Ollie could make a guess as to why. His fairy wasn’t healing easily, his fairy who’d once upon a time used magic to heal himself and Ollie and once Cedric’s broken arm. Tir had not done anything at all magical, in fact, beyond being alive; and to watch Oliver have otherworldly senses, awareness, reactions…

  That must scrape like salt in open wounds. Must cut like barbed wire, across the gaping knowledge of all that Tir had lost, from inhuman grace to the ability to climb an entire staircase without sitting down.

  Tir had died for him, and so this time it would be Oliver’s turn: his heart crumpled, one more paper-brittle crease, each time Tir laughed at one of Cedric’s jokes but avoided breakfast with Ollie by claiming he had an appointment in the infirmary.

  The appointment was a true one. Oliver walked over with him and knew he was expected. But the scheduling loomed suspicious and brutal as a dagger to the gut.

  I love you, he thought, letting his fairy go in without him. I love you so much.

  And he thought: I can never weigh you down with that. I can never tell you. Not when you look at me that way. Not now.

  It wasn’t all painful. Tir was alive. That joy suffused the world. Worth every agony.

  Tir didn’t avoid him entirely. More than once Ollie turned around to find rainfall eyes following him out of a room. Taking a chair in the library when he was looking for a book. Hovering in the open doorway of Ollie’s bedroom.

  He always asked if Tir wanted to come in. Sometimes the answer was yes and more often it was no, but unpredictably so. Even when it was yes Tir wouldn’t talk much, but would only find a spot to curl up long legs and watch him as if trying to sort out a mystifying puzzle-piece. That part Oliver didn’t understand.

  He accepted it, though. It was what he had. What he was being given, and that’d be enough.

  He lived with it, because he had to. He soaked up every scrap of Tir that he could. He was grateful—more than grateful—to have that at all.

  One afternoon, trying to find a spark of interest, a connection, he asked whether Tir wanted to see the astronomy tower. Tir took a deep breath, eyes searching his face.

  Oliver stayed perfectly still, afraid to exhale.

  Tir, slowly, nodded.

  “It’s a brand-new telescope,” Ollie said, with hope, and waved a hand grandly: a spring-fair showman demonstrating a wonder. “I kept the old one too, it’s still up there, but this one’s got the best optic lenses the University could make, I thought maybe we could use it tonight, it should be a good night for that?”

  Tir smiled at him. The smile was hesitant, but it was there. Oliver would buy a hundred telescopes, a thousand, for that smile.

  But the night, though clear, turned out to be cold as icicles and frosted graves. Tir was visibly drained by the end of dinner, white-faced with effort and trying hard to hide it. Ollie promised, “Never mind, it’ll be there when you are,” and walked his fairy to bed, and it was a mark of how fatigued those eyes must’ve been that they accepted his aid without protest.

  Oliver built up the fire in his room. Oliver brought over blankets and hot tea. Tir was already asleep, thin and depleted and lovely even so; the sharp lines of his cheekbones, his jaw, stood out in firelight.

  He didn’t wake when covered up more, and echoes of that first terrible week screamed inside Ollie’s veins and lungs and everyplace, all throughout; after a second Oliver only made himself exhale, and went and found the ridiculous erotic mythology book from his own room, an inadequate present but the best he could do.

  He stayed in Tir’s room all night, keeping watch. He fell asleep, not entirely on purpose, as the sky lightened into paler mists.

  When he opened his eyes, Tir was sitting up in bed and reading the ridiculous book, apparently having taken it out of his hand at some point.

  But Tir also held the volume back out to him immediately. Without a word. With some emotion—something Oliver genuinely couldn’t read—lacing those eyes, indefinable as the shape of the chilly morning mists.

  “It’s for you,” Ollie explained, heart bleeding again. “I bought it for you.” Tir looked at the cover and then at Ollie’s face, and then put the book on his night-table: a tentative setting-down of pages in place, as if concerned that he might be doing it wrong.

  Oliver beamed at him.

