,” his mother said, in the hallway, on the way to her study, “he’ll turn up. He won’t leave you. We know that.”
“He can’t even look at me half the time,” Ollie bristled. “What if he’s hurt?”
“He looks,” she informed him. “You’re just not looking at the same time. Can you hear him?”
“Can I—” He wasn’t used to that being an option. He closed his eyes. Put a hand on the wall to steady himself. Listened: with physical ears, with intangible perceptions, stretching out and unfolding and trembling across the solid foundations of the palace.
He didn’t have much control, but the sensitivity’d grown more recognizable, a part of him rather than an uncanny interloper. It’d never developed further, so he was unlikely to become a magic-wielding legendary sorcerer, but he did tend to know where people were around the castle. He’d grown accustomed to that much, more or less, when not distracted by fear.
He’d learned that he couldn’t always find Tir. In and out, flickering like a candle on a windy day. Might be something fairy-related; might be his own inadequacy. Not good enough.
Right now he could, though. Shining like blue and silver, like sapphires and stars. Battered but bright as a banner to his questioning thoughts.
Tir was in the infirmary. This lurching recognition caused him to lose focus—why would Tir be having more appointments with doctors, was he feeling worse, had Ollie’s awful neglect overnight left him cold and alone?—and he lunged for that wavering image and clung.
The vision sharpened. Tir stood by one of the beds, thin and dark as a shadow against crisp white linen. He was talking urgently; Fadi, looking frustrated, shook his head. Tir made an irritated gesture, more emotion than Oliver’d seen from him in the last week, and evidently unhappy about the answer.
Ollie strained unreliable perceptions to their limit, and dimly registered a palace maid tactfully inching around the stone statue of Crown Prince occupying the breakfast-room door.
“—I can’t,” Fadi was explaining. “I don’t know, and I’m sorry, you know I am, I’d be doing everything I could if I knew how, you know I would.”
“I know,” Tir said. They were standing, Ollie thought, intimately close: not like lovers, or after the first shock of vision he thought not, but like good friends, who had no secrets, who might’ve once shared more. Not romantic, but familiar. “I know, and—and that’s not good enough. I need to know what’s wrong with me.”
“Nothing’s exactly wrong with you, is there, though, we’re only needing to work on getting your strength back, and—”
“There’s something!” More desperate this time. One hand out; their physician caught it, and squeezed briefly, and let go. “I can feel it! And if I’m not—not strong enough, if I’m hurt, if I can’t protect him when he needs that—you have to help. Please.”
“It’s not anything I can—”
“Tell me,” Tir hissed, in a voice that suddenly powerfully reminded Oliver that he was not quite human, “because you know and I know you know, and do you want to know how I know? The fairy part of you knows.”
Fadil got very still, then. Poised.
“Even before you told me, I knew,” Tir said tightly, “I’ve always known, and I’ve never said, so please, please.”
Oliver, in the slippery mind’s-eye vision, saw the arrest of all motion. The precipice, and the secret. “And you know it’s only a trace, then. My mother’s mother, and her mother, that line. True sight. Sometimes.”
“And fairies are objects of suspicion, awe and wonder and fear, and so on. You’d have all those rumors about your mother enchanting your father to stay, everyone wondering what you might do, you’d never have a normal life. I know. I’m not asking you to put it on display. I want you to look at me.” Tir’s tone stayed on edge but his eyes—
Oliver wanted to cry for him, seeing those eyes.
