AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He was not opposed to trying.
Snapdragons nodded around his office door in magical rainbow assent, and grew two new blooms for emphasis.
Over the next week, he thought that perhaps his fairy was not opposed to trying, as well. He thought that the smiles, the closeness, were not accidental; he thought that he was reading Beryl right, and he found himself wanting to laugh, to smile in turn, to come up with stray bits of scientific trivia or quirky historical facts or richly spiced lamb skewers from the Al-Masiian food-stall in the village market—everything he could think of to share.
Beryl came by the next day, and the day after, and gradually every day that week: at first around midday, shyly peeking around the office door, and then meeting him after the day’s work to walk down to the village in lavender-soft twilight, or to go up and dine with the Court if they’d been invited. He brought gifts, equally shy; first flowers with intriguing veins to be investigated under a microscope, then some airy nutty unfamiliar biscuits that he said one of the other cousins had made while getting to know the village baker, and finally a small leather-bound book. “We don’t have a lot of—of what you’d consider scientific knowledge. But. This. One of the family ancestors took some interest in land-sense and bloodlines and did some work on—genetics, I think you called it?”
“Oh, this is lovely.” Fadi trailed a finger over heavy creamy paper, flowing script. “She’s recorded predispositions and inheritances and even done proper charts about type, those of you who feel the land better, or animals and creatures, or future-sensing, and which strains tend to be dominant…would you let me make a copy? If we’re going ahead with Ollie’s therianthropic studies plan, it’d be helpful.”
“Oh,” Beryl said swiftly, hands behind his back as if physically underscoring the words, “no, I thought—I called it here for you. Out of our library. To keep.”
“I can’t possibly take this.” He touched pages again: gilded edges, family records, no doubt centuries old. “She was your ancestor, you said.”
“But you could use it. No one else is, it’s only lying around, and—and I want you to. Have it. From me.”
“Are you sure?” He looked up from the book; their eyes met. After a moment, lightheaded from happiness, he breathed, “Oh.”
“I wish I could give you more.” Beryl looked at the desk as if thinking about sitting on it, and plainly decided not to disturb human tidiness, and then looked as if he weren’t quite sure where to put his hands. This, coming from a beautiful and slightly older and casually magical fairy lord, utterly transformed Fadi’s heart into hopelessly fond liquid gold. “I wish—you know I’m not—I don’t have much to offer. Not for someone like you.”
“Someone like me?” Fadi set his book down carefully, and held out hands; when his fairy took them, he tugged, and they ended up in a bashful but euphoric embrace. “And what does that mean when it’s at home, then?”
“When…what? Never mind. You are…” They were framed by those snapdragons again, in the doorway; one flower sneakily nodded down to tease Beryl’s moonstone hair. “Brighter. Caring. More clever than I ever could be. You saved my Prince, and you talk about building schools, and learning new things, and changing the world.”
“I like this line of discussion,” Fadi agreed, “you can say more of that if you’d like, but what do you mean you don’t have much to offer? You’re magical. You’re part of the Fairy Court. You’re one of Tir’s cousins.”
“I’m barely that. I’m a sixth son and I was never good at much. I’m ordinary. Ordinary at land-sense, at weather-coaxing, at household magics…” Beryl sighed, in the way of someone trying to make light of an old but not-quite-healed impalement. “I never really minded before. But that’s exactly it, isn’t it? I’ve spent a life…I don’t know. Listening to ballads. Playing games in Court gardens. Knowing I didn’t have any grand destiny, knowing my second-youngest half-sister—you’ve met Istrael, yes?—would be the Heir Apparent after Tirian—after Tir left us…I’m only here because Rae brought everyone in her retinue. Coming across the border’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done.”
“You brought me a book,” Fadi said. “And you sought me out. You did that, that first day. None of the rest of them did.”
“I…thought it would be kind. And you deserve more than ordinary. Someone great and splendid. A hero.”
“I think,” Fadi told him, “we can leave the great and splendid to the princes and the dreadful ballads, I like people who care about other people,” and kissed him.
Kissing Beryllin was glorious. He wanted to do that more. He wanted to do that forever. He felt flowers in his hair, and shy delighted lips under his own, and the world spun with elation.
Eventually they parted; Tir and Oliver were coming down for the weekly check-up, and Beryl had agreed to go out riding with some of the mingled Court, human and Fairy, as part of the delicate process of kingdom-joining negotiation. They were engaging in social niceties, and getting to know each other and the land.
Fadi, humming a sea shanty he’d picked up from sailors who’d come through his mother’s inn, drifted dreamily out of his office and found two Crown Princes giving him entertained scrutiny. “What?”
“That’s new,” Oliver said. “You’re normally menacing my soon-to-be husband with needles and lecturing us about not overdoing things.”
Tirian sat down on the closest infirmary bed. He was wearing a knitted shawl sent up from a farmer’s wife over an unobtrusively expensive ensemble that would’ve fit in, and likely had, at a Court luncheon; being Tir, he looked like the epitome of aristocratic fashion, and he shamelessly leaned into Ollie’s hand on his shoulder, and more so as it brushed his cheek. “Was that one of my cousins leaving?”
“You,” Fadi said, “have larger concerns, at the moment; how’s the wedding-planning coming along?” He batted Oliver’s hand away, and checked Tir’s pulse, and recorded it.
“Molasses,” Ollie said, switching sides to hold his other half’s other hand. “Icebergs. Mountains being formed. Other slow objects. Why can’t we just have the head of the University witness it over a keg of ale at a pub?”
“The problem is,” Tir said, “there’s both our mothers, and we’re both the respective Heirs, and there’re two Large Councils’ worth of bodies who want to have opinions, and who want to be involved, and we do want everyone who wants to contribute, to help us, to feel as though they have…”
“It’s going to be the grandest celebration in two kingdoms,” Ollie said. “With something like eighteen attendants on either side. Which reminds me, of course we were going to ask you, some of them have to be politically negotiated and some of them are family, but we want you standing up with us. Oh, and tell your parents they’re invited, I mean everyone’s invited, but from us personally.”
“Of course,” Fadi said, absently finding a vial and syringe—he wanted a blood sample—and then his brain caught up. “Wait. What was that? The middle bit.”
“You’re our friend,” Tir explained, wide-eyed and adorable. Fadi had a momentary flashback to four years ago, excessive amounts of mead, and that same look, which’d gotten him into Tir’s bed, or at any rate a rapidly borrowed bed upstairs at the public house. Oliver had spent that birthday being wooed and obligingly seduced by a visiting viscount; Tir had watched them leave with a smile, but Fadi had seen his eyes.
He’d tried, seeing that, to offer tipsy clumsy comfort: the love of, yes, a friend, for a night. He occasionally wished he could recall more of it; the mead had made events fairly blurry, though he thought it’d been thoroughly satisfactory all around. He also suspected that if he ever did admit to recalling any details Oliver might be rather less than thrilled.
“Yes,” he said, “but—you do know I’m not even a stone’s throw from being nobility, am I, and what would I even wear, and I don’t know how to talk to countesses, and—and I avoid half the Court dinners and balls you invite me to, even when you say they’re informal—”