  He then had no clue what else to do—Tir wasn’t talking—and blundered through sentences. “I, um, do you feel up to food? Breakfast? Do you want something? Anything at all, the cooks’re dying to make you whatever you—oh no I didn’t mean dying, I didn’t—”

  “Anything’s fine.” Tir pulled up both knees under his blankets, wrapped arms around them. “I don’t—I don’t know. Just…give me a moment. Or two. Tell them something that you want, and I’ll meet you downstairs?”

  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.

  The world stayed airless for a heartbeat, swinging in the balance; some old obligation or present loyalty loosened like a knot untying, and Fadi complained, having been conquered by the eyes, “Sit down and be quiet and let me look for a minute, then, I’m not precisely practiced in this particular area, not part of the medical curriculum, but…we’ll find out together, won’t we.” Tir did. Without commentary; with Fadi’s hand on his shoulder. The moment extended.

  And then it cracked, relaxing into normality like the release of a spring. “Ah. Oh, that felt—”

  “I know,” Tir said. “I’m feeling it.” He still had Fadi’s hand on his shoulder.

  “Yes, of course you are…and so you know how magic works, you know that even better than I do, and don’t say it, you know many things better than I do, and you asked me to look. Magic…you know it’s like—like a well, isn’t it? It’s not a perfect metaphor, but it’s what I’m thinking. You go to dip a bucket in, you draw some water out, it refills itself over time? But then there’s what you did, coming this dramatically back to life…asking so much of it, taking so much out…”

  “Oh.” Tir’s lips barely moved. “I…see.”

  “My guess is you’ve emptied the well at once, as it were. I don’t know whether it’ll fill in or stay dry. Perhaps if you were to travel back home—the other side of the border—”

  “No.”

  “You’d have magic in the air every time you took a breath, back home. Likely your best hope for—for being what you—for having that back.” They shared a moment, eyes meeting in hospital quiet: both in service to the royal household, in different ways. “You won’t get that here. With us.”

  “I won’t leave him.”

  “I knew you’d be saying that,” Fadi muttered. “Stubborn pixie that you are.” Tir’s mouth did a little upward tip, at that. “And that’s what I can tell you. You won’t get any worse. You’re simply…something new, I think. Human. Mostly human. You’ve got about a teaspoon left in that well, probably why you’re up and around so fast, considering you were, as the ballads say, dead. You’ll always be a fairy.”

  Tir nodded, taking this in. He’d drifted to perch on the edge of the infirmary bed, sleeves pushed up, hair falling forward when he glanced down. He looked more thin and more weary and more heartbreakingly beautiful than Oliver had ever realized: being told just how much he’d given up for the man he’d chosen to save.

  He also looked stronger. Like a hero.

  “I am going to test a couple of new prescriptions on you,” Fadi said cheerfully, mood swinging and rebounding. “Nothing too dramatic, but I know we’ve not solved much yet; you get tired pretty quick and you’ve been getting those headaches and you’re still needing better sleep, with those nightmares, and, also, if you’re in the way of being more human, I finally get to practice medicine on you.”

  And Tir smiled, tiny but genuine.

  Oliver surfaced dazed and panting. Tir was hurt—having nightmares—human.

  Mostly human. Not telling anyone—not Ollie, not anyone—about the nightmares. Keeping secrets.

  And Oliver had a form of scattered slipshod magic now, and once he put two and two together, he stayed away from Tir all morning, sickened. Tir had always been magic-sensitive. Of course it wasn’t only the reminder of loss that was causing pain.

  One more way he’d failed the man he loved. No wonder Tirian couldn’t love him back. Too slow, too stupid to figure that one out. Better that he stay hidden in his bedroom forever. Better that he not come out when anyone knocked on his door.

  He did do some work. Trying to be good. Trying to not let anyone else down.

  He put Tir’s dead knife, the slender fire-melted hairpin of a knife that he’d kept in his pocket, away in a drawer. He did not deserve to hold it.

