AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Not precisely.” He was beautiful, though most of them were; he had acorn-brown skin, and starlight hair, and ink-pool eyes. Unlike some, he did not have wings or gills; he did have soft tufts of fur, like those at a unicorn’s fetlocks, tracing both forearms. He was wearing the fairy version of Court finery, in this case constructed of shifting shimmering scales like iridescent fish under water, and evidently skipping luncheon. “I wanted to speak to you. That is…you are the Prince’s physician, correct?”
“I am that, yes.” Fadi remembered to put the book on its shelf, belatedly, where it settled in to listen. “If you’re one of the set who thinks he’s to be pitied for becoming human, wounded, all of that—”
“I’m not!”
“Oh. Well…good, then. Because I won’t talk to them.”
And they looked at each other for a moment: human and inhuman, in pale streaming window-light. The afternoon prickled: with a Northern chill, with change, with crispness like the crunch of leaves.
“They’ve talked to you?” said the fairy lord after several seconds, interestedly. “Who was that?”
“I don’t recall their names. Sometimes they like to ask me questions. I think,” he added, “one of them was writing another ballad. Tir won’t be thrilled.”
“That’d be Tourmaline, probably, in that case. Poor Tirian. No, mostly I hoped to…well, to thank you.” The fairy might be blushing; this was unfairly attractive. “For helping him.”
Fadi stared at him, and did not have an answer for this.
Both Tirian and Oliver had expressed gratitude, more than once; but Tir and Ollie were friends as well as patients and princes, and they’d all spent nights together in taverns, at University lectures, at one of those art exhibitions Bellemare’s Crown Prince adored. Most fairies had no need of physicians, being able to heal and channel magic; he could not recall any of them, other than Tir, thanking him.
He managed finally, “I did nothing much, he came back to us on his own, you know, and the healing is—it’s mainly due to you, to Fairy being here, that is, letting him be surrounded by—he’ll need years in any case, it’s not as if I can hasten the—”
“He’s said. Not to me—I’m not important enough for that—but you do help. With the—if he’s more human he can be hurt, and you—” The fairy tripped over words, blushed more, finished with some desperation, “I don’t know precisely what you do, but he thinks you’re helping, so. I thought. Someone should thank you.”
“Oh,” Fadi said blankly, “ah, thank you in turn, then—do I get to know someone’s name?” His accent tended to come out even more when he’d been surprised or confused; right now it danced over the question. He knew perfectly well that to anyone not a fairy it might sound incongruous: he’d gotten his father’s looks, nearly a mirror of his grandfather’s Southern desert-sun handsomeness, but his mother’s voice, that rippling coastal lilt from Bellemare’s port city of Heartwater. Eight years studying medicine in his grandfather’s renowned citadel hadn’t done anything about that; he rather liked it, after some mental rearranging and tidying-up of emotions associated with being unusual everyplace. Less so at home, he reminded himself, and also here in the capital. Cosmopolitan. Complicated.
The fairy in his doorway, living proof of this, blinked in surprise, said, “Did I not—oh no, I’m sorry, I’ll never be a diplomat, will I—it’s Beryllin. Ah. My name.”
“Lovely to meet you, and don’t worry, nor will I be. We’ll let the princes deal with that.” He held out a hand; the fairy took it. “Fadi. No need to be formal. Oh, that’s interesting, isn’t it…”
“My hand?”
“Your fingers are warm. Tir tends to be cold. Is that a proper anatomy difference, or is it only that before you came Tir was living in a kingdom without magic, and even now he’s still essentially living without magic, or is it—” Beryllin was regarding him, and their hands, with an expression of patient bewilderment. He said, “Sorry,” and let go.
“I’d…guess it might be the magic? What you said?” Beryllin looked at his own hand again, as if something’d changed or become new. “I’m sorry. I don’t know.”
“Oliver’s been talking about starting a new hospital. A whole new branch of study, in fact. Fairy physiology. Anatomy. Understanding. How you might be similar to humans, or different, and how some of those stories about human-fairy babies might have been true—” He wanted to kick himself. For all he knew reproduction was a taboo topic in Fairyland high society. “Er, in any case, we’ll hope to be learning some of those answers.”
“I think you will. Learn them, I mean, not simply hope.” Sincere, so very much so that it knocked his wits away for a second.
His fairy—and since when was he thinking of this one as his fairy, simply because they’d shaken hands and exchanged conversation; oh, his Nan would laugh—said, “If you’d like you can simply call me Beryl. If—do humans use short names? Kin-names?”
“Oh,” Fadi said. “Yes. Er, about that, I suppose that was what I gave you. I think of my grandfather as the Doctor Ahmadi, though; he’s quite fearsome and I’m relatively new at this. Um. Beryl. Thank you.”
“You are not fearsome,” his fairy agreed, and—was that a smile? A lovely one, too. “Though I confess I did think you’d be older.”
“No offense,” Fadi said, amused. Beryl, he thought, was older than he himself was, and older than Ollie and Tir by a bit; mid-thirties, he’d judge, though of course with fairies anything might be possible. “I’ve heard that rather a lot. Or I did, back when I first replaced the previous royal physician. Who, by the way, might’ve been the oldest person I’ve ever seen walking. And he thought microscopes were untrustworthy. Which reminds me, I’ve got to ask Oliver about new lenses, the University students said they were working on something…”
“Microscopes?”
“Oh, you’ve not seen one? Here, come and have a look at this…” Rain blew in against infirmary windows, and pattered from castle eaves. Inside, Fadi showed an intrigued fairy glimpses of his own hair, a cat’s shed whisker, a bit of yeast borrowed from the kitchens. Their fingers brushed occasionally; the fur along his arms was plush as a whisper. Fadi felt his skin tingle, not from cold, and tried not to think too much about the way the fairy’s onyx eyes lit up when he smiled, sunlight over stone.
He sat down in his office, after the fairy left—an hour later, and he’d have to finish reviewing Oliver’s notes about proposed new hospital sites before walking over to the symposium on the incorporation of magic into medicine at the University—and exhaled, and tipped his chair back on two legs, finding balance.
He knew he liked seeing Beryl smile. He knew he liked a person who’d take time to come and seek out and thank the royal physician, despite not knowing what human doctors did.
He’d mainly enjoyed women, in the past, though not exclusively. He’d had some fun and some explorations with quite a few willing friends—not to the extent that Bellemare’s princes had; he’d no need to compete with young Cedric in that regard—and women’d been easier when his family inquired; his grandfather was in many ways excruciatingly traditionalist. He’d not have been disowned nor cast out from the great medical school in Al-Masi; though Grandfather, he thought, would be angry about this. There’d be discussions. But not to the point of forgetting love.
His parents were a love match, and a beautiful one. Different worlds, a wanderer from the South and a quick-witted innkeeper’s daughter with sea-spray in her hair and a knack for seeing the truth, and they’d blossomed together. Da and Ma would tell him to follow his heart.