  Tirian himself, when Oliver finally encountered him in the hallway outside the informal family dining room, Ellie having requested the reassurance of her family’s presence at luncheon, said nothing about having been to the infirmary and nothing about nightmares. He looked as if he’d been pacing; he looked worried. A line sat between dark eyebrows, though some of the tension went out of his body when he saw Oliver step out of the stairwell.

  Ollie had almost not come. He knew his mother needed them, though. Her children, all of them. Alive and gathered. He couldn’t say no.

  He hadn’t planned to encounter Tir. He had no plans at all. No thoughts, only blankness, the running liquid pool of light through windows.

  Their eyes met—Oliver opened his mouth to make a sound, lifted a hand as if that might mean anything—but Tir’s gaze dropped first. Down to flagstones, to the patterns cast through open windows and stained glass.

  Words tangled in Ollie’s throat.

  Cedric came bounding up, waving a copy of a gilt-edged pocket manuscript. “Hey! Come look at this, it’s the winter court masque, I’m going to be a forest god, I get to wear emerald tights!”

  Oliver wanted to put a fist through the tapestried wall.

  Tir’s head came back up. Relief shone from his eyes. “That’s…wonderful. What sort of forest god? Fertility, wisdom, guardian spirit of the green?”

  “Kind of hoping fertility,” Cedric decided blithely, and pulled Tir into the dining room for luncheon in his wake, chattering about codpieces.

  Oliver, left behind, set a hand on the wall for support. It leaned sympathetically into his palm, but couldn’t help.

  He didn’t eat much. His stomach twisted. Churned.

  Tir, sitting beside him, glanced his way. Bit a lip, let it go. Then, while listening politely to Cedric’s rendition of an overblown monologue about falling leaves, picked up a bread roll, golden-topped and hot, and slid it onto Ollie’s plate.

  Ollie stared at it, mystified. A gesture? A kindness? For him, from Tir, now?

  The bread sat there on his plate, equally mystified. After a second he tore off a bit, nibbled it. It was good.

  He thought he caught Tir’s tiny smile, at that, though it vanished like a spectre when searched for head-on.

  Some of the freshly-baked heat made its way to Oliver’s stomach. Not enough, but some.

  Because he’d been opening himself up and inviting magic in, it refused, in the manner of a smirking stray cat, to leave. He’d meant to go back to his room and wallow in self-pity and sorrow and maybe some depressed charcoal drawings of Tir’s face; he was nearly there when he recalled he’d left his sketchpad in the library, and doubled back.

  This meant he was on the stairs when the vision punched him in the brain. He staggered, grabbed the wall, flailed for breath. Awareness, the way he knew where people were—but sharper, clearer—

  Tir. And Cedric. In Cedric’s room, where his brother’d apparently hauled his fairy off for a scolding, judging from the extravagant pointing-of-fingers. No one else, naked or otherwise, was presently occupying that room for a change; Tir, flattened against the door, seemed simultaneously surprised and disconcerted and a bit impressed.

  Oliver’s first impulse was to charge down there and throw himself between astonished rainwater eyes and whatever asinine accusations his little brother might be making. But Tir also seemed upright and unharmed and actually energetic in response to whatever was going on.

  Ollie sagged against his own wall. Let it hold him up. Tried for equilibrium. Listened.

  “You have to say something!” Cedric jabbed the finger at Tir again. “I know theatre! This is a melodrama! Confess!”

  “To you?”

  “Sure, because I like knowing everything, but no! To him!”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “I understand that you’re hurt. I understand that you somehow miraculously came back from the dead. I understand that you’re hurting my brother by not talking to him. I can see his face. And I don’t care if you can’t climb a flight of stairs or sit in a room without a fireplace. You can say words. You’re saying words to me right now.”

  Even Tir’s hair expressed dismay, backed up against the bedroom’s solid oak door. “I’m sorry—you don’t know—I’ve been trying, I know what it is now, I just need to find out how to fix it, so I can—”